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Medusa has been resurfacing over the past few months. It is the year of the snake, and, we are experiencing a monumental wreckoning across this world. I drew these up after having a dream about her and then coming upon a compelling episode the next day from the Emerald called Medusa and #MeToo: How Modern Narratives Miss the Heart of Myth. Originally debuted in October of 2020, the episode description reads; “Who remembers Medusa? Hair of snakes, gaze that can turn to stone, beheaded by Perseus… that Medusa. She’s in the news again, because a sculptor has re-imagined the story of Perseus and Medusa as a tribute to the #MeToo movement — and this time, Medusa’s the one doing the beheading. Some have embraced this re-telling, but the founder of #MeToo has spoken out strongly against it, saying that #MeToo isn’t about vengeance or simply ‘turning the tables.’ Lost in the current dialogue is the sacred place that Medusa actually holds in the original myth. The original myth is not about Medusa ‘losing’ and Perseus ‘winning.’ Like so many myths, the story of Medusa is about deep cycles of nature, sacrifice and regeneration, and in these myths the place of the ‘slain one’ — whether Medusa, or Vrtra, or Ouranos, or Ulu — is the heart of the myth. In this episode we dive into the story of Medusa and find her original power as the slain-creatrix, the primordial goddess herself, who through her unending involutions leads us to eternity. And we explore how when myths are bent to fit modern narratives about punitive justice and socio-political issues, we lose out on the beating, animate heart of myth, which, like nature itself, doesn’t always fit into neat boxes.”

The episode is worth a listen and will provide context for the bones of this entry. I highly recommend the broad-reaching scale of Joshua’s discernments and overall illuminating and clever body of work in his podcast. I find the majority of his episodes to be like sculptures of streaming, weaving, refreshing art; echoing sentiments and senses I have had over the years and then opening me into thoroughly researched and thoughtful landscapes of spoken prose. I carry my own critiques on pieces of his inputs to suit, meanwhile. The untelling / reclaiming aspect of this particular narrative on the original story of Medusa is powerful and understated. However / and, I still feel that the way the first story of Medusa as a conjuring of the Earth’s primordial embodiments, and how that story shifted sands over time, remains relative to what happens / happened to victims of abuse and sexual assault.

Being a survivor, I can trace the complicated trails, in brief:

at its core, the regeneration through destruction that Medusa experiences is her victory. As a representation of life force itself and through the uncomfortable dance of ‘beheading’ out of an old way of being to become aligned with oneness and stillness amidst animate chaos ~ to heal, rather than seeking vengeance ~ and an untelling that I deeply relate to after I survived a violent & manipulative domestic abuser. None of this is to suggest that justice shouldn’t be served. This trajectory spirals directly at justice by calling out the everyday enabling of abusers through a personal experience. The landing point of this is to amplify the advocacy for a victim’s voice that gets strangled out during the swarm: the song of her freedom, whether that is the harmony in her own accountability or simply her right to just be witnessed in whatever capacity without controlling the outcome of her rhythms amidst the layers of breakdowns & breakthroughs; but most importantly ~ believing her story and recognizing the brutal conditions that shape the illusions that continuously put her at fault.
With that being said, when the relationship ended, I spent the following years in a disemboweling stage of recovery and internal re-routing to understand why I stayed in that relationship and to disengage from the ignorant responses and backlash that I endured from the people around me when I first started to speak up about it; the people who had so many misguided opinions about a situation they otherwise knew absolutely nothing about; who always found ways to make the story about themselves or the abuser and consequently blamed me for it in the process: whatever erasure could be mustered to pick apart the victim and excuse the aggressor so they could be comfortable with an uncomfortable reality, as has been the way of warping truth for as long as we have had capacity to diminish complexity: dumb it down and make it ‘palatable’ junk food. So when you survive something like that ~ an abuser, but also the loss of friends (and your sanity) and the need for reinvention and relocation to achieve absolute safety becomes paramount, you become something else.
but that is exactly the point.
nothing is ever in a fixed state.

