It was a grainy image of a woman in a tiara smoking a cigarette, but it may as well have been a picture of God. God in a babydoll dress beneath a cloud of faux fur, God crowned by a bleached-blonde mop and God wearing smudged red lipstick. I saw her and felt struck with resonance, the kind that raises the peach fuzz on your lower back and floods your brain with dopamine. She felt at once mythic and artificial, like Venus in vinyl platforms. I was angry at God because I was fourteen, I was fearful of God because I was Catholic, and yet I was still looking for him because I was alive. Ten years later, two and a half of those things are still true. The photograph was of Courtney Love, not God, but she may have been the God I needed.

           Fourteen was the year that I felt I’d become a social pariah. Looking back, the rejection lived louder in my head than in the hallway. I don’t think people were really thinking about me as much as I believed they were, but a few comments coupled with a major bout of depression left me with the sense of complete damnation. I was an eighth grader starting my tenth year at a tiny Catholic school in Washington, D.C. that had an average class size of about twenty-five. It was a nurturing, cloistered, and academically rigorous environment for the children of lobbyists who would go on to become Congressional interns. Teachers started talking to us about padding our resumes for college in the third grade, and I’d heard a few parents comment on the caliber of high school that some of my classmates would be attending in the fall of 2016, which would be our freshman year. I was chiefly concerned with shoplifting and talking to boys, and I thought it was all so fucking stupid.

           I really liked shoplifting, but I was too chicken to do it more than a few times. I was concerned with my parents’ approval and driven by an overactive, Catholic conscience. I decided to tousle up my image a bit by taking on the identity of a kleptomaniac, which backfired. Two friends told me that their mothers no longer wanted me to come over, with one of them revealing that she’d heard I’d gotten to second base with a high school soccer player. I found myself tangled up in webs of talk about getting in trouble with boys, most of which seemed to be coming from moms. It didn’t matter that all I’d done was kiss a freshman and steal panties from Victoria’s Secret because I’d already been stained with the specter of bad influence. Madonna to whore. I might have brushed it off if had I not already been carrying a private sense of contamination. There were other issues in my rather splintered home life, but my fourteenth year was defined by my struggle to make sense of having been groomed by my stepdad a few years prior.

It was a lot of questionable tickling, special attention, and a few sexual jokes that I didn’t understand, but nothing overt enough to signal to a nine-year-old that she should tell someone. All I knew was that he was too touchy, and that I could feel his gaze reaching under my clothes. I couldn’t distinguish what the offense was, so I questioned my own judgment. Unaware of the concept of grooming, I prayed for a word that could describe what quiet indiscretion had taken place. As I neared my teens, I became immensely disturbed and obsessed with the larger spectacle of sexual violence; it started with a talk my seventh-grade class went to about sex trafficking, and it was heightened by my fixation on a brutal kidnapping case that had swept the nation. I was floored by the depth of these victims’ suffering and the questions that their ordeals asked about human nature. I also became preoccupied with how much worse my situation could be and admonished myself for overreacting. It was almost more comforting to think of myself as the crazy one rather than to grapple with the loss of control that victimization brings.

My sense of reality fractured, and my world became stormy and confused. Was the pencil in my hand really a pencil, or was I wrong about that, too? I could no longer trust myself in the way that children, in touch with their intuition and unperturbed by conventions of logic, typically do. There was one time in which my stepdad pulled my shirt up in front of an entire room of people, exposing my bare chest, that marked an internal shift. I no longer felt like a girl, but rather an assemblage of limbs, meaty with their ligaments exposed. It was the first time I sensed that he’d done something wrong by humiliating me, but it was also the first time I truly felt shame.

