The Adam and Eve Manifesto

I have always maintained that gossip is healthy and necessary. It performs important tasks. Yet gossip is most often unfairly maligned as… what? Catty? Vicious? Manipulative? All women’s work.

Gossip serves us in two realms. The first is the personal/psychological realm. When used correctly, gossip between friends is an opportunity to process feeling. Yes, sometimes, that processing isn’t quite achieved, but that’s a problem with the teller rather than the act itself. The second realm is political. Why don’t men want us to gossip? Because we might tell each other what they’ve done.

My nervous system has ignited my body as I write this. Chest shivering, skin tingling. I am frightened. I want to impart some gossip.

Two years ago, I raised the alarm on a man called Adam in a group chat with my wider friendship network. He was organising events that lapped at my life: my friends buying tickets, being booked as performers, inviting him to parties. I saw him on the edge of dancefloors and tried to smile and surrender.

But he frightened me.

I tried to raise the alarm, but he was too popular, too interesting, too central to the gigs and the parties everyone wanted to be at. What he’d done to me was suddenly just too long ago, his reputation mattered too much, the forum I chose to share in was inappropriate. There were two sides to the story. Benefit of the doubt. Everyone deserves to be heard. Maybe a misunderstanding.

My community gently packed my experience away in a box, with kind smiles and reassurances. Like it was important but not that important. I understood. Acting on the story required more energy than not.

It took a few years, but the many stories about Adam have suddenly set themselves like trip wires ahead of him. It’s not just me. He’s outed himself. Other women are speaking up as he discredits their stories and claims that we’re the abusers. He characterises us as traumatised narcissists, too identified with the victim archetype.

Below, if you’ll bear with me, I’ll set up my own wire. An excerpt from my memoir (called Dear Boy, out soon. Ish). I wrote this quietly, no intention to be read, before I had any mind to add my voice to a cacophony…

Dear Boy.

He was Adam. A long time ago. When I was twenty-one, and he was thirty-two.

He was Adam and we had a different energy about us to me and John. They were friends, two sides to one coin, both much older than me. And I was so eager to be lifted by them, off the bottom rung of the ladder.

John required me to be pure and spiritual and gentle. Adam, with blue eyes, blonde hair and pointed face, with all his manic, spikey energy, was willing to go deep toward the shadow (as he called it).

There was a sexual tension. Adam came to a little party at my place one night, and we kept grabbing each other into corners to lock our faces and grasp at each other’s bodies.

None of this bothered John because, of course, he didn’t want me like that. He was very clear about it. Despite all the co-travelling and co-sleeping and co-financing. Occasional fucking. I tried to use Adam to make him jealous, but it didn’t work. John was like a stern father, twelve years older than me, too elevated to be sexual, all the while teasing at the hem of my little skirt with his fingers.

We all went to a particular lightworkers gathering out at Michelago. Heading towards Spring. Dew on the grass. Mist across the surrounding mountains. And a double rainbow as we were heading in that made everyone froth about the synchronicity and the universe and all that bullshit.

On the second night, we sat through a sound healing in an old grain silo. Around a large central fire. A woman with no chin and too many floaty pieces of fabric swinging around her body walking around us in a circle tapping a variety of percussive instruments she was definitely too white to be using. And everyone breathing and back straight and eyes closed.

In the aftermath, Adam and John were both there when no one else was. Just the three of us in the yawning blackness of the old grain silo, illuminated only at its heart by the dying central fire. John and Adam. And I was very small.

Something happened. I was to be fixed. I was so full of demons, you see.

While it happened, Adam was somehow circling us on a bike, riding around the outer ring of the old grain silo. I remember seeing him flash past my vision from where I was, crumpled on the floor. On the dirt.

And John had me cradled on his lap. He thumped my chest occasionally. Blew on my face. He said, ‘I’m your mother now, I’m your father now.’

And I sobbed and sobbed, howling, keening, making rivers.

