Ready to Comply

In Russian: Gotov podchinit’sya.

My skin crawls every time I hear Sebastian Stan, costumed onscreen as the Winter Soldier from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, utter those lines.

The Winter Soldier is Captain America’s nemesis in the second movie bearing Cap’s name. 

He is a masked assassin who appears out of nowhere and leaves a trail of bodies behind him. We later discover that this terrifying figure is actually a brainwashed victim himself. His original identity was Bucky Barnes, Cap’s best friend from childhood.

Several times throughout this and other Marvel movies we are shown scenes of Bucky being brainwashed, using a series of specific trigger words, resulting in him shutting down completely and uttering the above phrase — ready to comply — in Russian, then waiting blankly for orders… even orders to kill his best friend. It is clear that his brainwashing is complete and irresistible, but we, the audience, know that the original Bucky was a plucky kid and a formidable soldier… the trauma that it took to break him must have been immense. We never see onscreen how he was broken. We are left to imagine the process by which a boy from Brooklyn was molded into a brutal assassin with no will of his own, one who would murder his own brother.

When I hear the Winter Soldier say those words, I am devastated every time.

I am devastated because I can’t sit through it without the full body memory of being forced to make the choice to comply.

I was six years old.

“If you don’t stay quiet and let me do it to you, then I’m going to do it to her instead.”

That is how you convince a precocious six-year-old girl to lie down on her bed and let you torture her, if for some bizarre reason that’s what you want to do.

Of course the reasoning doesn’t really hold up, does it? And of course I can see that now, sitting here, clear-headed. If I hadn’t let him do it to me, if I’d gone straight to some safe adults, as they say, and talked about the terrible things that he’d threatened and tried to do, they would have stopped him from going on to do it to the person who I loved and wanted to protect, right?

But I was six. I was a pretty smart little kid — or so my mama reports, and not always appreciatively — but I was under a lot of stress that day.

So you see, I complied. And to be honest with you, sometimes the hard thing to live with isn’t that I know what it’s like to have been tortured when I was six years old. Sometimes the hard thing to live with is that I know what it’s like to have made the decision to lie down and be tortured when I was six years old.

To have complied. Like Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier.

Sometimes I think that’s the part that really changed me forever. I guess I’ll never know, since I’ll never meet the person I’d have been if I hadn’t been tortured that day, and on a number of horrific occasions following it, until safe adults figured out what was happening and put an end to it.

That’s a lie. I’ve written a lie right there. That’s what I wish had happened.

Safe adults did put an end to it within the year. That part, at least, is true.

But I never told them what was happening, and they never figured it out. They figured out that something was wrong, and they decided to no longer let that terrible young man into my life. But sitting here today, they still don’t know about the torture. And I still think it’s probably best this way.

Here are some things that I own or enjoy that bring me great comfort:

The Winter Soldier Funko-Pop. The one from when he’s all evil and brain-washed and muzzled, importantly, not the one from after he had his mind back. I might be okay with also getting the other, unmuzzled ones later, to add to the collection, but that’s not the one I most wanted.

A Winter Soldier hoodie, with Bucky’s metal arm on the sleeve. (He has a cybernetic metal arm. It’s very cool.)

A Winter Soldier Christmas sweater, with Bucky’s metal arm on the sleeve. The sweater is very soft.

A Winter Soldier muzzle.

Winter Soldier screen savers on my desktop computer and iPad — my iPhone is a pic of my kids.

I would very much like to get a Gerber Yari II Tanto, which is one of the two kinds of knives that the Soldier carries. Money’s a little tight right now, so that hasn’t happened yet. 

However, I do have a beautiful kabar — that’s another kind of knife, one that a lot of military types like — that my husband got me for my birthday a few years ago, which is one of my most highly prized knives and is the descendent of the trench knife that WWII soldiers like Bucky used called a M3. I’m working on learning to flip it around in the kind of fancy, beautiful knife flips that he uses when he fights, but if you try to learn those with live steel, you’re gonna cut your fingers off, obviously. So I got myself a perfect replica of my kabar in heavy rubber, and it happened to come with a second rubber knife that is very similar to the WS’s other dagger, which is a Gerber Mark II.

Obviously, the Winter Soldier and I share an obsession with knives. Many survivors of trauma develop a preoccupation with personal safety and, accordingly, with weaponry.

Obviously, at this point I have also now developed an obsession with this character, right?

