by Travis A.
It feels so damn good to finally write this.
Six months ago I was sexually assaulted. Me, a queer Black boy, was sexually assaulted. After my assault, as some terribly shitty feelings began to affect my life, I discovered I was dealing with “trauma”. Trauma is defined by the psychological association as an ‘emotional response to a terrible incident’. I’ve looked over this definition many times in my head. It never quite fit for me. Six months into my process of healing I’ve realised why. The psychological definition I was reading was written by definitely white, and mainly male doctors. Their idea of trauma, and how to heal from it , didn’t fit my experiences as a Queer Black boy living under an oppressive system. I began to see how isolating what happened to me, and my response to what happened, from the structures of power around me would not help me heal. Advice from white peers, white online forums and reading stories written by white authors would not fully encapsulate my journey or my feelings. Healing, as a Queer Black Boy, would require a different set of skills; skills that for my whole life the world had told me I could not access. If I was going to survive this journey, I would have to reclaim parts of my humanity that the world had denied me.
1. The first part of my full humanity I had to reclaim was weakness. The ability to allow myself to feel weak, really weak—I mean fully weak —is a part of my humanity I did not access until late in my process. Allowing myself to be sad. Allowing myself to cry. Allowing myself to fully admit that something really shitty had happened and that I do not feel as strong or ready to fight the world as I did before. It seems silly looking back, but not punishing myself for feeling weak was a key step. In hindsight, it is not surprising that as a Queer Black young man, weakness is something I found so hard to access. How could I know that weakness is allowed, under the constant hyper-masculine portrayals of Black men around me, when media narratives of people who look like me are engrossed by two dimensional, un-nuanced, tough men? The outside world asks of me, How are you?, already assuming that I must be well, because what can a Black kid be apart from tough? I tried to locate in my memory a time I had seen a Black man cry and I couldn’t. Or a time I’d seen portrayals of Black folk suffering from mental-health-related issues or recovering from assault. I couldn’t.
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White definitions about how to deal with trauma are steeped in the privileged assumption that you have been told by the world that you are fully human. That you have been told that you can heal, can hurt and can access help. As a Black Queer person living under these oppressive systems, that is not something I have been told. Before I could begin to heal, I had to learn to access the humanity I had been denied under these systems. Telling myself that it was okay to feel all my feelings, that I was allowed to feel just as many feelings as any white person, that Black folk are allowed to feel weakness, taught me a lot about processing and healing from trauma.
2. The second part of my humanity I had to reclaim was my right to ask for help. In a world that violently tells us we are not worthy, asking for help is something people of colour, especially queer people of colour, are told we cannot do. Yet it is something we must learn to do in order to access the full humanity we deserve. The narratives portraying us as two-dimensionally ‘strong’ are dangerously interlinked with the fear of asking for help. The oppressive powers at play desperately try to engrain in us that we are only labourers. As workers for others, asking for help is something outside of us. Black folk (particularly Black women) are so often used for work, often without being paid fairly, if paid at all. We are always the help in media narratives: the servants and sidekicks of white leads. We are there to take care of others, not to be taken care of ourselves. These images seep into our psyches, affecting our ideas of healing and how we deal with trauma.
Although recognising the stigma around mental health issues causes a lot of folks, regardless of race, to feel isolated, as a person of colour, asking for help went against everything I had been told I deserved. To do it anyway, I would have to reverse years of these systems that force us to be workers and never receivers. Learning that it is okay to ask for help was another key moment in accessing my full humanity. Learning to reach out to folks I trusted and shared experiences with in my community has certainly helped in my process of healing.
3. I had to reclaim the truth that trauma happens to us, too. It seems obvious, but for me, personally, learning that as a Queer person of colour I could also experience assault, and the emotional and psychological effects of this violation, was a huge step. The narratives about trauma that are told almost always portray white people’s suffering. Books I’d read, films I’d watch or plays I’d go to that portrayed people healing from traumatic incidents were always white and heteronormative. Posters I’d see on the tube advertising lectures, or leaflets I’d see in the doctor’s office never had faces like mine on them. How could I know I could heal, if I had never been shown that people with my identities even experienced trauma? Really recognizing that we exist in our full humanity, and can experience every high and low of life, helped me to accept that something awful happened to me and that I needed support to heal. Finding Queer People of Colour support networks and doctors of colour was an important step in accessing my full humanity and subsequently realising that I could, should, and am allowed to start the process of healing.
Six months on and the road of healing is still rough. The understanding I’ve found is not a ‘quick fix’. It isn’t a ‘three tips to magically recover’. Yet it is a reminder that when healing from trauma as marginalised people, the systematic oppressions around us are still playing their part in our feelings.
Healing is continual. There are still days when I do not want to get out of bed, and days when this journey seems too much. Yet remembering that in my Blackness and queerness I am allowed to access my full humanity, allowed to ask for help, and allowed to experience my hurt has lifted some of the anxieties I had associated with healing and allowed me to come this far.
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Travis is a Black mixed queer boy from the UK. Currently the PoC officer for King’s College London’s LGBT students. Outside of studying he performs poetry around London, recently being published in ‘Black and Gay in the UK’s poetry anthology. He loves kittens, dressing up and finding ways to celebrate Queer Black art in London.