How did we even get there? From the sound healing to this… exorcism. To the sudden horror movie of fire, dirt, Adam riding bike, chanting over my body, thumpings to my chest…

John said he was removing attached entities from my aura. He was picking his hands through the air around my face, like he was peeling webs off architecture that I couldn’t see.

Like I was surrounded by an infrastructure only he understood.

John held me and talked to me and breathed on my skin. And I was seized, couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t speak. Only cry. Skin coating in dust. The firelight flickering against me, and the roof of the silo lost far above in blackness.

So powerful.

And then it was over. I finally stopped crying. And John dusted his hands with a job well done, told me that I’d likely find my mental health improving over the next few days, and my trauma feeling less heavy. And then he took himself off to his tent.

I didn’t want him to do that. I wanted him to hold me.

But there was another ready for that.

Adam walked me to my own tent, talking about how intense and powerful it all was. How magical. How much faith he had in it. He mused that I must be feeling raw. I said I was. He offered to get in with me. For comfort, you see.

I agreed. Of course.

And in the confines of the tent, against the darkness and the nylon walls, the sound of the zip, and clothes moving against the fabric, he started to kiss me. And yes, I clung to him.

His hands went further into my clothes.

And he remarked that the thing he loved about me was that I was so tense and strong, but then there would always be a moment when, through touch, I’d give way and go wild. Like an animal, he told me. A hungry animal.

How did he know?

We fucked. Quick and silent. One position (missionary).

When he was done (he came), he said he needed to get to sleep to deal with the early morning workshops for the gathering.

The sound of the zip, the mad rustle against the tent walls. Retreating footsteps.

And alone in the dark, surrounded by fresh air and a faint, musty smell. Between my legs a little sore and sticky.

Looking back on that night I feel appalled by the things I consented to be done to my body and mind.

But, a softer lens. I think it’s clear that I really wanted to be fixed. I wanted to believe they were really doing it.

Adam and I remained friends for a long time. Somehow. While John and I continued the trailing madness I’d become to him. Moved in together. Fucked and fought. Moved down the coast. Unfolding horrors every day as I became more isolated, more feral, more ugly.

The occasional, strange and halting attention I got from Adam was like water in a drought and the undercurrent of that flirtation fed our friendship for the next few years.

But I was a walking open wound. An exposed nerve. I was forever in conflict and getting intensely offended by the words of others. Often around issues of social justice, so I felt the burning torch of resentment I carried was vindicated. Self-righteous.

My friendship with Adam deteriorated. He was himself and I was increasingly awful. Caustic and obnoxious. We tried to go on one date after acknowledging the simmering feelings between us. John didn’t mind. John owned me enough that my dalliances with men he thought beneath him were of no consequence.

But the date was derailed by Adam’s need to play devil’s advocate for everything, insisting on opinions about women and what wanted that he would brook no objection to. It was derailed by my need to turn every feeling or situation into an issue of gendered oppression that could then trigger me into a state of intense victimisation. The night dragged on for too long, distressing to both of us as we each fought for our position. It felt unsafe. It felt rough, like sandpaper. We fought and scratched and debated, adrenalized and angry.

It was awful. Choosing to walk away after that was easy.

But it was also part of a pattern for me… I was trying to hold the self-righteousness of feminism around me like a shield. Which didn’t work. Especially because I’d placed myself in a battlefield. Feminism was another thing I could use to fight, without ever really acknowledging my own wounds. I could fight for all women, never myself. I could fight the men in my family, I could fight in restaurants, I could fight on long drives, I could fight at spiritual retreats. Just not in my own heart.

I fought because fighting made me feel powerful when I had absolutely no power. It was an illusion. Real power would have been to pull myself apart from all of them. Live a soft life.

That end was coming by this time.

After the night of the failed date, Adam and I didn’t speak for months and months. But he heard about the breakup, how John and I had exploded apart, and he reached out to ask what had happened. Or I might have reached out to him. I can’t remember. We got on the phone, and we had a long conversation. I’ll be honest, I felt giddy with the resurrection of our friendship, and I wanted him to choose me. I wanted him to condemn John what all the stinging ways he’d hurt and broken me.

