The Delicate Balance between Coping and Feeling
- jlk399
- Aug 5
- 6 min read
Hi friend,
With everything going on in the news lately around the Epstein files, I can’t stop thinking about the victims.
It’s easy to become desensitized to stories of violence and abuse when you hear about them every day, and I’ll admit that over the last decade or so, some previously awake (and hurting) part of me has sort of gone to sleep in response to the endless horrors of Trump’s America and the #metoo movement.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing, more like a useful internal boundary. A little wall of dullness that my psyche has erected between me and the endless parade of stories about girls and women being harassed, abused, raped, trafficked, and disrespected.
I’m still impacted by these stories, and they still fuel my drive to fight for justice.
But as someone who has thousands of my own experiences of feeling like prey in a world full of entitled and violent men, I’m ok with the fact that I needed to build a bit of a blurring barrier between those stories and my tender heart.
**
Sometimes it feels like when I take in scary and painful stories about men victimizing women, it goes through a long hallway covered in sticky fly-paper, and certain details get stuck in that hallway, so that the version of the story arriving in my conscious processing center is a bit less painful.
Interestingly, this hallway seems to be mostly focused on catching and protecting me from putting myself in the shoes of the girls and women being hurt. Apparently, I am far more capable of safely and effectively processing my anger at the men than I am of processing my grief and empathy for the victims.
Lately, for example, as the Epstein files have taken up so much space in the news cycle, I find myself automatically focusing my attention on the disgusting evils of the men involved (and women too, in the case of Ghislaine Maxwell), because I know how to feel and process my rage.
What I don’t know how to do (without completely losing my mind anyway), is to feel and process the reality of what these children who were trafficked and raped actually experienced, and how they must feel now, watching the whole world invalidate, dismiss, discredit, and erase them.
I wonder if other people have similar barriers in their psyches when they take in stories like this, too. I wonder if other people have fly-paper hallways to protect them from the overwhelming truth of what’s happening… and if so, what details their hallways protect them from.
Given that most girls and women were conditioned to believe anger is bad, unacceptable, or dangerous, I could imagine others having the opposite experience of me— easily connecting to their grief and empathy for the victims, perhaps, while struggling to tap into their rage about the perpetrators.
(Of course, maybe other people have the capacity to take in and process the fullness of such atrocities, and I’m just being weird… but I wonder nonetheless.)
Anyway, I’m sharing this with you because recently my psychic hallway messed up and let through something that rocked me to my core.
Like many of you I’m sure, I’ve been reading all the horrifying stories about the trafficking and rape of children ever since the Epstein files came to the forefront, and feeling absolutely appalled at the obvious lies and corruption we’re seeing play out in the public eye as Trump tries to escape accountability for his involvement.
For what it’s worth, I believe the victims. And I believe that Trump has been straight-up telling us who he is for a long time.
He’s admitted to going backstage to inspect the undressed women and girls in his pageants, made countless inappropriate comments about women’s bodies and appearance, and proudly announced that if you’re famous enough you can get away with grabbing women by the pussy. He called Epstein a “terrific guy,” and added “it is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” as if his good friend’s penchant for pedophilia was an adorable rogueish quirk.
All of this is to say that I already knew how despicable Trump is… so I don’t know why it was while reading a quote from a 1999 interview Trump gave to Howard Stern the other day that my flypaper suddenly stopped working.
This is what Trump, who was 53 at the time, said about a conversation he had with his daughter Ivanka, who was 17:
“I have a deal with her. She made me promise, swear to her, that I would never date a girl younger than her. So as she grows older, the field is getting very limited.”
Something about this quote just made my heart drop and my blood run cold, because a 17 year old girl doesn’t ask her dad to make a promise like that unless she had already witnessed things that made it feel necessary.
For a moment, my whole body cold and frozen, I was in the shoes of a girl who—in the absolute best case scenario—saw her dad being inappropriate with girls her age and younger.
I imagined the teenage Ivanka laughing it off when her dad made gross comments about her friend’s developing bodies at home, and then quietly warning them not to be in a room alone with him. I imagined what she might have seen (or experienced herself), and what these experiences would have taught her about men, women, love, and sex.
Suddenly I was remembering all the disgusting things Trump has said about his own daughter’s body and appearance, and imagining how it must feel to know that the whole world knows your dad views you as a desirable sexual object.
In case you’re not familiar with the disturbing way Trump talks about his daughter, here’s a few lowlights:
“She does have a very nice figure… I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I would be dating her.” (The View, 2006)
“Yeah, she’s really something, and what a beauty, that one… If I weren’t happily married and, you know, her father…” (Rolling Stone, 2015)
When asked what Ivanka and Donald have in common in a 2013 interview on the Wendy Williams show, Ivanka first answered “real estate,” before Trump said “Well, I was going to say sex… but I can’t relate that to her.”
And in two different interviews with Howard Stern, he said “she’s 6 feet tall, she’s got the best body” (2003), and when Stern asked him if he could say Ivanka was a “piece of ass,” Trump approvingly said “yeah.” (2004).
Anyway, for whatever reason at that moment, my heart just… broke. It was like my protective psychic wall was temporarily out of order, and suddenly everything that I normally keep at a nice safe distance from my heart came rushing in.
I felt it all. All the harm he’s caused to women, both directly and indirectly. All the trauma of his victims, who he’s worked so hard to discredit and erase. All the confusion and shame of the girls and women he’s groomed and gaslit. All the discomfort of the women in this circle who’ve learned to laugh off or dismiss his inappropriate behavior in order to avoid his ire. All the pain and fear he’s created for girls and women everywhere.
Because honestly it’s not really the existence of a man like this that makes us feel afraid. It’s the fact that he’s getting away with it.
It’s the way he’s been telling us who he is for decades, and people laughed it off and called him charming. It’s the way he feels safe saying such vile things, because he correctly believes that his position of power will protect him. It’s the way half the country heard about his crimes and said “that’s not a dealbreaker for me.”
If someone walks up to you in a crowd and punches you in the face for no reason, that’s scary and painful.
But the real trauma happens when you realize everyone in the crowd saw this happen, and didn’t do anything. That they turned away and pretended they didn’t see anything. That they shrugged or laughed it off. That they looked uncomfortable but let him stay… showing that they didn’t exactly approve of his actions, but they didn’t see it as a dealbreaker either.
It is this—the realization that nobody was willing to step in, or stand up for you—that will haunt you for the rest of your life. It’s this that will permanently damage your faith in humanity, rupture your sense of safety in the world, and injure your belief in justice and goodness. It’s this trauma that we’re all experiencing right now, and it’s this pain that briefly overtook me.
I’m happy to report that I had a good cry about it, and that despite the constant onslaught of horrifying news stories, I am still, in fact, capable of letting my whole heart break.
Because while I believe my psychic fly-paper hallway serves a necessary and important purpose in such overwhelming times—it allows me to stay informed without shutting down or giving up—I never want to actually lose touch with my empathy, my grief, or my ability to let my heart break.
We must find ways to cope right now, and I have nothing but compassion for how any individual accomplishes that.
But they don’t get to strip us of our humanity.
Big hug,
Jessi
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