(even the shimmering, slithering snakes shed their skin. They remain low to the ground, subtle, and intuitive. They are the DNA, the helix, the strands of deeper, interweaving, shape-shifting unity. They are humming, vibrating.)

even my own desire and need, out of necessity, to coil inward and protect myself was misunderstood and criticized. Victims of domestic violence tend to isolate for these reasons. Navigating the severe realm of C-PTSD is another unspoken dimension of vicious loopholes. It is documented that survivors of narcissistic abusers can die from the psychological stress. I know it. I have been on that edge, feeling like any tender shoots of ‘better’ness were constantly ripped out of the freshly forming foundation whenever his image appeared, or when people spoke his name, and denied my needs for safety meanwhile. The self-interest of the others around you just compounds the damage until you’re buried in so much shame that it’s any wonder that you can lift your head back up at all. At the same time, during that relationship, I sustained a head blow and a horrific back injury that has resulted in a struggle with chronic pain ever since. My mapping of that alone deserves its own write-up, but for now I’ll only mention it as just one more participating factor to the trial of survival.
When my attempts to make clear the experience were not seriously considered outwardly despite my efforts, I chose, instead, to say ‘fuck all of you’ and focus on my health and my peace. I could not bear the magnitude of excuses and tokenizing worship the people around me harbored for the abuser and his big public presence. It destroyed me, knowing what I knew about this person, and being dismissed and accused of ill intentions. Few of these people ever asked me for my wellbeing even after he was officially outted. It was, ‘what more can you do for me?’ Extraction, exploitation, and lacking total empathy. Some of these comments were from so-called ‘influencers’ who were drunk on the singular-serving social media culture that they couldn’t see a real world that didn’t fit their own limited digital lens. It was infuriating.
The stress, constant exhaustion, and memory loss from navigating the people was the true guillotine in this story. That I was considered to have ‘strength’ felt like a tedious insult, additionally ~ I did not feel strong, I felt stripped of all dignity: emotionally, spiritually, mentally, physically fractured beyond all recognition, dealing with challenged mobility with my back injury, and clawing my way through the pit back to some semblance of stability. This does take a grit and determination that goes vastly unrecognized. That I defended myself through his terrifying, drunk assaults screams volumes too. There is a strange take-over of motions that happens when you are at the receiving end of terrible, supernatural violence. Parts of those nights I recall with lucid, nightmare vividness, and other parts are blocked from the flow state of being so out of mind and primal with instinct to protect my life.
I could come to accept that the abuser was sick and an actual sociopath. I had been played and had ignored my gut for all the wrong reasons. That I had wanted the idea of something over the reality. That what I thought were trauma responses were actually his innate desire to deliberate harm. That he hated women, and targeted them, and I was in a spell that was meant to trap. I had never met anyone in that range of ultra-violent possession before, although I had previously been in relationships that were physically and emotionally tumultuous, either by their doing or mine. I was, at worst: naive to this subject and very inexperienced with dating and grew up a weird, nerdy girl with special interests and obliviousness to those dynamics. My household was not a safe or comfortable place and I found those needs in other families. Having once suffered from severe manic depression, disassociation and an addiction to chaos, and with this history of damaging relationships that I learned to accept as normal from an early age, there was a part of me that couldn’t fully break past the game of it until I was obliterated by it, and those shadow qualities only buffered the otherwise glaring signs all the more.
Domestic abuse can happen to anyone. My story surprised those in my life who knew my boldness and my strength, my light and my humor, my open conversations and ease of connection. They couldn’t imagine that I would ever get involved in something like that. What’s worse, there is a common assumption that victims deserve it. No one is asking for it. That was the biggest stab in the heart and I heard those words sneak past the lips of the greatest percentage of persons; ‘what’s wrong with you? clearly it’s your fault.’ There is a litany of reasons why and how these crisis occur. That is why examining the broader social constructs that empower it are critical to cite. It is rarely an individual production.
I could speak of my shadows until I was out of breath but it didn’t matter.
He continued to get away with it. And I had to reconcile with my own ‘let’s pretend everything is okay when it’s not’ habit in how I was letting him.
So when I finally gathered the courage, at my lowest of lows, to cut him out of my life once and for all, I never engaged with him again and kept my mouth shut on any public platforms because not only did it risk harassment, as I was still experiencing that in the background when he found ways to reach me, but it would only further feed his want for attention. For narcissists, when you give them the satisfaction of acknowledging their existence, they thrive. They want you to talk about them. And after my early attempts of speaking out backfired, I did not want to go through the anger of being disbelieved all over and over again. I also didn’t want to provide any information to the people I knew who continued to support him. Why would I trust anyone who excused an abuser, or belittled my experience? That determines everything of their character. Those are not people I should keep in my sphere. It was a strategy that I had to keep silent about. I wanted nothing more than to remove myself completely from ever being associated with him. But the responses and exclusions of others that persisted; by supposed friends, community members, and ‘important’ figures? I was never equipped for that level of betrayal. The feat of not seething on perpetual, body-rotting bitterness is a war zone all of its own. You find your real family in trying events such as these: the ones who genuinely support you over those who are simply parading around in the petty social bullshit circus. Thankfully, I had a few who wholly recognized the gravity of my circumstances, and that was just enough to get me through it while I still lived in the same small town as this abuser. The real grieving didn’t happen until after I moved away. I had locked it in for years just to get by.

