The video for Sia’s Elastic Heart is a profound, poetic portrayal of my experience of childhood abuse. I watch it over and over, fascinated by all that it is able to capture.

The words of the song are powerful enough, but the video could tell a whole story without a sound. Maddie Ziegler was a “tween” during this amazing performance. She possesses an ageless girl-strength, even though she is in a cage that makes up her whole world, and really has no where else to go. Shia LaBoef, the grown male in the cage with her, gives us all the perpetrator’s alternate states of being: fixated, stalking, aggressive, tender, rageful, soulless, deliberate, pitiful, grasping.

Maddie takes my breath away. She opens the video with the alert, watchful concentration of any creature that needs to constantly defend itself. Her initial displays of strength are meant to warn off the predator – staring, shaking, posturing, screaming – everything she can to make herself look bigger and scarier than she is, everything you are supposed to do when faced with a grizzly bear. The cage is a pre-verbal state where one might scream and try to fight but cannot talk, which is why she clutches at her throat. There’s no real person to talk to.

I admire this girl so deeply for her fight and resistance, as I too remember fighting sometimes. But since she never really escapes, she inevitably becomes exhausted, and he’s still there. He waits until she’s asleep or he acts pained to draw her back in. Finally he becomes a zombie – while, trying a different strategy – she attempts to remake him by gently pounding it out of him, remolding him, sucking his evil out with her breath like one might extract the poison from a snake bite and spit it out. She even tries to bring him out of the cage with her. He’s never going to leave and never going to let her go either.

I grew up in that cage, and mentally I still inhabit it. The predator in my childhood was a series of men, who all had in common a propensity for exploitation, control, rage, calculated manipulation and an underlying belief in their right to harm others, however small, when they felt the urge. The evil they shared makes them into one hostile grizzly in my mind, but they were individuals. A stepfather who hit my mother and I like we were grown men, and told me at five years old not to comfort my mother as she cried in her room because she was “being punished.” He went on to a career as a successful historian and a less successful kleptomaniac. Next came a wine-soaked designer, who kicked my mother and I out on the streets of a major city in the middle of the night when I was eight, no car and no such thing as a cell phone. He took his ultimate revenge with a tender conversation in which he unblinkingly told me that my mother would someday leave me too. A sculptor caught me playing outside when I was twelve and creepily informed me that he and his friend had decided that he should forget my mother and wait for me. The sculptor continued to stalk us for years; I remember opening the door to leave my house when I was a senior in high school, many moves later, and finding him standing there.

One of my 6th grade teachers harassed, stalked and entrapped me over months, watching me and circling exactly like Shia LaBoef’s character. Somehow he was convinced that I was his girlfriend and had unfairly jilted him. The crown prince of all t was the school Headmaster who was alerted to this abuse by a witness and tried to paint me as a nymphet, telling my parents “girls get crushes on their teachers,” as he quietly pulled all of the girls out of the abuser’s homeroom class. Of course all this accomplished was to partition the cage, and leave other students without warning. The refreshing thing about the Elastic Heart video is that Maddie’s character is no nod to the myth of the “nymphet” – she’s a real, strong, compassionate but trapped girl doing the best she can to save herself when the whole world seems to be a male-made haunted house.

Of course I don’t know what Sia or anyone involved in the making of this video had in their minds; I have described the meaning that I take from it, which includes an amazing level of truth and emotion for a five-minute piece. My experiences are not uncommon, so I think this is artwork that should speak to many. I did not escape the cage in adulthood, and learned that adult domestic violence is basically the same thing all over again. That’s why the words of the song captivate me as much as the video – I do still want my life so bad, I’m doing everything I can, and no matter how sharp the predator’s blades, I will fight to find a world of peace. I will never more betray or abandon that girl.