On Solstice, in my neighborhood, I participate in a Guatemalan ritual called Quemar el Diablo. In the silence of the darkness, I light a fire outside and write on little papers all I wish to give to the fire: resentments, grievances, the longing for justice, grief and sorrow, the unfinished business of a life. I hold this small and fevered planet, with all its chaos and all its beauty. I try to reckon with what I cannot fix. I light the fire to try to put some intention into the flame: more empathy, more generosity, more courage to be in truth, speak more truth, more coming to terms without capitulation and despair, to find joy, not just distraction, to laugh despite the evidence otherwise in the chaos of politics, to embrace not knowing in whatever form it takes.

Sexual trauma is a profound betrayal. It shakes the brain like a snow globe. What you have known for certain is suddenly stripped away, creating chaos, grief—and overwhelming confusion. Confusion is the brain trying to make sense of such cognitive dissonance. 

Your mind may be noisy and crowded and empty. You don't quite know how to explain what you know or feel anymore. You stand blind in the sandstorm of confusion as lingering tapes of the past fight with growth. You grapple with the updated map of your interior terrain, and the loneliness that first comes with new alignments.

Silence: a weapon or a message; agony or balm

Secret or stance; sacred or torture

Empty space or full of meaning
Cowardly compliance or betrayal...

A medium of brave resistance.   

Silence has been a protective device that may have come out of suffering violation.
It has been used as a weapon by others to chill dissent. 

But it can also be the means to stir oneself to action.  

Truth: A very complicated subject. Is it subjective or fact? Real—or the power of all we have been told? We wonder—in history, media, politics, religious doctrine, or altered family narratives and secrets—what is the truth? What were we told? What do we believe? What have we come to know about our history or ourselves? 

Truth is all of these: subjective, narrated, interpreted, inherited, projected, passed down, altered or corrupted. Perhaps squashed, silenced. The ground of truth lies below the muddy pebbles of appetite or ego, inherited shame or cognitive memory.