I’m in the midst of writing the proposal for MAGICAL DEPRESSIVE REALISM and I’ve been thinking about mainstream success, what it does to your perspective, what it requires you forsake and leave behind.

In the social media microwave background are murmurings about Black Lives Matter Global Network CEO Patrisse Khan-Cullors being called in by the families of the dead Black folks whose names the organization used to “build power”, and her recent interview with Marc Lamont Hill essentially refusing their requests for accountability. Her high-profile friends rushing to her side, claiming they are acting in the name of love for all Black women, in defense of all Black women. Some of those high-profile friends are writers, artists, and organizers I love—if from afar—and respect, whose work has inspired me and changed the trajectory of my own. And none of them, as far as I can tell, are directly addressing the very valid grievances raised by the families of Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, and others whose deaths laid the foundation for BLMGN’s mainstream success and at the very least bolstered Khan-Cullors’ influence and prestige.

It’s really making me think, is it damn near impossible to remain rooted in a set of values that centers the most marginalized once you achieve a certain level of success? Or is it that so many of the folks in our communities who get to that level were already middle class or white adjacent to begin with?

As a Black person who was mostly raised by a white parent, I know that I must be ever-vigilant in examining my own reactions to and understandings of situations. The same goes for my class background. Raised on the stoop of the middle class and paying rent with credit, I am constantly learning how good I had it compared to a family with no access to credit and no extended family with savings. It sounds like Khan-Cullors, raised in Van Nuys, had a similar upbringing as my cousins out in Pacoima, CA. My cousins are Black middle class, nothing fancy, but also way better off than many others. Yet I’m sure they have horrible stories to tell, ways they could claim purchase to the gravy train of Black death, if they wanted.

Living in LA, I’ve heard things about Dignity and Power Now, Khan-Cullors first organization here in the Los Angeles area. They have a reputation, at least in disabled community, of not compensating appropriately for labor requested. Former BLM LA members—disabled working-class cultural worker Walela Nehanda is an example—have spoken out about their dismissive treatment by Khan-Cullors and Melina Abdullah, a professor at Cal State LA and leader within BLM LA. Ferguson activist and media director for Planting Justice Ashley Yates has long been drawing attention to the abuses within BLMGN, particularly their handling of sexual assault accusations against one of their members by Yates herself.

None of this is new and none of it originated in right-wing media. Like everything else, white people noticed calling BLMGN out was trending in Black circles and decided to capitalize on it. And it’s a cute swerve to finally come out and say something about it after all that’s gone down, and then claim the whole thing is a right-wing op.

It’s the elite playbook, really, and it makes sense that it’s being used by folks who’ve gained some level of mainstream success. To get to the point where you’re regularly bumping elbows with celebrities, especially as a fat Black queer person, you have to have begun to believe in their bullshit to some extent. More importantly, their bullshit has to have rubbed off on you.

And perhaps most importantly, you have to have shut out the folks who would take you by the shoulders and shake some sense back into you. Those folks are, too often, the same ones you had to use to get where you’ve landed. Folks like Nehanda and Yates. Folks like the parents of murdered Black people, like Samaria Rice and Mike Brown Sr., and the grassroots BLM activists who support them.

Generations of Black middle class academics, writers, and artists have interpreted the experience of the Black underclass into profit and refused accountability for it. This isn’t the first time it’s happened, and as long as folks think protecting Black women means protecting their right to acquire wealth by any means, it damn sure won’t be the last. The constant social media gaslighting around Black abundance, acting like any critique of earnings is an attack against all Black folks’ right to be comfortable, is white supremacist capitalism internalized. Folks are using the same arguments billionaires deploy to justify why they deserve their wealth, just draping it in kente cloth. If you add shine to your name off saying the names of dead Black folks, I’m sorry, but you are engaging in exploitation unless their survivors are also living in abundance.

And that’s something I see too: the conflation of white supremacist attacks against Black activists in general and Khan-Cullors, Tamika Mallory, and others in particular with the legitimate critiques of BLM chapter members and the families of those murdered by police. Yes, some people making noise do want these high-profile activists dead, do want them to suffer in poverty. But many others are folks who are directly invested in the struggle, who have been on the ground doing work in BLM’s name, or people like me who were inspired by the way the phrase “Black Lives Matter” seemed to separate the chaff of white folks real quick. I mean, we have two Black Lives Matter stickers on our car, so it’s not like I was ever anti-BLM or anti-PKC! I’m still not. I’m just anti-evading the communities you say you want to lift up and build power for.

I know there’s only so much you can do to control the ways people use your name, your ideas, your image. I want to offer generosity to these activists, consider that they did not willingly participate in the their uplifting to a position of community leadership. But I also know it’s possible to limit your success, to turn down invitations, to donate speaking fees or suggest a different speaker with an experience that needs centering. In my own career, I’ve had many opportunities to speak on the Black experience, bolstering my own profile in the process, that I’ve turned down.

