When I first laid my eyes on Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, I had an inescapable feeling that something was wrong. Look me straight in the eye and tell me if there is anything that can be taken from a slab of black paint—you can’t. That’s what I hate the most about abstract art: you would’ve never guessed that a couple of squares on a canvas would be so troublesome.

I had never known the feeling I felt while looking at Black Square until I was raped three years ago.

I was plunged into a realm in which I was neither experienced nor comfortable, where nothing felt right. Guilt was a simmer, long nails a surprise in my chest. Despair was heavy and imploding: swollen eyes, whole-body tremors, jelly fingers. Fear melted my tongue.

I was left grasping for words that would articulate the full breadth of my emotions—but “devastated” was too feeble, “distressed” was too modest. Verbal language had become a flimsy vessel for the magnitude of my traumas.

Perhaps that’s why, when I saw Malevich’s Black Square only months later, I loathed it. The sight of something so indefinable only flung me further back into that realm of melted tongues.

Yet there was something unreachable about the painting that pulled me in. That’s the power of abstract art—its ambiguity lures you in, plaguing you until those colors that once meant nothing start to mean something to you. The abstract is a realm of new understandings, residing beyond rational thought and perceived impossibility. It was within this realm that I reconciled the silence inflicted upon me by violence.

I can’t explain exactly when or how this happened, but eventually my attempts at articulation began to disregard the traditional rules of language I had once dutifully adhered to. My healing—no longer bound to arbitrary words—has now found its place in the abstract. Maybe it’s not as straightforward as I’d want it to be, but I see my healing in my workshop discussions with other sexual assault survivors about our desires to end sexual violence through transformative justice, originating years before we had the vocabulary to describe our intuition. I see it in the letters I exchange with incarcerated survivors in women’s prisons, where words alone are not enough to contain our pride as we whisper of our daily victories: “I can speak his name without flinching,” “The other night, I threw away the outfit I wore that day.”

And most importantly, I find healing through my art. I’m constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones, that can only be experienced in my bones—to derive meaning from abstractions which only I can understand. But where words once failed me, I take comfort in knowing what I wish I could articulate can be divulged in the pigments of the contorted faces I paint, or the scribbles in my sketchbook that vaguely resemble teenage bodies.

These are the languages I’ve carved from my abstractions—not the words I so desperately craved three years ago. It’s not exactly clear-cut, but I’m still experimenting with how the dismembered figures in my sketchbook might fit together in just the right way that would spark a revelation, or how continued discussions with other sexual violence survivors can create a space to process the magnitudes of my wounds.

I don’t know if I’ll ever fully reckon with the macabre of Malevich and jelly fingers. I do know, however, that as my understanding of emotion as something that extends far beyond words evolves, those muddy sensations have begun to dissipate. There’s no telling what might happen.

As for now, I’m comfortable residing in the abstract. In this realm of infinite understandings, I know I can make peace with abstractions of emotion through unconventional modes of articulation, whether that be through art or connection.