I mean, when your ten-year-old son judges you for being obsessed with something, and that something is a comic book character, you’ve got to realize that you’re not quite like the other moms in the pick up line in front of the school. (Well, I’m like some of them. Fortunately I live in a pretty eccentric town.)

I mean, the comic book character obsession thing isn’t too weird. There are plenty of forty-year-old parents there in Star Wars and Marvel t-shirts, is all I’m saying. (I have an incredible Rey/Rebel t-shirt that gets me many friendly looks from other moms.)

My knife obsession is pretty weird, though. Even my youngest kid recognizes that. We started them camping young, so we started teaching them knife safety young. Knives-are-tools-not-toys, all of my kids regularly recite, just like they recite our other family mantras, curse-the-day-you-don’t-learn-something-new and the-hardest-part-of-any-adventure-is-getting-on-the-road. (This last one has a jaunty song that goes with it. Actually. It’s tremendously helpful.)

Knives are tools, not toys.

Accordingly, the kabar lives in my bedside table. My bowie hunting knife, by my crafting and reading chair. My beloved Spyderco Delica pocketknife, when it comes out of my pocket every night, goes onto my desktop, which is also where my childhood switchblade lives —it’s fixed and legal now, doing duty these days as a letter opener.

One evening my little one (what, she’s totally little, it’s not like she comes up to my chin now, shut up) came into my room after I’d had a stressful day at work and saw me playing with my kabar while I was watching a movie. All my life, during the periods when my childhood trauma has been on my mind, I’ve soothed myself by handling my knives a lot

My little girl squinted at me. “Knives are tools, not toys, Mama,” she reminded me. Kids do love it when they catch one of their parents breaking one of their own rules.

“You’re right, sweetie,” I agreed, putting away the kabar and getting out one of the rubber dummies. “Knives are tools, not toys.”

Fanfiction has gotten maybe like a smidgeon of respect now. Go ahead, laugh, it’s okay. I’m secure. I’m forty-four years old, a serious professional with a lovely career who has even had the honor of speaking (on a panel!) at fancy institutions like UC Berkeley, and I’ve raised three excellent children. And fanfiction is one of the things that has kept me sane through all of that.

There’s a trunk at the foot of my bed, and I’m pretty sure that somewhere in that trunk are about twenty barely-legible pages of dot-matrix printing on tractor-feed paper, containing an agonizingly juvenile story about Star Trek: The Next Generation characters in a world where everyone has personal dragons a la Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern fantasy series. I must have written it in the late 80s. I’d never heard of fanfiction — I just had access to my parent’s new computer after their business was closed for the night, and I wanted to write down the sorts of things I thought about in my head all the time.

I stopped doing that a handful of years later when I discovered sex, which kept me occupied pretty well for well over a decade. But by the time I made it to my mid-twenties in the early aughts in pervy San Francisco, a little phenomenon called Harry Potter had begun happening, and all the queer girls I knew were jacking off over the idea of Severus Snape slapping the boy wizard around. 

The mainstream media was even starting to write articles about it by then. At least, that was how I found out that sometimes other people cared about fictional characters the way that I do — via an article in the SF Bay Chronicle about Harry Potter fanfiction.

For me, as a person on the autism spectrum, there just isn’t the same distinction between fantasy and reality that there is for the rest of you — what we autistics call the neurotypical crowd. To me, people are people, and whether they’re real or imaginary is kind of incidental, and I dunno, I kind of feel like it’s rude to be judgmental about it, the way it’s rude to be judgmental about someone’s sex or weight or skin color. Yes, I know that’s weird. I’m just sayin’ that’s how it feels to me.

I really know that’s weird. Technically, it might be a tiny bit psychotic.

Just a tiny bit though. I say only a little bit psychotic because I can always keep track of who’s fictional and who’s not, and I always remember that the difference is important to neurotypical people.

I’m so extraordinarily grateful for all the fictional people in my world. You know, this is a strange thing to write, but sometimes it’s just kind of… lonely being someone who’s been tortured. There’s really no one to talk to about it.

Or no one to not talk to about it, as Bucky and I like to joke sometimes, as people who aren’t always that chatty.

For some reason, a lot of people seem to like to write about Bucky Barnes in recovery, trying to process his trauma as the Winter Soldier.

His time being brain-washed. Tortured. Being forced to comply.

I have spent entire months of my life compulsively reading this fanfiction about the Winter Soldier. You know I have.

