A Magnificent Creature

"She was magnificent," I said,  "She wore a long, black gown and combat boots underneath. She had a pierced lip, nose, ears and eyebrow. Her hair were tied in two fat, black plats and she had crosses for eyes as if warning the world to stay away lest they wished to be decimated by what they found."

"You realise, you are describing yourself, right?" He asked, "Your eyes aren't crosses, of course, but they serve the same purpose. What was her name? What was the name of your doll?"

I grinned with sheepish quality of person who had just been asked the question they were hoping to answer.

"Ancilla," I said, "Ancilla was the name of my doll."

Ancilla lived on the mantle of my bedroom back at my parents' home, she didn't do much, nor did I really play with her, but I loved her. I was remarkably young when I had found her and it was the first time in my life that I had seen a doll that felt like me. Of course, at the time, I didn't look anything like her. It's hard for me to remember how this felt but I know I faced a crisis of confidence before I was ever raped. It's not that I was shy, it's more that I wasn't sure if I had any value. I wasn't pretty "like the other girls", no amount of nice clothing was ever going to change that. I was "smart" but in the way that only my English teacher seemed to know it, I feel like this is a type, students who were valued by language teachers is a type. I wasn't very good at making friends, something about me was off-putting to most people my age at the time and I seemed to always say *something* I later discovered they found objectionable. I was very unfashionable and I just wore whatever was put in the closet by my mother. I wasn't "cute" either. I also had, for my age, a deeply precocious and unnatural interest in the sexual so developed it was isolating.

I knew that when I grew up I wanted to be a bold and successful woman, but I didn't believe that could really happen, I figured I would be lucky if I could get out of that town. I also knew I wanted to be tied up in chains and locked in dungeons, but I didn't think people actually did that. I was allured by ideas of liberty, empowerment and education but I didn't think I would ever actually attain the kind of emancipation it takes to live your truth. I was also allured by belts, whips and abusive, violent love but I didn't think there was a realm of the universe where that would be considered normal. I knew I wanted to pay my own rent, have a job and make my own choices, but I didn't think it was plausible that I would be afforded that much freedom. I also knew I wanted to pierce my tongue, cover my skin in ink and be a badass bitch, but I didn't think that I, the vaguely smart, seemingly unattractive, friendless freak, could ever attain that confidence. All the feedback I got at home wasn't positive either, it was delivered mostly in the form of abuse and disapproval, and it convinced me that I was... nothing. Just a lifeless body.

A doll.

A meaningless toy.

Ancilla, though, she was something else. I made up stories about her all the time. I thought about the minutiae of what it would be like to be her. I thought about how people would respond to her when she stepped into the street, I got stared down anytime I put on a shirt that exposed my back a little or a skirt that betrayed that I had thighs, but I envisioned that when she stepped out in the streets, people would be intimidated and fearful of her authenticity and magnificence. I wrote her as a badass lawyer some days, coming back to her own home where she lived alone, after a day of fighting for justice and then having casual sex with a man who pulled her hair and left when she told him to go. Other days she was a college principal, in an abusive and insane relationship with a man who beat her every night, and she liked it. I wrote her getting whipped in a coffin and holding a loudspeaker at a protest. I wrote her chained up to a pole inviting dozens of people to touch her naked body. I wrote her a policewoman, a sailor, a judge, a reporter. I wrote her as sexually liberated. I wrote her as a woman who wasn't afraid to embrace her odd and socially-jarring idea of beautiful. I wrote her as depraved and unafraid.

It was the fantasy life of a child in a bad situation who felt invisible, overburdened, powerless and hopeless. I didn't expect to actually attain any of it, that is why I wrote it, because I believed the writing was going to be as close as I ever came to being this woman.

Then I was raped.

I don't know how one caused the other, but being raped unleashed something violently confident and unapologetically sexual in me. I think, retrospectively, the fact that the sexual abuse occured in my own home, was immediately disbelieved and left to continue for a considerable period of time signalled to me a failure of the adults in my life and I decided, as a result of that failure, to take matters into my own hands. I stopped being scared of everything. I started to say what I meant. I started to wear what I liked. I began to do to my body things that I wanted to do. Over time I got pierced, tattooed and fucked by strange men on my terms but that wasn't the heart of it. The heart of it was that I wasn't going to treat my dreams as optional anymore. I wasn't going to leave my fantasies inside a doll on the mantle and play the act of a good Indian girl.

I took the life out of Ancilla and put it inside me.

Two major things changed as a result of all of this. The first was that I became obsessed with education. You know that thing teachers do where they try to get you to grasp the immensity of getting an education and receiving knowledge? Some of them mean it. In a classroom, I know, we are taught to scoff at the substantive emotionality and labour of teaching and respond with bellicose stubbornness to learning and hard work, but some of us don't. Education saved my life. This is the truth. I had a terrible home life, a terrible personal life, I was condemned to remaining in a town that promised to turn me into a lady who lunches and has fashionable babies and I realised the only way out lay in books. Not in the romantic escapism of literature, which by the way, i have always been been so sceptical of that reasoning, what books were you reading that allowed you to escape into happy, magical words? Happy literature? Really? Come on. (Sorry for the smugness, I am, indeed, the worst and it annoys no one more than it does me, I promise). The escape of education is that it showed me that I could learn, enforce my rights, stand on my own feet and have to answer to no one. Financial (and sometimes social) emancipation is crucial to female liberty (and I say that while fully acknowledging that we are not all starting on equal footing to this path). I saw that more clearly than ever. I wasn't going to let a second pass after I turned eighteen before I took complete charge and responsibility for me (and I did just that).

The second thing was that I completely stopped denying my sexuality and gave it everything it wanted. I imagine the immediate reasoning was quite simplistic and a little problematic, the man who raped me reasoned that I was sending him signals by being a "woman before my time" and enticing men, and I was trying so hard not to do that. I was trying so hard to hide everything sexual that was inside me, being ashamed of it, yet by doing nothing, a grown ass man was convinced to rape me, how much worse could it have been if I was just, truly myself? I started to wear my sexuality on me, to the point where it caused discomfort not to me, but to those who would have happily exploited my "innocence" in secret.

It happened slowly but at some point I really started to believe in myself. I believed that I could be the lawyer in that apartment.  I could be the girl who had casual sex for her pleasure. I could be have tattoos all over my back and pierce my clit because that was hot to me. I could be the college principal who wore cotton sarees and an air of dignity. I could be the badass bitch in combat boots, tied up in chains and whipped to shreds by a whip she bought and a person she chose. I didn't feel scared anymore. I was sure, I still am, that I could handle anything that came my way. I didn't feel afraid to be myself anymore. I liked what I liked, I would openly profess it and I would not allow anyone to disrespect me just because I had a sexuality as a woman.

I started to believe I could be Ancilla.

I took myself off the mantle and put myself into my stories instead and each year I became more like Ancilla than I ever believed possible. I stopped being a toy in my own life, when I realised a toy had more liberty than I ever envisioned myself having. The day I stopped living through a doll, was the day I finally became free. This is not the woman I thought I would grow up be, I've come so far from that fearful bedroom where toys and fantasies where my only refuge. Still, somedays, I look in the mirror and I cannot believe, the enormous life behind the crosses that stare back at me.

Could this magnificent creature, really be me?