It might have more to do with my neurodivergence-fueled affinity for fairness and my general disdain for celebrity, but as someone who straddles the borders of many marginalized identities, I am very conscious of the space I take up. I want the same level of conscientiousness from those who have taken up the mantle of community leader. Particularly if that’s not a mantle the community you’re trying to lead has handed you. I don’t think, even if you feel this way, that being “divinely called” to this work is a valid excuse for evading calls to accountability. That’s a very individualist mindset. If you are called, it’s to serve the people, not the other way around. Demands that we ignore these families’ cries for redress sound to me like we’re being expected to serve our leaders, who are in turn serving white supremacist capitalism.

Anyway, there’s this saying of adrienne maree brown’s, one of the aforementioned writers who’ve rallied to Khan-Cullors’ defense while either ignoring or completely mischaracterizing what Mike Brown Sr. and Samaria Rice and all the grassroots BLM activists are saying. The saying is, “What you/we pay attention to grows.” She repeated the saying in a recent blog post, which was actually a recent speech she gave at Tulane University, defending Khan-Cullors against these supposed right-wing attacks. I used to nod along in the way I nod along to other movement platitudes like that, i.e., “The power of the people is stronger than the people in power.” In the latter case, when I drill down into that saying I find all sorts of nuance, like yes, the power of the people is potentially stronger, but the people in power have riot gear and tanks, so we’ve got to be more specific—if we were all aligned, all working towards liberation strategically and diligently, then our power can overcome theirs.

Today I found myself at last reacting to the simplicity of “What we pay attention to grows” as brown sought to divert our attention from the struggle of poor and working-class Black families inviting their self-installed leaders to accountability and towards the struggle of being a high profile Black middle class activist. I realized my experience with gardening does not bear the phrase out as a truism. Sometimes what we pay attention to rots and dies. It depends on the quality of the attention.

I think these celebrity activists and movement writers with a high profile have been receiving low-quality attention. Too much water. Adoration absent honest critique, attention that can look and feel like it is helping you grow but is actually cutting off your oxygen supply, dooming you to suffocate in stagnant ideas. When the families of Black folks murdered by police are calling you in and you can’t step off your pedestal (which you claim you don’t want in the first place) long enough to acknowledge what they’re saying? Your root system is gone.

I just… am so disappointed. I had to write about it. If only so I remember, so that if I’m ever in a position to disappoint others in this way, I can avoid it.

I don’t remember the first time I was raped, but I know it happened.

I don’t recall when the memory was lost. I can’t answer #WhyIDidntReport.

I do recall remembering exactly what happened, in re-traumatizingly clear detail, two years later: in the middle of an assembly at school on reporting sexual abuse. And then, I did report. Loudly. In the form of a high-pitched yet guttural scream that seemed to have gathered strength from the time the memory sat dormant in my brain.

Around me, other children–other girls, as far as my ten year old self could tell–had also begun to cry (although none quite so spectacularly as I, unfortunately for my social life). The administration at my private Christian school created an after-school support group for all of us. It lasted for six months or so before either they or we decided it wasn’t worth the effort, wasn’t worth re-dredging up our memories over and over with no real resolution. So eventually I forgot, again. At least, I thought I did. But I never really forgot.

I went through a tumultuous adolescence marked with mental instability, self-destructive behavior, and questionable relationships with men and masculine-identified folks. Standard survivor fare; I won’t bore you with those details. What I will say about that time is that I never fully recovered the memory again. I recovered more of it. For instance, during a particularly intense overnight therapy session at a residential treatment facility when I was sixteen, I remembered again where the rape took place, and I remembered penetration. But still, the full awareness of it was, mercifully, kept from me by my psyche.

When I was nineteen I was raped again, and I remember everything about it. It destroyed me, psychologically, but it didn’t reveal the memory of what happened when I was eight. It did, however, induce all sorts of PTSD and dissociative identity issues that forced me to confront my unprocessed trauma. I went into intensive therapy with EMDR, a course that lasted for about seven years. I managed to reintegrate myself, despite not having access to the actual memory of what occurred when I was eight.

Even without details, I can see the shape of the memory. Bordering the gnawing, gaping gaps in the record, there are some clear lines. I remember my excitement over an older white boy thinking this ugly Black duckling was pretty. How good that felt after the years of bullying and torment I endured. How cool I thought I was when we hung out on the jungle gym and flipped other kids off. Him calling me at my house: me, giggling, my mom, hearing me, asking who I was talking to.

And I remember…a nonlinear empty space. (And something involving the lunch tables, something involving something of his inside something of mine. I don’t try to pin down specifics; I truly consider it a gift that I can’t recall what happened anymore.)

Then, I remember my head down in my folded arms after school, crying. A note from him in my third grade yearbook that I think said something about how ugly my hairy armpits were but I could never tell because I scratched it out immediately after I first read it. My grades dropping, my interest in life degrading; partially because I’m not a fan of standardized education, but mainly because my mind was occupied with blaming myself for whatever happened in that empty space. And later, of course, there is the aforementioned mental instability.

