When I finally came out about my years of trauma, that pain was dismissed by people who refused to accept how someone who was traumatized could be in pain and still get shit done. My resilience was used to erase my pain.
Julie Lalonde is an award-winning Ottawa-based advocate for women's rights: a support worker for survivors of sexual assault, an acknowledged expert on women's issues frequently featured in print and television news, and a public educator who travels Canada to lecture on topics such as consent and bystander intervention. She is also the survivor of a decade-long abusive relationship – a teenaged love story that degenerated into threats, assault, and years of stalking by her abuser – and Resilience is Futile is her candid account of all of the influences (good and bad) that made her the strong voice she is today. It always feels somehow inappropriate to give a star rating to someone's memoir – I'm certainly not here to rate someone's life – but I can say that Lalonde's voice and storytelling skills are thoroughly engaging, and if it's not obvious from what I've written so far, I admire and respect what she has accomplished and think that this memoir ought to be widely read.
We were a group of traumatized survivors working long hours with no pay and little validation for our efforts. We were toxic, mean, and petty. But we had no tools to cope with our own trauma, let alone the pain and suffering we took on from the survivors we were supporting. So we turned on each other. The universe was throwing up countless red flags for me to slow down and get help, but I ignored them all. Every day, I bargained. If I help one more person, maybe then I’ll feel better. I never made the connection between the work I was doing and my life with Xavier. After all, it was examining myself through the lens of white privilege that had pushed me to start this work, not my own experience of abuse. And even though I was spending thousands of dollars on tuition to write a thesis on the complexities of resilience, it never occurred to me that my deep awareness of the issue came from my own lived experience. It was just what the data told me. I was just being a good listener.
I don't want to go over the details of Lalonde's relationship with “Xavier” (I assume that's a pseudonym since his name is blacked out in the notes and emails reproduced in this book), but I will note that wherever Lalonde sought help (whether from the Mental Health Department at Carleton University, the police, or the justice system while seeking a peace bond), her outward “resilience” was used as proof against the seriousness of her situation. And as her story takes place just before the Jian Ghomeshi scandal, #MeToo, and Harvey Weinstein, I'm hoping that a young woman in Ottawa today would have better access to support and justice? (Thanks to Lalonde herself, this young woman – or man – would have access to sexual assault support on the Carleton campus.) I was also thoroughly intrigued (and disturbed) by Lalonde's story of her experience trying to teach her bystander intervention content to the cadets at Kingston's Royal Military College – and further intrigued by that day's aftermath (the internet threats of her rape and murder, denials and gaslighting by the academy's officials, the debate brought to Parliament). It is incredible to me that Lalonde has been able to rise above so many seriously challenging situations – all while suffering the debilitating effects of unacknowledged trauma – and has channeled her energy into helping others. She's pretty much my hero now.
Like a true millennial, I took my pain to the internet, launching into a Twitter tirade about the big, fat decade-long secret I no longer had to carry. I wanted people to understand that if this could happen to someone like me, someone with the privilege and platform to take on the Canadian Armed Forces, then you truly have no idea what people are going through unless you ask.
Resilience is Futile is a quick read – less than two hundred pages – and if I had any complaint, it would be that I would have liked more (while acknowledging that Lalonde has no duty to share more than she wants to). I think this is an important book and should be of interest to everyone; I hope to see it nominated during the literary award season so it finds more readers.