How did the evil Nazi organization break Bucky Barnes? In the world of the MCU, poor Bucky was under HYDRA’s mind control for seventy years. Man, that’s so much worse than the six or ten times — I dunno, my memory is fuzzy — that that bastard had me lie down and take what he did to me. Bucky has really bad scars.

I have scars.

Deep scars.

I’m not being metaphorical.

There aren’t many people who can take that kind of thing in stride. Did you know that? There just aren’t that many people who can hear about how you were tortured when you were six, who can see the scars when you say, look, I need to show you these because it’s driving me nuts waiting to see if you’re going to notice them on your own when we’re having sex, and take it in stride.

I know that.

I can’t blame the people around me. Most of the time I haven’t really known how to talk about it. Did I mention the autism spectrum thing? The spectrum part means that if you know me from ‘around’ — if you worked with me, if you’re a casual friend — you probably think I’m pretty normal. Maybe even charmingly eccentric. A lot of people actually really like a woman who rides a motorcycle.

If you’ve ever lived with me, you know better.

I’m easily overwhelmed by my environment, I need a LOT of time alone, I live in a fantasy world in my head about eighty percent of the time, and my impressive communication skills all abandon me in the blink of an eye when I’m on the fritz emotionally. These things have gotten better in some ways with age, worse in other ways, and are definitely improving since I finally realized that they are autism and not simply me being the biggest bitch in the world.

But the topic of, you know, those times I was tortured as a kid has been sort of an emotional one for me, and so I haven’t really been that great at talking about it. Funnily no one seems to know what to say.

Bucky often has that problem. In a lot of the fanfiction that people write about his recovery, he has an ambivalent relationship to speech. As the Winter Soldier, he was muzzled by HYDRA. Once the good guys take HYDRA down and the Winter Soldier is liberated (by Captain America, through the power of friendship!) all of his old and new friends assume that Bucky is relieved to be unmuzzled and free to talk, but sometimes he isn’t. As a slightly autistic person who occasionally feels ambivalent about my so-called powers of speech, I really understand a version of Bucky who sometimes longs for the clear-cut reassurance of his muzzle back.

I bought mine as part of a Halloween costume.

Really, that was a cover. Mine is like my security blanket. A grown-ass, purportedly professional woman can’t wear a comic book character’s mask around town, obviously, so I usually carry it folded up in my pocket, though you can bet your sweet ass that I adapted mine with an appropriate filter for COVID and I sure as shit wear it anywhere I can get away with it.

Some HYDRA Trash Party fanfiction (that’s the tag for the genre of recovery fic that we’re discussing here) posits that that Winter Soldier was consistently de-gendered, referred to as ‘it’ during the decades of Bucky’s captivity and brain-washing. After all the Soldier was a weapon, and weapons don’t have a gender. Many authors presume that Bucky would have hated this, would be glad to have his gender back once he was free, but others wonder if Bucky might have become accustomed to his — to its new gender, might miss the way it was referred to during those years?

Like many on the autism spectrum, I feel genderless. I was born female and raised as a girl, and I don’t really mind acting like one, but it doesn’t feel like me, it just feels like what people expect of me and what’s easiest. I had a former partner with whom I had a very kinky relationship, and he used to call me ‘it’ as a humiliation thing, but honestly it was about as accurately perceived and therefore cared for as I’ve ever felt in a relationship. 

It’s like being brainwashed by evil Nazis for seventy years — maybe compromising his relationship to speech, maybe compromising his relationship to his gender — might have rendered Bucky kinda autistic. There’s a lot of subtle overlap between the effects of trauma and autism, and since many of us who are autistic have also been traumatized, it’s hard to tease apart — is this the natural ambivalence toward speech of my autism, or have I lost my voice to trauma — even from the inside?

And here is the confession that I’ve been building up to with all this. My confession isn’t that I was tortured when I was six, or that I’m a little bit psychotic on the edges of my autism disorder. I’ve gotten to a place of relative chill about all of that at this point in my life.

But here’s what gets me. I am a psychotherapist. I have bachelors and masters degrees in psychology, and I have spent the last twenty years treating patients with trauma.

I can’t stand going to therapy myself, though.

I’ve tried it. I’ve tried it many times, with many therapists. I’ve tried going in at various points to talk about some of the history that I’ve disclosed here, but I also went when my dad died to process my grief, and a few times with partners during rocky patches in relationships.

