I contacted a healer recommended by a friend, in a period that I feared that a μάτιασμα* was on me. Over email and only half believing, I gave him my longitude and latitude and he went to work. He told me I had lost a soul fragment. I returned to a moment of having my small blue underwear lifted away from my body.

I like this way of thinking about it: a fragment, a small, circumscribed part of me, something to grieve. When I can say I lost something, it just feels easy, continuous to talk about grief. When I see it as lost, I can understand what entered into my body through that undefended rift in my matter, dark like the inside of a mouth. The shifting, sweeping wind in my chest, the fist in my throat and a deep, blank feeling of disbelief.

A part of me is permanently gripped in childhood by molestation. I am beset by an unwanted knowing, and also the strange orientation to sweetness it produced. I am alive to sweetness’s wonder. Concurrently, I am feeding something mad, starless. These poles don’t feel separate from each other.

It is both astounding and absolutely sensible, concrete, that a hand touching your body can usher you onto new pathways, peeling off a thousand versions of you with the same opacity and texture of insect wings. This is the sequel of touch. It seems more right than any other unfolding moment that changes you, because a hand is material. It can and does push you, while some transition moments feel like nothing, then gather meaning in retrospect. I see them as a gate guarded by a fate at her loom, mercenary, hands full of thread, holding a yawning passage to a new dimension of self.

In its solidity, a hand bypasses this unknown and reaches into you, then through you to touch other people, too. It uses every finger, becomes multi-limbed, like a god full of pain. It touches my parents when I hurt them from a secret place of rage, every sexual partner I have resented for no reason but wanting me, people I love but can’t trust, people I love anxiously, like it’s a calling. It touches my sisters with resentment, and my nieces and nephews with watchful anxiety. It touches my patients with a careful distance. It touches anyone I tell, with discomfort or gentleness. I push it away from me because I think this will change me, this could change them.

The world-changing aspect of violence is what interests me, because of its variability. Why was I touched into a chronically busy overachiever, and the patient on my ICU ward touched into someone who dissociates and swallows cutlery? I watch her getting a nasogastric tube fed down her oesophagus, which is so scarred she needs the size we usually give infants, and read in her social work notes that her grandfather did it. Why are her and I one way, while another person hurts someone else as they had done to them?

Maybe it is commensurate to who harms you, how badly they betray you, when it happens or where, but it’s also where this particular violence is inseparable from all other axes of power, characterised by patriarchy and capital. Healing, whatever this imperfect concept entails, is easier with capital. Grief needs time, gathering your soul together again needs time, giving and receiving care, breathing and resting, trust need time. Under a racial, cis-heteropatriarchal, ableist capitalism, time is expensive and inequitably distributed.

This isn’t to say that moneyed people heal, as its opposite holds more truth. As much spaciousness as capital gives us, it offers the same quantity of corruption. When I consider capital and healing, I think about the bright and dark faces of privilege. I think of how much violence structures binaries of gender, as if harm were gender’s most logical expression. I think about the co-optation of healing by the market, the privatisation of health systems, the incessant minting of pain into profit. Mostly, I think about the reiteration of abuse, and how money and resource aid this exponentially. So, something purer, that must also be true, is what allows time to stretch and healing to happen within this oppressive ecosystem. It is a microclimate of joy. Access to the tools offered or ability to insulate from commensurate violences produced by systems of capital may dictate how and at what pace you heal, how hard you have to fight for time. What persists through whatever unholy architecture capital builds is this: it is the safety of being loved well by others, and loving, that changes the form to which your soul migrates.

The imagining and storytelling of empire are never without the spectre of sexual violence, but this often told as an auxiliary to a greater project of land theft and evicerated bodies. Tina Ngata speaks to the theft of “spiritual territory” as strategic. Dr Sarah Deer offers that rape is not a metaphor for colonialism — it is central to the colonial project. It could not exist without it. It births and perpetuates empire, as both destructive tool — making the body an exemplary site to distil and enact taking, desecration, to undermine the personhood of a people or place, to end lineages — and a generative one — to forcibly breed itself into existence, to commodify, to traffic. It pervades empire, produces a sickly power, in Falastine, in Sudan and Congo, here on these lands, and any lands touched by this sickness. And it contaminates spaces in which it has no business, in movements pushing hard against the structures that produce and feed on it.

If sexual violence is a foundational building of empire, and if these acts crystallise oppression as a sorrowful dissolution of relationships, then so too must work against oppression and a situated, relational joy, be part of dismantling empire.