You die, figuratively, if the literal damage doesn’t break your heart or your body in the long run. My memory remains spotty, and I feel massive sensitivities to many things that keep me away from certain people and places, and to this day I find intimacy and touch to be difficult and am extremely particular about who I am open to sharing that with. I have not been in a relationship since, although one day I would like to be, and am going to keep striving to reach a healthy space where the other person is available and understanding to the intensity of it and the kind of trust that is required to rebuild.
I am willing, and I want it.
As for various treatments; I decided not to get surgery for my back and have been engaged with plant medicines to assist with cognitive repair. I have had a few failures in the pursuit of treatments for my PTSD and am otherwise making those steps in gradual but not passive strides. The rest is pure patience and keeping vigilant with inner diligence.

You choose to be reborn in one way or another.
To transform all of that is the honest hard work and it’s ugly, so ugly, every step of the way.
That is where healing over vengeance reigns.

exhale

So you tell the story, over and over, because it keeps you alive to tell it. How many stories have been stolen, reformatted, reframed, from the bloody mouths of victims? Have been reduced to petty boxes of predictable nuance? You repeat it, because you are desperate for someone to believe you, for anyone to know, to see it as to prevent it, to cast the stones for change in the waters of being. You cry it out because so few people will actually make the time to receive it and how it has impacted not only you, but everything around you. You go through the agonizing and tiresome motions of having to relive it every time too.

I remember the first time I listened to Chapter 3 of Rebecca Solnit’s ‘Reflections of my non-existence’ and felt such intense sorrow but overwhelming validation over this line; ‘there’s a kind of indignation I know well, when someone feels that the wrong done to them has been unrecognized, and a kind of trauma that makes the sufferer into a compulsive storyteller of an unresolved story: you’ll tell it until someone lifts the curse by hearing and believing you.’
It was also the first time I heard something that actually touched on my own feelings with such profound and sharp accuracy that it became the only tangible liberation I could find amidst an otherwise relentless and unsupportive sea. Solnit’s work was brand new to me, introduced by a long-distance and sympathetic friend who I knew from Alaska and who is one of the few true ones I can confide in without rebuke,  and I wondered, after drinking from the fountain of this chapter from her book, how I made it so far into my recovery without ever tasting the crisp, clear edges of Solnit’s fearless writing.
This passage is just a glimpse of a greater whole in a brilliant and unflinching encapsulation of what social norms have been crafted to silence and diminish anyone who is striving to expose the reality of being snared in the labyrinth of abusers. You can purchase the book through her web site, or listen to it on streaming platforms.

Victims are a spectrum, in and out of our shared natural world. Same with abusers. It is not exclusive to one particular demographic. When I reference Solnit, I can relate to her writing as a woman, and in her addressing of what becomes shaped around women’s experience with a culture that delights in her suppression. This is very real. At the end of the day, I have known and seen abusive persons in the guise of many faces, body types, and identities. I do not agree that it is a purely and exclusively a taught behavior. Some are simply born that way. They will never change.

and furthering beyond me, even ~ as I continue to track where the parallels and intersections between Medusa and what became modernized of her tale exist ~ that the Earth itself is where our greatest severance has been drawn, and to be unconscious of her wild rhythms is our worst flaw.

because what we experience as targets of intentional violence and erasure, the Earth does too.

I see this in the devastating methods of clear-cutting forests or the damming of rivers or the wipe-out of the buffalo or the wild salmon habitat in the America’s. I see it in the wake of the dust bowl, in the nuclear testing site near Alamogordo that exposed people in the Tularosa Basin to dangerous levels of radiation, in the silent pesticide reign of the 50s, in the history of land grabs. To name a few. Yes, I see it there and I see it here, and I see those who have raised their voices to bring awareness to these crimes, and I observe where our conscious, ceremonious tethers to this Earth have been eradicated in the process to allow for these industrial transgressions to happen in the first place.

this is where I spiral back to the heart of the origins of Medusa and what exists inherently of her old, old story. This is where I knit the seams back together. As the powers of earth and wilderness have been stripped of their core, so have our natural instincts been wrecked to enable it.

“Early training to ‘be nice’ causes women to override their intuitions. They are actually purposefully taught to submit to the predator. Imagine a wolf mother teaching her young to ‘be nice’ in the face of an angry ferret or a wily diamondback rattler.