           I retreated into the Internet and spent a lot of time on Pinterest, working on escaping. I took a particular interest in fashion, which felt like a triumphant defiance against the dreariness of my inner world. And the fact that I’d spent my entire life in a Catholic school uniform. I spent hours collecting pictures and watching runway shows, constructing photographic cathedrals to beauty and glamour. To this day, I still hold onto beauty as the life force, beauty as self-authorship and a will toward creation. That was when I came across the ghostly image of Courtney Love and felt that I had stumbled upon a deity. I must have spent an hour clicking through image after image of this nameless woman when I first saw her, wild-eyed, big-boned, and captivating. Her style was described by Spin magazine as “baby-doll femininity and punk rock sleaze” (1994), and it evolved into what became known as the “kinderwhore” aesthetic. Kinderwhore is a medley of tattered tea dresses, rosaries, combat boots, Marlboro reds, dead flowers, and baby dolls with their heads sometimes missing—symbols of beauty and innocence that acknowledge their own inevitable decay. My subtle exposure to an adult’s sexual appetite at such a young age coupled with my soiled reputation made me feel irreparably dirty. With Catholicism in the foreground, I wanted desperately, as Courtney wrote in her diary at nineteen, “to be clean inside and sparkling and pure.” On another page she scrawled “I will be SWAN SWAN SWAN” (Love, 2004). Most of her female punk rock counterparts rejected men and purity culture entirely, while she relished in the dual persona of virgin and whore. As rowdy and frightening as she could be onstage, I saw the bruised little girl in her. I admired her insistence on dragging her ruin into the light, insisting it could still be beautiful.

           Courtney wanted to scrub herself clean, but she also paraded the stain. She was dubbed “the poster child for celebrity deviance” in 1994 (Spin) and “the world’s most controversial blonde” by Elle magazine in 2008, always known for her raucous performances, scathing lyrics, endless feuds, and legal troubles. She did an eighteen-month stint in rehab to avoid a prison sentence in 2004, temporarily lost custody of her daughter in 2009, and has been arrested a handful of times for her drug-fueled, at times violent conduct. She was the electric frontwoman of the grunge band Hole, known for putting one leg onto the amp at the front of the stage and thrusting, shredding, screaming primitive rage like a male rockstar would. Yet she embodies chaos and pain that is characteristically feminine: Hole’s themes revolve around the destruction of women at the hands of sexual violence, warped body image, motherhood, public scrutiny, and, most importantly, themselves. Sexual violence and public scrutiny hover over all of Love’s work as twin disciplinarians, quick to punish and quicker to question whether any crime occurred at all. I was sexually assaulted as a high school freshman by a popular classmate only weeks after having transferred to a new school, and this time I was conscious enough to register my own defilement. This time, I really felt it when Courtney screamed.

           My insides fluttered with glee when Parker, a popular football player, asked me out on a dinner date. I was new to the school and green with anxiety, so getting attention from someone like him made me feel like I was finally doing something right. My insides fluttered again when he pulled over the car by the side of an empty country road after dinner without telling me why. He lived in rural Southern Virginia, and I’d thought the pairing of country boy with city girl could be romantic. It didn’t feel so romantic when I looked out the passenger window and found myself surrounded by miles of cornfields, the landscape flat and indifferent to my ordeal. My body realized before my mind that I was nothing more than animal locked in cage, girl trapped in car. I never levied an accusation against him because I was the new girl at school, and I knew my name would immediately and permanently be associated with him. I regret not having done so, as I learned from another girl soon after that he’d done the same thing to her. They always do. He would be quietly asked to leave the following year on the grounds of a rape accusation, but he never saw legal consequences.

           Hole’s 1994 album, Live Through This, was the only thing that helped me process the violation. The band softened its abrasive punk sound into delicate melodies while maintaining its trademark aggression. The sonic juxtaposition mirrored my own ambivalence. I wanted to stab Parker and twist the knife, but I also wanted to crumple to the floor and be carried to bed. I wanted someone to recognize what had happened to me, but I also wanted to be untouched again. While Hole’s first album painted surreal scenes of violence and female sexuality, the lyrics of Live Through This narrativized the inner experience of the ruined woman in conversation with her onlookers. I particularly resonated with the disassociation described in “Doll Parts”, with lyrics like, “I am doll eyes, doll mouth, doll legs/ I am doll arms, big veins, dog beg.” They brought me back to sensation of having my bare chest exposed to a room of strangers when I was nine, feeling like a dismembered mannequin on display. Violence against women takes center stage on Live Through This, with songs like “Asking for It” and “Jennifer’s Body” unraveling as conversations between victim, perpetrator, and media witness. What separates the exploitation angle from similar feminist critiques in music is that Courtney fashions herself as the auto-exploiter: she’s spoken about the many ways she altered her appearance and used her sexuality to improve her potential for commercial success. “Every time that I sell myself to you,” she sings, “I feel a little bit cheaper than I need to.”

