As some of you know, I have been working with KaDee Strickland on her portrayal of a rape survivor on ABC's "Private Practice". While I have spoken to the media and opened my online world even wider since Charlotte's brutal attack, I haven't written in my own space other than the screenplay. Until tonight. "I'm holding up a corpse of Charlotte" says Cooper (so dead on thanks to Paul Adelstein) and it is only months later, for just a moment, I see myself. Just a little. It always takes what I must have done, seen, been, looked like to the people I cared about the most that reminds me of that sad skinny girl. That 22 year old record label manager who dug her heels into a pair of black platform shoes, pulled on a pair of textured stockings and a black polyester turtleneck dress plucked from a Salvation Army in Philadelphia over her head and headed off to work. It was the same Salvation Army that I bought a white french phone with a rotary dial to add to my vintage collection of clunky things that weighed down my tiny bedroom with its half painted patina walls. And because all of the life lines were cut by the same knife that was held to my throat for hours, it was the phone that my nerve damaged hand used to dial neighbors, an ex-boyfriend who lived on Greenwich and 12th, and finally my boss down on White Street where Jean-Michel Basquiat used to pick money off the floor at The Mudd Club to buy Cheese Doodles, answered my call. The textured tights I wore that November morning had been tied around my wrists so tightly that my fingers could barely curl around a metal claw to dial 9, then a 1, twice. What's your emergency? I didn't know. As my roommate sat shaking beside me in darkness, it occurred to me that it was not just my emergency. That's all I knew.
There is no doubt that bringing the real to Charlotte has reminded me of some dark days and endless nights. The graffitied "RAPE" over the stop sign at the Waverly/Christopher street intersection. I liked to think it was Jean-Michel's angel painting the red white as I'd been working on the soundtrack for Julian's film. The magenta poster with JM and the lucky duck. That lucky duck did nothing for either one of us while we were alive. The dead little girl that moved east to 2nd and 5th avenue who had little regard for herself. Oh but you'd never know. Every bit of that broken heart went to helping others. Make no mistake of this, that girl was a victim of a crime. Judge not, that same girl was still very much a prisoner curled inside herself. Dancing barefoot over broken bottles from Ludlow Street to the East Village. She laughed a lot, lived around recording studios, music venues where very good musicians made lots of 90s noise that drowned out the sound of her own heart beating out of her skin. She wore angel wings and had red hair on fire. She was everyone's best friend except her own. No one saw the emergency. They did not dial 911.
I was what I told them: okay, fine, good, totally fine I smiled. Go help them break their silence. Those still silenced. I never looked at myself plain in the face. I did not want to hear my own sad story. I did not want to hear that I was brave or strong or that they were proud of me. I wanted nothing to do with me. A year later my 80 pound self wore a string bean green lace dress and matching platforms to attend a RAINN benefit (I promise to never look like a vegetable again at any benefit). I was a wandering spirit pretending to be so alive.
It took a long time to build flesh to the bone. My husband knew me when I didn't want to know myself. He was one of my best friends. He has seen and felt it all and does not feel like a co-survivor. What have I survived in this? he says. He deserves a medal bigger than this world. The helplessness, the hurt, the anger, the place where there aren't enough walls to put your fist through. The pride he has in me, has had for so many years since I've been a survivor, watching me go through it all over again in a NYC courtroom. Last October we were married under a big oak tree where John Hancock was married. The British burned the house down and it was rebuilt. Sometimes you need to burn the whole house down to find love and laughter and yourself at your most beautiful under a giant oak tree.
If there is message from me today, it is to give yourself time, and care because you need it, you deserve it and it's there for you. It did not happen overnight. Sometimes it stings, and I cry, and yes you better believe I call 1800656HOPE. There is nothing past-tense about that phone number for me. I will speak for and with, write, rally, and assist in reducing the number of crimes in the most fragile place you could ever be attacked and live through: your soul. I hope that Charlotte feels real to you because she is. A little piece of Charlotte is the girl who lost her life at the stairwell of 160 Waverly Place. And here I am on the other side of that last sentence.
Did you wonder why it is repaving Waverly? Because you need to dig the whole thing up before you can figure out what created such an inexplicable crack in the earth the way rape tears the world apart. I fell through that crack and came up out of the earth chewing gravel.
I am unbelievably lucky for love, support, sunshine and RAINN, for my writing hands again, for my voice, my husband, my rock star friends who all fill my sky with the light that brings me back home every day. I have a whole lotta love in my heart for KaDee and Shonda for being the real. These are not stories; these are real lives. You put a live one out there and thousands come out of the hurt where their earth fell flat. You gave them the real that extends the edge of the earth and makes room for help and healing and growing in to everything that they were made to be. Anything that was taken, they can take it back. For helping me help others and see how much I've grown to love myself.