My appreciation for the work of these scholars comes from a confusion — why are rigorous explorations of childhood sexual harm so missing from our academic, philosophical and political discourses on power, or otherwise confined to studies of gender? And even as we explore power and violence in gender studies, why so little specifically on the child? I am asking what lies at the root of this disappearance, this partial reckoning. Approximately 1 in 4 children are sexually abused on this continent, a statistic twice as likely in children assigned female at birth. While this form of abuse is arguably the most difficult, the most colossal betrayal of our humanity, it is common enough that it must also be human. So although it may feel unexaminable, it does not actually defy understanding, language or looking. We can reveal it, name it, plumb it, look at it as closely as we wish to, seek out how it is embedded in and around us beyond the story of the individual. When we don’t address this contamination in our movement work, and the thinking and doing spaces that inform this work, it hinders us, closes us to the joy of existing together.

I am not saying harm has the same properties of energy in that it can’t be destroyed, but once it is produced, I do experience it as a continuous entity, something to be transmuted into its most contained form. Personally, I can’t destroy it because I will never feel nothing about this experience, even if that feeling is a bone-deep numbness. Amani Haydar says, talking with her cousin about war and woundedness — there is no way to get justice for what war does to you, war just happens and you can do absolutely nothing about it. I am not posing the particular psychic and physical violence of war as equivalent, nor the convoluted constructs and processes for “justice” that accompany it. This sort of harm exists in a different political register, although of course sexual harm is also a tool of war, and sexual violence is collectively wounding. It is the idea that a hermetic justice is a fiction which resonates. There is no monetary recourse for sexual harm, because the harm is not economic. There is no completeness of safety you can revive, because the threat of sexual or gender-based violence is relentless. If you exist, you exist in its miasma.

Any offering of justice from a colonial system is greatly weakened by the hypocrisy of its reliance on harm, the blood-for-sustenance it demands. The incarceration or death of your abuser is unsatisfying, knowing the ways in which incarceration compounds and reiterates sexual violence, knowing that, in the timeline of harm, death erases nothing. Knowing both that there are worse things than death, and that inflicting those worse things may be destructive, unsatisfying to the spirit. That the best path may be one of transformation, rehabilitation, if there are willingness and appropriate support to engage in these processes.

There is no way to recover loss, no matter how you relate to punishment or reparation, because it’s lost. The impossibility of justice brings rage with it, but also releases me from the ableist construction that there is a teleology to healing. It’s not that I’m not religious — in fact I do believe in the creative principle of God — but I can’t believe that there is some inherent, personal value in how you overcome. I trouble the idea of survivorship, because of the way it presumes and enfolds healing. A part of me did not survive it. At no point I will be healed. I will be carrying it forever, and this is okay because it is true. It just is.

I experience greater peace when I release the imagining that I am not yet whole, that something or someone could move me to a pre-abused wholeness. If I am peaceful with the idea of remaining unhealed, it could be coherent to say — there is no hierarchy of survival. But if we think of harm something to be transmuted, pushing yourself to exhaustion to build a life of emotional safety is less harmful to the self than swallowing a butter knife, which is significantly less harmful to the other than abusing another child. So, a strange order does emerge in which healing can’t be completely discarded, in which it takes on the shape and temporality of process, of being with each other better.

My friend who was also molested told me about going to a podcast launch. It was a series focusing on the sexual assault of the protagonist. While the producer spoke, he experienced a wash of clarity in which he could identify every other person in the room who had been harmed as if they were diffusing an artificial light. So many of them, he said. I think about that a lot, because a part of you does recognise it in the other. What is it we recognise, what is it about violence that keeps us so visible to each other? What is it about resonance that brings relief, that moves us?

I don’t actually believe, myself. I remember and make it both worse and better in my head until it’s hazy. I remember my teenage mother’s rape with more clarity, and I wasn’t even there. My own has lived in me, coming into focus when considered from a particular angle, from a particular level of intoxication, in particular conversations with people that hold up particular mirrors, responding to particular triggers, but rarely understood. Is it bad to say I feel like it has made me a better, if more broken, person? Is it bad to say I am using it to create? Can I do that because it’s mine? Is it mine?

Because really, to me, it means very little when out of relationality. I am seeking a world-building utility from it, a way to understand others who harm and are harmed, to understand its production and reproduction, and that is what feels most meaningful. To first overcome the profound muteness of shame, then to use it. This is the Janus face of joy, a feeling of naming, sharing, and transmuting an experience of connected devastation.

Where do we find joy? Is it under, over, alongside, within or without? Edged by joy, as most human things are, enclosing our darkness, orbiting it or resting at its core? It is so persistent, so necessary. We need it to remember why.