As long as a woman believes she is powerless and/or is trained not to consciously register what she knows to be true, the feminine impulses and gifts of her psyche continue to be killed off.”

(Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes ~ from Women Who Run with the Wolves)

My inner child howled when she read this passage, remembering vividly all the ways her claws had been clipped, and all the ways I ran away because I didn’t know how to name it. All the ways that I was taught by example to compromise my health, because I thought it would be honorable. All the ways that I self-sabotaged, because I believed myself to be the culprit of all wrong-doing after I had been the punching bag to men in my upbringing who were never my protectors. It is a classic and common tale and there is immense willpower in the persons who fight to find their way out of that mental fuck maze. Many of us were raised on the ‘do as I say and not as I do’ phrase that epitomizes the superficiality and double-standards that exist in these domesticated excuses made for abuse. It is one small example of how our bodies and sensations are polarized. If you’re speaking against what you are doing, how can this be truth? You say that you love freedom, but you advocate against women’s reproductive rights? You tell her what to do with her body, but you have no idea how her body works?

To exhibit a habit of defenselessness and victimization is what became of all that. It gets carried and handed down and shows up in sometimes subtle or otherwise obvious ways. I went a long time without even knowing that I was playing that part in my relationships or that I had even learned it. It had taken a catastrophe to wholly reveal the intuitions I was conditioned to ignore.

And the catastrophe, in my life, was this nightmare, domestic violence event. I was in my mid 30s when it went down and it also broke open the floodgate for my examination of familial patterns that I hadn’t otherwise been given agency to perceive. I remember observing behaviors when I was a child that showed me to become passive in intimate relationships. I was shut down when I spoke up and out against things that were wrong or made me uncomfortable. Not knowing any different, I followed suit, even if I shone brightly in other areas of my life.
And on the subject of agency ~ true agency, and something that I gleaned from the Medusa story, is that agency is never what it seems. It is not quaint or convenient. You can be told a truth for decades but for some of us it won’t sink in until it drowns you. Such events are an unfolding in their own currents;

“from allowing her – nature – the goddess – to slay the parts of us that need to be slain – so that we can find deeper alignment with the greater cycles.” (from the Emerald: Medusa & #MeToo)

In this way, surviving a domestic abuser set me free from a painful cycle. It doesn’t justify what happened. It doesn’t make right that harm. It doesn’t excuse the people who protected him regardless of the facts. In fact, I would even hesitate to say that because he would feel validated as therefore doing good, which is the method of narcissists. But we all must reclaim our narrative because I have seen the language of liberation and transformation often confused and smothered out with these mindsets. A victim has a right to their sovereignty of recovery: if she wants to forgive, let her. If she wants to find shelter under the boughs of a moral code, by all means. If she wants to live a quiet life and never speak of it again, that is her right. Like the sovereignty that’s rightfully hers to make decisions regarding her own body, it’s no one else’s business but hers. There exists a channel in which we can surrender into that brings us back to our original thread before we got lost, before the perilous fog, before the hi-jacking of our nervous systems. This is where the message of healing shines because what else do you do; shrink even further into despair and disappear forever? Let the fuckers win? Hate men? Your life is meant to be so much more than that.

The way I see it, and this is truth to the greater worldview: nature doesn’t take sides. Nature is a place of competition and finding allies. It is brutal and vicious and gentle and beautiful. Destructive and nurturing. How you move through it is everything. How you recognize the shape-shifting, infinitely undulating wildness that is this beating breathing body we live on and reflect, the greater your allowance of animate, fatefull forces to then move through you becomes. 

That is Medusa.

I wonder, too, as I reflect on the way her story was changed over the generations, if there isn’t something relevant to how it was molded and shaped into these other spaces. Did Medusa’s own truth become a beacon for survivors for that reason ~ is it possible that Medusa, in her for-ever-evolution and slithering means ~ wanted, needed ~ to become a vessel for a voice that had been slain in timeless renderings? Medusa, life force itself: what we have been torn from, honing in for our attention by modern means, modern musings, making her revival in a wild full-spiral, a mysterious trajectory? So that we can find our way back to her, and she to us?  

If her / our voices were crushed, then what better triumph it is to sing clear again over the wreckage, so that new growth can be restored.

And when you sing, you sing for the truth of it: for the bitter marrow that finds sweetness in the nutrition. Not the polished version, and not the kind that cuts out complexity, not the kind that fits a narrow view ~ but the song that brings it all back together, and holds up like a monumental stone in the fiery tempest of the whole.

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