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CW: sexual abuse

This is the first time I’ve ever used a content warning in my writing anywhere. As readers of my first book, Excavation, will know, there was no content warning. The book’s readers could have come across the book any number of ways: someone told them about it; they read about it somewhere; they looked up a keyword in the library and the book presented itself. A reader would be immediately thrust into the world of this book, without content warning, merely from reading the book’s current description:

A darkly vibrant and daring memoir, Wendy C. Ortiz’s Excavation challenged the standard telling of abuse narratives when first published in 2014; over a decade later, it remains deeply prescient. Set in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley in the late 1980s, the narrative follows the spiraling entanglement between Wendy and her eighth-grade English teacher as she becomes both victim to and participant in a simultaneously predatorial and impassioned relationship. Baited by initial praise and a false sense of control, Wendy tumbles into a dangerous dynamic that spans the duration of her teens. Artfully constructed from her own journals and decades of personal excavation, the story of this secret relationship has imprinted on Wendy and readers alike. A stunningly honest look at memory, agency, and power, Excavation will claim your whole heart.  

I offer the description, whether you know about the book or not, to describe, simply, that one possibly reads, then knowingly gets in, puts on the seatbelt (or not) and goes with the forward motion of the book and its world. Or they don’t. Readers of the book make a choice, just as I’ve made the choice countless times when I’ve come across art that I know will disturb something in me, remind me of something from my own past, stir embers I hadn’t realized were there.

The everyday news offers no such content warnings. And I scroll.

I scroll through, I listen, and in the past few weeks, I’ve had to be unsettled over and over again—yes, by the genocide in Gaza, and yes, by so much else—ICE, the gutting of resources in service to fascism, yes, all of it—but another unsettling—more, there can always be more, as it turns out—has been occurring.

It may have been back in 2018 or earlier when I told M. about some of the backstories that I lived during the time of Excavation. Stories that were not in the book.

One backstory was the coach at the same school who had the phone number of my friend, just as my teacher had mine. Another backstory was the friend of my teacher, someone who is mentioned in Excavation in a couple of scenes. He comes up most prominently in a scene of dialogue in which “Jeff,” my teacher, is warning me against hitchhiking while tying me to a chair with pantyhose. This friend of his was someone who also had sex with me. There is the backstory of the roommate who my teacher liked suggesting I might fuck sometime, and there is the backstory of another of his friends who took me on a date and then ultimately did not do what his friends had done with me.

Around the first time I listened to anything about Jeffrey Epstein, hearing the word “trafficked” in relation to his serial sexual abuse of teenage girls, I thought back to that period of time and these men, who I thought of as “backstories” to the “main story,” of "Jeff, my teacher, who had been the main perpetrator. These other men (not to be confused with various other men unaffiliated with Jeff, who did harm to teenage me) took on a different hue. They seemed to physically move forward in the narrative I had already written of what had happened, until they merged with the central perpetrator. After all, I had met these men through my teacher. The sex I had or didn’t have, the “dates” I had or didn’t have with them, were relayed to Jeff, either through me or them.

Then I buried that information, that concern for my past self, for a while. Only for it to be unearthed in the most hideous of timelines, 2025.

Of course there have been numerous times when my old traumas get unearthed. There was the time when I was attending a Zoom orientation for my kid’s middle school and the introduction of the male teachers suddenly found me gasping and sobbing. My therapist had reminded me once several years ago that trauma like the kind I had endured can be triggered, exhumed, when the survivor’s own child becomes the age the survivor was when the abuse occurred.

My kid is fourteen. I was thirteen when my teacher and I started talking on the phone, but the abuse had ramped up significantly by the time I was fourteen.

If my body wasn’t already struggling now—aging, perimenopause, hormone therapy, the constant threat of abductions by fascists —maybe I wouldn’t have suffered as much as I have this round of extreme consciousness? Having to hear anything and everything that can be said, or joked about Epstein over and over again, throughout social media (of which I use less than many), tv, radio, has been an exercise in ongoing compartmentalization. Until I get to a point of exhaustion, a point in which an ordinary occurrence can rattle me and leave me anxious and crying. I told M. about the reaction I had, my body had, to one such ordinary occurrence this week, and she reminded me of all the things I know are true, and things that would help me come back from this place where I’d cocooned myself into my house without really thinking about it.

The problem was, that in the avalanche of posts, of news, of “news,” the victims of Epstein, Trump, etc. ad nauseam, were invisible, or once in a while, a photo or a story would emerge, but one that mainly added to the salaciousness the media and the public seem to agree they want in the (re)tellings of the story. The word “trafficked” bobbed all around. I thought of the past victims and survivors of these men, that surely go beyond what is known because I’m positive there are women who for whatever reason could not or would not come forward, and I thought of all of us, the survivors of sexual abuse, living through this news cycle.

Last week I’d texted M. that I had been thinking about that word “trafficked” again, and wondering (again) if it applied to me. I couldn’t remember how much I had told her in the past. There’s a blur when it comes to remembering how much I told any one person because I often feel like telling ALL of it to ONE person is putting a tremendous burden on them. I have also thought that I talked this all out in therapy, many times, long ago, and yet. The wounds are still here, and their insidious noise when they are opened echo all around me.

If you were to post something, anything, on social media about Epstein, a dead serial sexual abuser, would you also post something about any one of his victims? If you are caught up in social media and news and feeling panicked or numb, would you call or text someone who cares about you?

If you’ve read this far, you must have made the decision to sit with the subject as listed in my content warning above, and I recognize that as potentially challenging, even re-traumatizing. I see you. And I ask that if there are things you knew that ground you, sustain you, that you partake of those things, urgently. For me, yesterday, it was lying in my zero-gravity chair in my backyard, with my dog on my lap, thinking about and feeling through how I would metabolize my own distressed nervous system.

Every time I have to read the name Epstein, or Trump for that matter, besides thinking things I would never write on the internet for my own safety, I think of the girls. I think of the girls who became women, some of whose lives were tragically cut short. I think also of the men who used their depraved mouths to say my name, who talked about me amongst themselves, and I wonder where they are, who else they likely harmed, and how much I wish them things that I, once again, won’t write on the internet.

A butterfly flew by, taking a zigzag path across our yard. I jokingly tried singing Heart’s “Dog and Butterfly,” a song I find a little cheesy, and I sang leaning into that cheese. My yard has been a bit thrashed lately, with an exterior paint job happening to my house, but yesterday I needed the yard in whatever state it was. How wild that I had cocooned myself so deeply into my house after New York, amid all the bad news, that I had forgotten how much simply being outside has the capacity to heal me. To heal, and sustain me, and move me toward the next moment and the next, where I eventually land in those spaces where hope lives.

Written while listening to Ptah, The El Daoud, Journey in Satchinananda, Universal Consciousness, The Sun, and Ohnedaruth, all by Alice Coltrane.