Adam had always been intensely interested in my spiritual wellness. His interest came with a burden of righteous judgement. We were positioned always as me wounded crazy woman and him wise teacher. Guiding. He didn’t like conversations to be about him. Though, of course, I still pushed them. Ever the obstinate little bitch.

During our phone call, Adam was very kind and seemed to take everything so seriously. I unlocked the chamber in which I had been keeping the truth of what had happened with John over the years. The threats, the humiliations, all those foul words, and the little incidents of physical violence. The sexual violations. I hadn’t shared these things before because I had never wanted anyone to suggest that I should end the relationship. It wasn’t because I was trying to protect myself from punishment. I didn’t want to be told the truth.

Adam heard it all and responded in a soothing tone. He told me I was safe and that he wanted to understand. Kept asking questions, gently pushing at me to open further, expose more. And I lapped it up.

I often think, when I reflect on this time, of something I once heard a psychologist say: that the foremost effect of trauma on interpersonal relationships, is the compulsion to make the difficult person love you. The logic is that if you grew up with violent or neglectful parents, you lived out your childhood locked in a pattern of love seeking. If I behave in the right way, say the right things, fight back, whatever, I’ll get the love. It will work.

So, in your adult relationships, the love you want most is not from the people giving it to you for free.

It didn’t matter to me that my mum, my dad, Nina, Desi, Ebony, and a few other scattered friends believed my story. It didn’t matter that these people affirmed the full extent of my suffering.

No, I wanted the difficult ones. I wanted the ones who’d already made up their minds about me. I wanted the people who thought I was crazy to realise I was both crazy and right. I wanted Adam.

There was a savage joy through that phone call. The very thing that I had wanted for years was appearing before me. The game was working. The difficult one was changing his mind.

But, when we got to the end of that phone call, after he’d told me that he was so glad we were friends again and he looked forward to hanging out with me, reconnecting… I felt odd. I felt like I’d gone too far somehow.

I hadn’t lied. I never lied about what had happened. I didn’t even exaggerate. For the first time in my life, I didn’t really feel like I needed to because the truth was so extensively awful.

I was more like a mad child, gushing out the story, putting weight on and re-emphasising many times over, each fact that felt like it proved the point: I’d been hurt. I pushed the narrative because I was scared, of course. Scared that someone might say it wasn’t really abuse because John hadn’t properly bashed me. Because I chose to stay with him. Because I fought so fiercely all the time.

I felt uncomfortable after our phone call. Like I was sticky with honey. Vulnerability that had poured out and left an uncomfortable gap. A tooth lost leaving an exposed gum.

I had a shower to wash off the nervous sweat that had accumulated on my body throughout the call, ruminating on it, thinking about how I could maybe undo it a little bit. Maybe I could message him an apology. Maybe say that I didn’t want him to have to choose between John and I. They’d been friends long before I came along after all. Like try to let him off the hook a bit.

When I got out of the shower, Adam had messaged me.

And it was… vile. The vicious cruelty of it has stuck with me through the intervening decade. I don’t have the message anymore, but I remember how it made me feel. Targeted. Like, I hadn’t noticed that little glowing dot over my heart, and this was the bullet.

Through this message I was painted as deluded, a person no one ever took seriously or believed. Walking toxicity. Disgusting. A parasite.

He told me to stay the fuck out of his life. Then blocked me so I couldn’t respond.

It was like a car accident. I didn’t understand the impact. All the air went out of my body; I was shuddering through the injustice of it and the belief that it was all true. That I deserved it. That I was hideous and alone.

Poisoned by the poisoned well again.

John called Adam to confront him when I told him what had been done. Despite his own abuse of me, John would always leap at any opportunity to be the hero. He reported afterwards, with disgust, that Adam had indicated the action was always intended. Niceness made to ply me for information. Trying to get me to admit something. To lay out all the false allegations I was about to level at John.

