Early Attempts at Recording Pain

By Katie Bonna

Originally written for the Reclaim the Night event

When I was little I really wanted to be on tv, specifically I wanted to be a journalist- like my intellectual heartthrob Krishnan Guru-Murthy. I was so obsessed with honing my craft, that whenever anyone got a camcorder out, I would begin to ‘present’ whatever was being recorded. Which didn’t go down brilliant in siblings school plays. I decided the way I was going to make it big, was to write a story for Press Pack, which was a club for young reporters run by the show Krishnan presented, Newsround. I wanted to write something serious, but also funny, utilising the main tool I had developed to make people laugh- making fun of my emotions. I don’t have a copy of the story, but from what I remember it was a hilarious piece about how I’d been walking the dog in the local park and I had ‘convinced myself’ that a group of young men were going to attack me. One of them had followed me through the trees and I had picked up pace, until finally he caught up with me and asked if I had a lighter. I conveyed this story as a joke at my own expense. Silly me! He was perfectly innocent and I’d ended up, heart in throat, panting and yelling my dog’s name, tears streaming down my cheeks- what’s wrong with me?! I think I concluded in the article that I needed to read fewer Nancy Drew books, which usually involved a woman being scared by a shadowy male figure.

When I wrote that, I was 13. What 13 year old me hadn’t been able to conclude was that there was a lot more going on, than me being spooked by some hokey story about a teenage detective. There were, for starters, the countless warnings I’d received from parents (mine and other peoples) about the dangers of being female in a public place. There were the bogeyman stories I’d share with friends on sleepovers, always centred around a man hurting a woman. There were less direct, but just as insidious warnings courtesy of Ms Parr, who would stand at the school gate, making girls roll their skirts down so that boys didn’t get the wrong idea. There was Miss Anderson who gave us - no joke, this really happened- a class on how to apply make up so we didn’t ‘send out the wrong signals’. And there was the fact that an older male was chasing me through a park where trees shielded anyone outside from catching sight of the moment he caught up to me.

When I was 13, and Press Pack didn’t even acknowledge receipt of my article, I blamed myself. It was a stupid thing to write about, no one else feels like that, no one else cares, what a silly self-involved fool I was to drag that poor boy into it. 13 year old me gave up her dream of being the female Krishnan, because she felt ashamed of the fuss she’d made over nothing. Almost 40 year old me has some questions. Like why was no one in my sphere of existence validating my experience, to the point where I couldn’t even validate it for myself? Almost 40 year old me sees a cry for help in that 13 year old writing that story in the first place.

There are so many layers to what we are experiencing in this present moment. There is the abhorrent and unthinkable crime that has come to pass, playing out like the bogeyman stories we have been brought up to be scared of. There is the loss of a young woman’s life at the hands of a man. There is the fall out. The posts, the articles, the subtweets, the stories, the hashtags, the clips of men talking about it shared by women in the hope that men will listen to them. There is the insistence by a woman with great authority that this sort of crime almost never happens and with it, the sweeping oversight of the hundreds of men who harm women and evade punishment, in part, because of the institution she is heading up. There is the system, not broken because it never worked, which fails to protect, to educate and to recognise that the visibility of this atrocious crime makes the shadows cast over all the atrocious violence that men enact on women of colour and trans women darker still.

And then there is how we are feeling in the midst of all that.

Yesterday, when I was considering what to say this evening, I found myself struggling. I felt like I had a stone in my stomach, that was growing. I read and I watched and I listened and the stone moved to my chest and it felt like it was crushing me from the inside. I was pretty sure that I would have to say sorry, I can’t do this.

The theory of the pain body in mindfulness teachings, is that painful life experiences that are not fully processed and accepted when they first occurred, live inside you. Every time you have a similar, painful and unprocessed experience, it adds to that internal body of pain. And when something triggers it, the pain body rises in its wholeness like the sea swelling and you are overwhelmed. The trigger can be tiny, but it will tug on every thread of pain that has been buried and uncared for. So when the trigger is something of this magnitude and everyone starts discussing it and sharing their own stories and talking about change, the waves….the waves come rolling in.

My pain body is made up of 13 year old Katie dismissing her terror, because she had been shown by those around her that not only was this normal, she was making a fuss again. My pain body is made up of every Nancy Drew story that stopped me sleeping as a child and every news story that stops me sleeping as an adult. My pain body is made up of every time I’ve reached the door just in time, or I’ve turned to stone in the middle of the street or berated myself for not wearing trainers. My pain body is made up of doors I wasn’t expecting to be locked and alleyways I wasn’t alerted to on Google Maps.

Every woman here has their own intricate body of pain within them, which has been swelling like the sea this week. Some bodies will surface caked in rage, some in numbness, some in fearful retreat, some in sickness, some in depression, some in exhaustion, some in a stone in the stomach which ends up as a few words on Zoom, but now- now is the time for us to let the swell come. Because the time for being told that we are overreacting, is over now. As is the time for being blamed, for having the weight of our pain forced back onto our shoulders even though it was inflicted by men. Enough is enough. Those stories are old and they have been told by a system that stands in front of us like a battered seawall, that was built to hold us back.

We are here to pay our respects to a life taken, brutally, and to all 118 women killed by men over the last year. But also, by gathering here, we are validating all our years of dismissed pain. We are here to carve out space for them at last. Space to hold each other as the dark, deep waves swell and rise and we feel what’s been hidden. Their time is now and they are powerful enough to smash that battered seawall into dust.