Retrieval: the visions
(trigger warning: mentions of sexual violence)
“Some things go on. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was just my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do.”—Sethe, Beloved.
In the early part of 2020 I had a dream of a woman in a beautiful red gown riding out of the ocean. Though she came from the depths of the water, she appeared to be completely dry, untouched by the wet. She rode with the horse onto the sand of the beach and looked around, an ethereal figure, not of this world.
Standing on a pier nearby, silently watching her, wearing everyday human clothes was someone who looked exactly like her.
I had no idea what the dream was, but it was clear to me that it had something to do with sexual assault. That underneath the imagery there was a tone of sexual assault, protection, and quite literally a re-membering; a putting back together, a memory, a fragmentation, and a whole-ing of oneself.
Toni Morrison talks about the idea of ‘re-memory’ in Beloved; the idea of remembering a memory, one that has been tucked away for so long, safe-guarded from our mind by our mind, and as we do so we’re not recalling the exact version of what happened but also of our memory of the version. We call it back, and in the calling, make it new, make it alive. We un-repress what was repressed, it bubbles from the deep. It demands our attention.
When I had the dream, I wrote it down and then promptly went back to my life, not thinking about it. And then, in early 2021 I started to have visions of horses coming to me. Prior to this, I’d had no real connection to horses. I had ridden one once in LA with my best friend as we did a group ride in Griffith Park, but I really didn’t know anything about horses. But then, the visions started to come. And they were deep, and they were very powerful, and they were demanding me to pay attention.
These visions were coincided with a very traumatic resurfacing of a moment that I was assaulted years ago. It was quite unexpected for me, very traumatic, and also clarifying in seeing how many people loved me and supported me and cared about me. It was very hard, and a lot of my year last year was spent in the energy of dealing with that, of trying to rebuild myself after the rupture of not only having the original event, but also the resurfacing.
Healing is so wild and circular; it works in really mysterious ways. I used to think that healing was creating a logical understanding of an event, a narrative and understanding, and then moving past that. I didn’t fully understand how deep personal, societal and generational trauma lives in the body, and how active and daily we need to work in order to dissolve these energies from our auras, to create openings for ourselves. And, how quite literally, the universe is conspiring with us to try and help us transmute as much as we can.
As this was resurfacing, a teacher I worked with last year said something along the lines of—Did you come to this Earth just to cope? Is that what you’re here to do?
I realized that for me, creating a logical understanding of a traumatic event was just the beginning of healing for me. It wasn’t just about processing something, it was about energetically trying to release it from my body. I realized how much of my energy was spending just coping and pretending everything was fine, when it was, in fact, not fine. I spend so much time pretending everything is okay, not only in terms of this specific event, but with so many things. I feel like so many of us do this, because its sometimes an adaptive strategy that we need for survival. For so long, I didn’t know, and hadn’t been taught, that there could be anything beyond just coping. And it’s been a beautiful and also very hard journey in realizing that there’s more than that.
I used to hear people talk about self-love, self-care and healing and it never resonated fully with me. I think that sometimes on social media, things that are incredibly beautiful and nuanced concepts can often get reduced to something that feels really benign. And there was also a way where people would talk about healing as a linear thing, that was complete. “I’ve healed from that.” Or; “I’ve already processed that.” Or; “I went to therapy for that”. I used to think that healing was like a big magic eraser, like Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind. When in actuality healing never ends. We can transmute these things, we can use them for our awakenings, we can work until we cease to be so triggered by them. But they still happened. They still stay with us. We spend our lives healing.
Or, we ignore it, and our pain consumes us.
I started to wonder what the visions that were coming to me were saying. If they were asking me to get back part of myself. The part of myself that I had lost. And if they were trying to show me how.
So many people I know in my life have been sexually violated. And there’s so little discussion on what it means to heal from sexual violation, how to even really pursue that, how to think about actually restoring your relationship to your body after something like that happens. How to move beyond just coping and into healing. And how healing looks so different for every one of us, and how there’s no linearity in healing.
