Unfolding Life

For so long, sharing the story of the sexual abuse I experienced as a boy was utterly unthinkable. Yet, as I got into my thirties and forties, the imperative to write about it, the attempt to shed some light on what happened, grew so strong within me that I ended up writing a book. The Tricky Part was released in 2005. 

I remember how sure (how relieved!) I was that, after all the years of seeking its way into sentences, the story was at long last complete. And public. And I remember how much I believed that with the story wrapped up, the ache and the questions would be too. The imperative to figure it all out would vanish. There’d be closure. Liberation. Peace.

Well, my dear friends, I just turned sixty-six. The book came out over twenty years ago and I’ve come to understand that, while the book may be complete, the story is not. 

There is no doubt that wrangling the thorny tale of being sexually molested by an older man from the time I was twelve to fifteen, that excavating the narrative of it, helped me understand the human scope, the universality of my own story. And that this gave rise to a deep compassion for myself. Even glimpses of compassion for the blind, unconscious, sicko of a perpetrator. I felt that the past had taken its hands from my throat so that I was able, at long last, to live and breathe in the present.  Such welcome feelings! But I have also come to see that, for me anyway, there is no such thing as closure. 

I remember, for instance, a chilly November morning not too many years ago. It was 2011. I was in Des Moines, Iowa, on tour with the Broadway musical Wicked. Playing a goat, no less. A goat who happens to sing. I woke early thinking I might make another visit to Des Moines’s amazing art museum. I checked my email. A message had come through from a reporter in Denver informing me that Camp St. Malo (the Catholic boys camp where I initially met the perpetrator) was just then going up in flames. Oh, my God, that idyllic Rocky Mountain boys camp, that Catholic wonderland that had ushered wilderness and campfires and a perp into my young life, burning to the ground!? Did I have a comment? the reporter wondered. The inquiry gave me a terrific jolt. A sudden wave of grief. I did not reply to the email.

Then, still in my pajamas, I walked to the door of my hotel room where a copy of USA Today was waiting in a plastic bag on the doorknob.  I grabbed the paper, and as I walked back into the room, I opened it to a huge, red-colored headline in reference to the exploding Penn State sexual abuse scandal. “Victim Number 1,” it said.  My stomach heaved. I didn’t want to, but I peeled open the pages to learn that the headline referred not to Coach Sandusky’s first apparent prey, but to the brave young man who had been the first to step forward and who had, with the help of a counselor and his family, reported Sandusky to the police. Not yet twenty, this boy was described in USA Today as a hero who had courageously ended the conspiracy of cowards and stopped a serial predator. 

The boy’s plight, his valor, the seemingly endless crimes and cover-ups out there, the tabloid sketch of heroes and monsters, the words victim and coward…it all knocked me flat. I still have this searing pain that I never spoke up. I’ve never gone to the law. Instead, I turned to sentences, to storytelling. I want to believe that writing about it all was a brave act in its way. But I still feel a sadness and regret that I never spoke up to the police or the church.

In a millisecond. The panic. The guilt. The regrets, heaved through my body. Curled up in my pajamas in a hotel room in Iowa, it all came flooding back. The feelings of cowardice, of grief. And there I was, lost (again) in a dark wood. And there it was. The ongoing complexity. I landed in a chair and sat frozen for much of the day as I tried to sort through my seemingly intractable feelings: my deep and abiding sense of shame, the sudden surety that my life was meant to be other than it is. That I’d somehow allowed it all to go wrong way back when I was twelve, back when I (so I still, at moments, believe) allowed it to unfold the way it did. The stubborn sense of complicity. 

Closure is, of course, a kind of illusion. I realize now I was quite attached to the idea. I had wanted the book to release me. But from what really? 

I will say this. Over the years I have grown to recognize the old thinking and feelings, and I attempt to hold them all with tenderness and to take good care of myself when the feelings flood in. It’s a kind of practice. A life-giving, life-sustaining practice. 

I also know that a big difference is in having found other survivors to speak to and write to, and to love as I move through the feelings that still live within. Given the stubborn half-life of trauma, when the dark confusion cauterized in the belly rises up and stops me in my track, that tender mop-headed kid of 12 is begging to be heard and honored for what he endured. That requires quiet and patience, and a great deal of love. And companionship. It may not be closure, but it is the ongoing mystery, the ongoing journey toward the love of this self and a kind of radical acceptance of my life just as it unfolded. And as it unfolds now with what is yet asking to be discovered and healed. And, amazingly, this can happen in a compassionate community of others who understand. 

I’m getting older and life is inviting me, it would seem, to remain awake to all its messiness and wonders. Feelings of anger and love, exultation and shame. Breath by breath. I sit here at the end of a summer day in the year 2026. The kids are back at school across the street at the local elementary school, climbing on the jungle gym. This crowd of little bodies, kicking soccer balls that careen around the playground. My husband is in the other room, reading a script for an audition. The headlines in today’s paper are about the war with Iran and AI, and the kids seem blissfully unaware of it all. They are spinning around the tarmac like molecules that naturally delight in existence. I look out at them and feel an abiding sense of hope that we are able to listen, without judgment, to the stories that make up our lives. That we are able, with each hour we are given, to lift the veil of indifference to each other’s presence. Here’s to being alive. 

Martin Moran is an author, playwright and actor who lives in New York City. His new solo show, Other Bodies, will open Off-Broadway this November at The Barrow Group Arts Center.  For more information visit Alltherageplay.com