“Hurry Up and Heal” – An article from Feministing.com

I want to share this great article from Feministing.com called “Hurry Up and Heal”: Pain, Productivity and the Inadequacy of ‘Victim vs. Survivor’ by Dana Bolger. I think many of us can relate to this!

“Hurry Up and Heal”: Pain, Productivity and the Inadequacy of ‘Victim vs. Survivor’

Afterward, my friend said to me, “Stop calling yourself a victim. You’re a survivor.”

The notion of the compulsory transformation from ‘victim’ to ‘survivor’ is hegemonic in violence care-work in the United States. To be a victim is to be fresh, still smarting, an open wound. Weak, disempowered, passive.

To be a survivor is to be strong, (pro)active, healthy, and productive. To have progressed.

The point of transition from victim to survivor is variously delineated as the moment at which someone first discloses to someone else that they suffered violence, meets with a therapist, reports to the authorities, or (even) takes their story to the press or engages in policy work.

In elevating those who “move forward,” the victim/survivor dichotomy implicitly condemns those who do not, reaffirming myths about what constitutes a good versus bad survivor, and legitimizing certain forms of survivorship over others. To be a (strong) survivor is to carry that weight — figuratively, and literally. To be a (weak) victim is to crumble, “stay” silent, engage in self-harm.

Compulsory survivorship depoliticizes our understanding of violence and its effects. It places the burden of healing on the individual, while comfortably erasing the systems and structures that make surviving hard, harder for some than for others. You are your own salvation. You are your own barrier to progress.

* * *

My school hired a lawyer to clean up its act. She was invited to speak to the entire campus community to educate us about rape culture. Instead, she said: “Rape is the death of the victim’s spirit.”

I’m not dead.

‘Victimhood’ comes with its own baggage. In the popular imagination, to be a victim is to have lost but worse: it is to have let yourself lose.

Only certain people get to be victims (or survivors). The very categories are policed on the basis of identity, presentation, and experience. We only recognize the violence of certain acts. We only mourn the violation of certain bodies.

* * *

“Just get over it.”

Others decide how we express our pain: too little and they catastrophize (“he damaged you”), too much and they demand we move on.

The idea of the victim-survivor transformation is linear, and directional. You’re a victim until one day, you “speak up,” you report, you go to therapy, and poof! you blossom into a survivor. You “put it all behind you,” and then there’s no turning back.

The cult of compulsory survivorship ignores the cyclic nature of healing. The good days. The bad days. Healing is nonlinear, messy, disruptive, and unpredictable. Trauma is, as others have pointed out, generational and historical. We carry trauma in our bones.

I don’t believe the afterward of violence ever really ends. We get better until we don’t.

* * *

“We’ll get you fixed up and back to college in no time.”

Before that, I’d never known I was broken.

Who benefits from believing in the “fixable”? Who benefits from insisting that trauma and its effects have ended, from tying up pain with a pretty little bow?

Our society is invested in the idea that we will return to “normal.” That there is an impending date at which we will be as we were, when the ‘after’ will look like the ‘before,’ when everybody can finally have some peace and quiet. Perhaps for some that day will come. Perhaps it won’t.

We want to believe violence’s impacts are finite. We want to believe that healing is constant and progressive. Perhaps deep down we know this is not true. We cling to it for our own comfort. We insist victims perform resiliency for our own peace of mind.

The relentless imperative to “hurry up and heal” is an appeal to smooth over your rough edges and Move On. Get back to being a productive member of society. We hear it everywhere from our homes to our college campuses to the streets of our burning cities. I urge you to set aside your pain and engage in productive steps forward. Performing our survivorship benefits the privileged (who seek to remain comfortable in their ignorance) and the powerful (who are deeply invested in managing the anger of the marginalized). The compulsory transformation from victim (unproductive) to survivor (productive) serves an imperialist capitalist state.

Our history books paint the U.S. occupation of this country as over and done, a concluded (if tragic) chapter from a colonial past. If the trauma is over, then we can move on and forget. If the trauma is done, we can in good conscience stop carrying that weight.

I don’t know what to call myself these days. Victim/survivor feels inadequate. I want new language. I want new structures and systems and institutions that affirm and support vulnerability, instability, and anger.

* * *

“Right now you might think of him every second of every day but someday, you will think of him less.”

I do–

Read the article in its original format and find out more about Dana Bolger on Feministing.com.