LATE LAST YEAR, I WENT TO see a young woman named Bonnie Bliss (possibly not her real name) at Stace’s suggestion. Stace had a friend with a story like mine who’d gone to see Bonnie Bliss and it had been helpful.
I’ve learned that sometimes you have to take a breath and dive in. I decided to make an appointment without thinking too much about it.
Bonnie Bliss offers a three-hour one-on-one yoni-mapping session for women. Yoni is another word for vagina and the mapping is what you might imagine it is. The aim of her work is healing, helping women who’ve experienced trauma in this part of their bodies back to themselves.
Bonnie Bliss lives and works from a cottage on a farm outside Mullumbimby. When I arrived at the session, she explained that she was pursuing a Tantric spiritual path, which seems to me, from what she then said about it, a lot like Buddhism.
I don’t know if Bonnie Bliss helps other people, those who haven’t experienced what I have, but she helped me.
Last month, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse was in Brisbane, bringing its light to dark places where people who have done great harm have hidden for a very long time. Although it does me no good, I read the testimonies of children, now grown, who were betrayed by those who had a duty to care for them. I read the responses of the schools and institutions, those who run them even worse in their way than the offenders, for they have more resources. They know about harm. They are able to tell the difference between right and wrong.
After I watch the Royal Commission for a week, I do something I haven’t done for years. I look up my teacher and her husband by name on the internet. I find a funeral notice. My teacher’s husband has died peacefully in his sleep, it says. I am supposed to feel something, I know, but for weeks nothing is there. Nothing at all. I think of going to the cemetery, finding those bricks, burying them, but I realise they are already buried, already gone.
And then I write to the Royal Commission, offer my name, my teacher’s name, her husband’s, offer to tell my story if it will help anyone else. I get a call from a commission officer, whose job it is to check whether my situation fits the commission’s terms of reference.
I was older than many of those who’ve given evidence, I tell him.
Yes, he says.
The school was not to blame here.
All right, he says.
He wants to know did I ever lodge a formal complaint about what happened.
I did not, I say, wondering if he thinks me daft, writing after all this time.
‘Your story is as set out in your letter?’ he asks.
Yes.
‘The next step is for you to meet with a commissioner,’ he says.
It may take up to a year to arrange. They have so many of us to meet with, there’s a backlog.
I’ll wait, I say.