           When I was nineteen, my first boyfriend gifted me The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday. I recall chafing at a passage that cautioned against acting out of spite, either in the pursuit of success or revenge. Drawing from ancient Stoic thinkers like Marcus Aurelius, Holiday posited that if your motivation is to prove someone wrong, you are still psychologically controlled by them. Better to detach and focus on your own conduct (2016). I agree in that revenge is often fruitless. I agree with the sentiment as an ideal, but I don’t think it accounts for the staying power of trauma. My body stiffened with anticipatory fear for years after I was assaulted, turning sex into something painful and scary. In the opening track of Live Through This, Courtney sang that her subject’s regret “might last a day” while “mine is forever.” His sin would evaporate, and her penance would persist. Sexual assault cases often collapse into “he said, she said,” and the exposure of the legal process can be so re-traumatizing that many victims, like me, choose to opt out altogether. I’d been too scared of the damage to my reputation and too concerned with rekindling my own purity; I didn’t want everyone to know that someone had spilled wine on my best dress.

For better or for worse, the only thing that released me from the cavity of depression that hollowed out my adolescence was my absolute hatred of the two men who violated me. My resentment toward God for watching idly as they took advantage of my naïveté. My seething, putrid hatred actually did spark movement. It was unholy and un-Stoic, but it was kinetic. I can best describe it as a sense of vindictive survival—I wanted them to see me plant my foot into the earth and dig my toes into the mud. I started going to the gym, putting effort into my appearance, and reading with aesthetic devotion after years of feeling like I wasn’t worth the attempt. I started trying to help others instead of wallowing in my own misery. I recognized that the kinetic energy of anger carried potential—I just needed to direct it right. My pursuit of purity had frozen me into shame, and as I got older, I began to suspect that this was its primary function.

That shame began to melt when I thought of Courtney, a victim of child abuse who’d bounced through foster homes, juvey, and strip clubs by the time she was seventeen. She too had internalized her trauma and mourned the ways it separated her from youthful innocence. She had the guts to carry that rag doll in a tea dress around because it was part of her. Maybe that’s what the kinderwhore aesthetic, which she’d named herself, meant to me. I admired the way she refused to sanctify her trauma into martyrdom or package it as empowerment through feminist reclamation; she simply let it bleed and stain her dress. She let her dress get so soaked that it turned into an art piece, something beautiful that made the similarly disturbed feel less alone. Even after all the public meltdowns, court dates, stints in rehab, and drug overdoses that surrounded her, she refused to die. She refused to be tragic.

When I first heard Live Through This, I felt as if Courtney was singing to the larger lineage of brutalized women, an ancestral communion that I recognized instinctively. Like Aphrodite rising from the sea foam of Cyprus, she seemed to emerge from the ocean of the collective female unconscious: all id and inner child, all guts and vocal cords. Perhaps that was why she felt so deific and yet so familiar, so fluorescent in her humanity. My two years in social work have exposed the crushing universality of sexual abuse: it is the one experience that almost every female client I’ve worked with as a mental health professional shares. They often move with a dissociative numbness that I recognize in my younger self, when my body still felt like a crime scene. When I still prayed to be scrubbed clean. I no longer pray for purification, but for the stamina to bear witness to women who still feel dirty. I cannot save them or prosecute their past, but I can let their pain breathe without looking away. I can position rage as a sign of life rather than a corruption of their character. In the end, I pray that they live through this, too.