John told me that Adam had said I had needed, spiritually, to be brought to desperation and destruction, as if I was not already there. That I had needed to be annihilated in order to heal.

Maybe it worked. I am certainly better now at spotting men like him on the edge of dancefloors.

Adam and I didn’t speak again until a few years later. As part of a 12 Step process, I reached out to him to make an amends. It was warranted; I had been mad throughout our entire friendship. I had been like a hornet. Stinging and stinging.

Just because he had done the worst thing, didn’t mean that I couldn’t take responsibility for my side of the street.

The thing about 12 Step amends processes… You’re not supposed to talk about how the other person has harmed you. It’s a space just for you to admit to your own fuck ups. It’s liberating. Knowing that after that… The things people could think about you would never measure up to the courage and honesty of your own amends. It doesn’t fix things, doesn’t fix all the hurt, but it helps. Shame weighs less.

Adam and I had a single phone call. He was kind once again, very understanding. At the end, he thanked me and said he was glad that I was healing myself. He said that he felt our karma was finally cleared. He didn’t say sorry. I didn’t ask him to.

There are many threads that sweep through all this, I know. Pieces tied to other pieces. The patterns of my maladaptation are, of course, plain when we’re talking from behind my own experience.

The one story I know for sure is the one where I smelt burning and went towards it.

But something else peeks through.

Have you noticed the way the men seemed to feel the need to wreck us before they could walk away from us?

There have been many friendships ended with women over the course of my life. And when I say ‘ended’, I mean very explicitly that the friendship would be cleared and done. That there would be a mutual understanding of, at best, an absence of shared values, or, at worst, outright animosity.

But the thing is, a friendship with a woman ending was always largely peaceful (even if it was still painful or spikey). We’d step back, together. Stop making calls, stop sending messages, stop trying to talk things through. Just back quietly away. One might argue that there’s a discomfort in that; like, wouldn’t it be better to talk it out? Sometimes we’re too angry for that. Sometimes we’ve simply already talked enough.

But with the man, there seems to be a repeated pattern. Like Adam who had to destroy me in order to heal me. Or Julien, who had to come to my door and eviscerate me, calling me fat and a whore before he could block my number. Or John, who has never been able to leave a final word that was just mine.

Or Blake when we were 16, about 6 months after we’d broken up, I reached out to him on messenger, and we ended up video chatting. And he got flirty and he asked me to expose my breasts. I did. And the next day he told me he never wanted to speak to me again. That he’d wanted to humiliate me, and now that was done, he was ready to move on.

Whereas Sara, though she hated me, was perfectly happy to simply melt off into the sunset and never speak to me again.

Like, I know that the common denominator here must be me. But is it possible that it’s also… men? What came first? Is there something in the male psyche that is geared toward punishment? As in, the force of your feeling justifies the harm of another?

Or is it something in me that is violable?

I think of that quote by Pablo Picasso, who was famously a fuck-wit: ‘Every time I change wives, I should burn the last one. That way I'd be rid of them. They wouldn't be around to complicate my existence. Maybe, that would bring back my youth, too. You kill the woman and you wipe out the past she represents.’

I can speak philosophically here to hide the pain of it. In a way, to be treated this way, as if you are not of value, feels like an existential threat. Like I am walking around trying to be alive, feeding myself and bathing myself and breathing and thinking. Yet… I am also not just deserving of harm, but I actively create the impulse in others.

To begin with, he loves me, he thinks I’m so smart and wise and worldly. My victim story makes me a wounded princess to him. Strong and delicate. Needing to be saved and loved.

And then, like I peel away layers of skin to reveal scales, I am uncovered. I am not royal, I am demonic. I am not just an animal to be used for sustenance, I am actively evil, like a paedophile, like a diseased thing, like a mosquito. I am an instrument of harm, that seeks, even intends to cause harm and must therefore be stopped. Punished. Subdued. But also, not discarded, not at first. He tries to force me into supplication before he throws me away. I am only discarded when it doesn’t work.

He felt so strongly, so I deserved to be hurt.

Is that it? Did I get it right?