Innocence

By Mikaela Thrailkill

“I learned that my anger never meant there was something wrong with me; it meant

there was something wrong. Out there. Something I might have the power to change. I stopped

being a quiet peacekeeper and started being a loud peacemaker. My anger was good.”
–Glennon Doyle.

I often think of the relationship between my younger brother and myself to be some

strange symbiotic social experiment. We were born two years, 22 days, and 1 hour apart to the

minute and have been assumed to be twins for our entire lives. My mother would separate us

constantly just to come back and find us together or communicating from our rooms with Barbie

walkie-talkies. We would stay up all night to make up games, build forts, have sleepovers, and

generally exist attached at the hip. We were brought up in the same environment by the same

people and yet are generally opposite each other in every way. I often feel like he leeched all of

the “big” feelings out of me. My brother takes up space. He is loud. He is strong-willed and

passionate, and sure of himself. He handles confrontation with elaborate displays of why he is

right, and when he disagrees, he steps into the cage to make his feelings known. He asks for

what he wants and for what he needs and stays true to the exact person that he is no matter the

setting. He shifts for no one and filters nothing. My mom jokes that I made her a parent, but he

made her earn it. This difference created a dynamic in my childhood in which my brother was

loud and had needs, and I listened and met them. There are many things about my brother that

can be exceedingly difficult and that I wish he would reconsider, but I have always envied his

ability to take up space in our world.

Anger is inherently abrasive. It’s not a presence that’s easy to miss. The things that

occupied the majority of my life, eating disorders and self-harm and drug addiction, and an

unexpected sexual orientation, fed on secrecy. There is no room for the “big” feelings when your

lifestyle requires invisibility. My brother asked for what he needed and raged, and I hid and

stayed quiet. I never really understood anger. I could rationalize any situation enough not to

need it. When I started confronting the sexual abuse of my childhood and studying other

survivors, I started noticing a common thread between them. The survivors that I looked up to

and admired were angry. There’s another Glennon Doyle quote that she often says, “I only

respect two kinds of women right now at this point in history: ones that are angry or ones that

are actively in a coma.” That’s all well and good for social justice, but I still didn’t think I would

get angry. I don’t discuss details of my abuse, but it was not just one straightforward perpetrator.

In the beginning, to separate the issue into simple terms, I would tell myself that a system

abused me. The adults involved didn’t do anything wrong; it’s just the way society is. It was my

fault for engaging. I even wrote this down in an attempt to compartmentalize it. I was abused by

how the world works; I can’t get mad like real survivors because I don’t have anyone to be mad

at.

I don’t think that my healing began until I found my anger. I was not caught up in a

blameless blurred-lines game; I was a child who irresponsible adults and structures harmed.

One night I found myself so mad that I could barely see; I felt as though I was going to hit

something. “I’m mad that we don’t teach sex education properly, and I’m mad that we don’t

protect our kids better,” I wrote to a friend, “I’m mad that I was taught that 13 is an adult and not

to trust myself and I’m mad that I still don’t trust myself and I’m mad that a kid is sexually

abused every 9 minutes and it’s only reported like 34% of the time and out of that 34% only 23%

of those are convicted. I’m mad that I didn’t know better then and that I didn’t know for so long

after and that I likely will never tell anyone anything about it, and it will die with me and the

fucking abuse crisis counselor that told me to journal.”

I think that the survivors that I admire are angry because they are honest. It’s brave to

hold someone accountable for harming you rather than internalizing it as your fault. It’s raw to

recognize the components of challenging situations. There is nothing particularly awe-inspiring

about watching my brother jump up and down and scream over not wanting to unload the

dishwasher. There is something mesmerizing about witnessing him persevere for what he

knows is right. There is a discussion of innocence around these topics. Angry little girls and little

girls for whom sexual violence has been a piece of their story. Anger is not seen as something

that can coexist with purity, a quality that’s referred to as having been stripped from mistreated

children. In my eyes, angry women are absolved of pollution. Women who are angry, are not at

fault.

Mikaela Thrailkill is a student at Georgia State University where she studies Psychology. After completing her degree, she intends to work primarily with survivors of sexual violence helping to provide any necessary care to victims. While in school, she has spent the last several years working in a real estate office and writes in her spare time. She hopes to continue to incorporate her personal life and eventual work in psychology into writing and eventually publishing a book, or several. She lives in Georgia and enjoys reading and spending time with her two siblings. Any inquiries can reach her at mikaelathrailkill@gmail.com. 

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