And also, how many barriers of access we have to healing. When I was raped, I was in my early twenties, working three jobs at the time but making under $14k a year, had no health insurance, did not have a stable family or family support, was/am still an orphan, was/am still Muslim and came from a family where sex before marriage was seen as a sin, and was very new in a city where the man who assaulted me had a very large presence. I didn’t know how to get help, and one of my friends recommended a therapist’s office that had a sliding scale payment system. I could pay $15 a session with therapists who were in training.
When I went the therapist was my age, and I said, “I was raped but I know it’s not my fault” and she said something along the lines of “wow, that sounds like you’re handling it very well!” and I went for two more sessions, decided I was healed, and stopped going. I also, frankly did not have time. I’m also very good at pretending that everything is fine, when it is in fact, not fine. I was also working a lot, writing, and just trying to cope enough to survive, be a functioning human, and keep going.
No one needs me to say this, but there are just so many barriers to actually getting help healing-wise in this country, especially for people who don’t have access to a lot of resources, people of color, people from immigrant backgrounds, people who are Muslim, and people who are queer. There are also so many stigmas around needing to seek help in the first place, and also so much structural colonized practices in the west around what ‘healing’ even looks like that don’t account for healing modalities that have existed long before and think beyond white logic and reasoning, that are connected to the Earth, to spirit, to life force energy, to plant medicine, and to the totality of life that this planet is abundant with.
There are so many people who are sexually violated and have no support, who have to burry that pain deep and keep moving. There are so many ways where that healing feels so impossible to touch, where folks are not afforded the time and space they need to unravel, to be with and process the pain, and to find a way to try and move it out of their body. I feel really grateful for the space that I have been afforded to do that, the time I’ve been able to take for myself, the healers and teachers who have helped me.
I think back to what my teacher said to me last year: did you come to this Earth just to cope? Is that what you’re here to do?
I think a huge part of healing for me has been learning to trust my intuition again. Learning to listen to myself. Learning to clear out the gunk so that I can listen to my dreams, my intuition, my helpers, everything that’s trying to guide me to my next step, my next move. Whether it be rest, or be making a movie. Whether it be showing up for a friend or showing up for myself. Whether it be practicing patience, or protecting myself.
Whenever trauma occurs, it gets hard to trust myself. The doubt comes. How could I get myself into this situation? How do I know I can trust again? How can I protect myself?
I’ve been working for years to rebuild my trust with myself. I cultivate that relationship with my intuition through many practices. One, being art. One, being making. In this way I try and honor my dreams, my visions, as well as the craft that I’m aspiring towards birthing.
Shortly after this moment around my sexual assault resurfaced, I wrote RETRIEVAL, a short film that is about a soul retrieval in the aftermath of a sexual assault. (for anyone who hasn’t heard of the concept of a soul retrieval, it’s the spiritual process of retrieving a part of your soul that has been traumatically separated from your body). The project is birthed from the dream that I had in 2020, the one I now understand was trying to show me something, was trying to signify to me that part of me had been lost, and I needed to get that part of me back.
It was important to me that as I engaged with this project that I worked my hardest to hold the set as a ceremony space, a site where I could conduct the healing work that I was setting out to do. I’m so grateful for the incredible crew and cast that made this possible, who helped support this film and healing process, who showed up with such incredible presence and willingness.
We’ve been so lucky that we were able to raise the majority of the funds already through the project, through the support of Islamic Scholarship Fund, the Sundance Uprise Grant, and a few incredible individual donors. We launched a fundraiser a little while ago, and have already raised $10k. Thank you all so much to who has donated and shared. We’re hoping to reach our stretch goal of $15k before our Kickstarter closes, to ensure a smooth post production for us. If you all have the capacity to donate, or to share, it would mean the world to me:
And lastly, I know that I am writing about this now, that I’m asking for help with this project, and this project deals with sexual assault, but this newsletter and this project is on my terms. I very gently would like to ask that people don’t reach out to me about, or discuss with me the specifics of my assault or my trauma. Thank you.