I am a psychotherapist who doesn’t benefit much from psychotherapy.

Isn’t that fun? I just can’t get anything out of it. I devolve into a babbling, incoherent mess, and I terrify my therapists. It’s the autism. Gender variant autistics who do not match the old white, cis-male, Sheldon Cooper profile and who do a great deal of camoflaging in order to function are, unfortunately, still something that your average therapist isn’t very informed about, and don’t really know how to help. Turns out that I’m no exception.

I finally understand why, now that I finally know that I’m autistic. I do have a lot of communication problems, though they’re not really an issue when I’m calm and working, only when I’m emotional, so say, discussing any topic that one might discuss in therapy. 

So I worked through it all with fanfiction.

The shit I have written, no, please don’t go read it. I want to be clear, there is piss and blood everywhere. Because that has been the nature of my trauma. In the spirit of informed consent, we tag our fics thoroughly in the hopes that no one wanders into anything that they aren’t prepared for, and I do my best to take care of my occasional reader who gets in over their head — ours is a very interactive community — but the truth is that I’ve connected to a lot of people who have healed through the extreme journeys I’ve taken in my writing as well, and that has been as meaningful to me as some of the connections that I’ve made running groups for survivors of trauma as a professional over the past twenty years.

One of the most impactful stories I ever wrote was this really horrible, terribly dark story in 2003 featuring Hermione Granger and Severus Snape from the world of Harry Potter. I wasn’t working through something personal at all, but something quite impersonal — I was a young person who had come to sexual assault and domestic violence work because of a history of horrific sexual violence that I’d experienced at the hands of someone from outside of my family, but I’d grown up inside of a family that had its run of the mill dysfunctions, but where physical violence was unthinkable. I’d actually been raised by quite an empowered mother, had a strong assumption that if any partner ever raised a hand to me it would probably be the end of our relationship, and was struggling with my own personal judgments working with clients who stayed in violent relationships, even while I was actually teaching classes explaining the dynamics of domestic violence to other people. I really needed to wrap my brain around it in a deep way. So naturally the solution was to write some deeply fucked up porn about it featuring children’s books characters, right?

My scenario? Hermione, stand-in for every know-it-all girl of my generation, takes it into her head (there’s some convoluted but unlikely set-up here; it’s porn) that she’s in a position to seduce Lucius Malfoy and gain critical intelligence for the good guys, but she needs to know what she’s getting into before she tries it, and only Snape can properly “prepare” her for this grisly task, right? It’s ridiculous, but it’s a paper-thin excuse for him (i.e. me-the-writer) to use his teacher role to explain the dynamics of seduction and abuse to her, and I made it pretty ugly.

After my years of teaching about domestic violence, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the response. The number of survivors of trauma who either commented publicly or wrote to me privately to tell me that reading through that story had helped them come to terms with the same understanding I’d been struggling with, and thus had helped them toward acceptance of something in their own pasts… after all these years I still particularly remember the woman who wrote to me about how the story allowed her to forgive her mother for her relationship with her abusive father and thus begin repairing her relationship with her mother.

It’s been almost twenty years now since I wrote that filthy, sadomasochistic porn featuring Harry Potter characters in order to become a better speaker and advocate in my role at the domestic violence centers where I worked, and I still get more private messages about it than anything else I’ve ever written.

I used that example here because it was the impersonal piece that I wrote with the strongest effect. Everything else that I’ve written that has garnered any kind of similar response has involved me processing my own personal sexual trauma and its effects on my life, and for me to reveal my process around what details of those stories came from my own experience would be far too personal for such a public venue. It’s bad enough to admit that I’m a professional who writes fanfiction, especially dirty fanfiction involving children’s books characters. I am heartily looking forward to my hate mail for all this.

But I’ll tell you this: Mycroft Holmes, elder brother to the famous Sherlock, once saved my life. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean it literally. And because I’m only a little bit psychotic and not a lot, I technically understand that it wasn’t his hand that stayed my execution, but my own — and because I’m me and autistic and neurodivergent, I’m not sure what the difference is if the thought patterns that I learned from my internalized version of him hadn’t been burned into my neural pathways, there for me to access at the critical moment that kept me alive.

Mycroft can explain it better than I can.

And there is no one other than Bucky Barnes with whom I’d rather sit and not discuss what it’s like to have survived being tortured in a world where very few people can relate.