What have I learned from this culture about survivorhood and memory? From watching season after season of SVU, from watching now two women in my lifetime testify that a potential Supreme Court justice sexually assaulted them, from the Mike Tyson trial, the Cosby trial, the Very Special Episodes of various sitcoms and dramas? What is important, when you are raped, after a rape? Remember as much detail as you can. (Remember, even, what you were wearing.) Remember not to take a shower, so your body can remember what they left on you, and you can prove this has happened. Remember to try to leave some memory of yourself on them, a scratch, some DNA, some irrefutable scientific proof. And if you can’t? If you didn’t? If your brain’s split-second decision when it realized you were under threat was to shift you into a different state of consciousness while the trauma occurs so you cannot remember the trauma outside of that state? If instead of smells and sounds and sensations there’s just an ominous void where a part of your childhood should be?

What can you do when you’re doomed to know, but never remember?

It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that I am a survivor of childhood rape. In fact, I didn’t come to terms with it fully until I was raped again. Part of the reason I had difficulty in validating my experience has to do with the importance memory holds in legitimizing one’s status as a survivor, which in turn derives from a cisheteropatriarchal, white supremacist prioritization of the rational and material over the emotional and the spiritual.

When it comes to sharing experiences of rape, we love details; we love when someone’s juicy underbelly of trauma is served up raw for the re-devouring. Narrative structure is important, too. (Make sure it fits the range of acceptable assaults. Make sure you’re weren’t fucking them consensually first or laughing with them first or drinking with them first or flirting with them first. Make sure you’re white, nondisabled, cishet, thin, and attractive.) If you’ve got physical evidence, bruises, bleeding, we’ll of course take those, maybe rub some salt in those wounds for good measure. And you’ve always got to have the corroborating witnesses, preferably of the highest caliber (so not your drunk ex-BFF who’s consensually banging her boyfriend in an adjacent hotel bed and oblivious to your screams).

But when you just straight can’t remember? When your evidence consists solely of a promising life dashed upon the rocks and an empty space? There’s no empowerment to be found there. No statute of limitations to beat out. Neither our society’s system of justice nor the current pop cultural/political moment occurring around sexual assault readily accommodate the slippery nature of trauma memory.

I’m reminded of the difficulty I had in claiming a political identity as a survivor now, in this moment of #MeToo reckoning, with the development of newer hashtags such as #WhyIDidntReport. So many of our methods of personal resistance against rape culture focus on storytelling, splaying your experiential guts onto a screen of various sizes as a form of empowerment. I do absolutely support survivors who want to tell their stories. But as someone who doesn’t particularly want to feed more bodies to the prison industrial complex, and as someone who remembers the name of their rapist but no details in one instance and a bunch of details but no name in the other, I haven’t participated. What would I say? I keep looking out on my feeds to see if any of the stories resemble mine, an empty space; none so far yet.

The confirmation fight over Brett Kavanaugh was re-traumatizing for me, as it was for so many other survivors. In my case, it stirred up some latent feelings of inauthenticity. In Dr. Ford’s testimony, she leaned on the Western medical-scientific view of memory as primary in determining legitimacy as a survivor, basically stating that she knew she was assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh because of how traumatic memories encode themselves in the hippocampus. I know I was raped because of how the memory encoded itself into everything else in my life. Could I testify, if my childhood rapist were somehow nominated to some public position? Could I sit in front of that kangaroo court and try to plead my broken life against my rapist’s hippocampus?

(This is one reason why I’m an abolitionist. I don’t believe our current paradigm of justice can account for all the ways one can testify. My testimony is embodied, and so my vision of feminist justice involves a de-centering of narrative testimony, particularly when it comes to rape and sexual assault.)

Our (U.S.) society associates forms of knowledge gleaned outside a rational-scientific framework with femininity and Otherness, thus rendering them inferior in a cisheteropatriarchal white supremacist context. Our society is also a rape culture, and so no amount of remembering in perfect detail will ensure that a rapist is brought to what passes for justice here. So why should I, or you, dredge up our trauma on demand and offer it to an uncaring society with no guarantee of return on our investment? Why prop up the idea that a survivor’s memory is ever worth anything under heterosexist patriarchy?

Again, I don’t want to discourage survivors from telling their stories. I only want us to consider what we accomplish, who is excluded when we emphasize this tactic, and what ideas we’re reifying. Even in the best of circumstances memory can be unreliable, and constructing a homogeneous experience of survivorhood is impossible. There are survivors who remember every last detail, who know but cannot remember, whose memories are completely intact but organized nonlinearly, and whose understanding of themselves as having experienced sexual assault is shaped by the impression the event had on their life rather than any recollection of vivid details of the assault. Some of us contain all these and more. A feminist survivors’ movement must de-center the rational-scientific paradigm and consider all the ways we can know we were harmed, or risk perpetuating cisheteropatriarchal oppression.