I have a hard time with the fact that I want to pick people to be in authority and have them dictate who I should be. I transfer around who has this power a lot. A lot of the reason that Noah is such a wonderful mate for me is because he shares nearly zero of my interests and he has a lot of interests of his own. He wants time to go do his thing. So he is shoving me towards independence with all the subtlety of an atomic bomb. I need to go try a bunch of things and fail a bunch. I need to go figure out what I actually like to do. That’s what this identity crisis bullshit is about.

I had to fire my therapist because she doesn’t have crystal clear boundaries. I’m not actually sure many people have clear enough boundaries. I’m ridiculously empathetic and I can usually see what people want from me as clearly as if I am reading a book. It’s uhm, kind of weird to admit out loud, but I’ve actually received several proposals of marriage. I don’t tell people that. Because I always brush them off as not serious and the guy must be crazy and just saying that because I just got them off. Whatever. Normally I run from those guys immediately. Those are the nice guys. Ew.

I think the reason that my relationship with Noah works is because he is a cocky son of a bitch. At least long enough to make me hot. The rest of the time he’s plodding and quiet and he keeps his head down so I don’t blow up at him. It’s an odd mix. Why am I fixating on this now. Because I am freaking out because I don’t know how to have boundaries. I don’t know how to be normal. I had to fire my therapist because she expected me to have to defend my boundaries in therapeutic space instead of her doing it for me so I was not safe. She did not hand me a clear framework of what to expect and then follow it to the letter. She was flexible. She was ok with me sending her obsessive text messages. That’s not ok. Because then I fixate. Then I begin to feel like she wants me to do that because she thinks I’m that kind of crazy. When a group leader establishes that we will be spending the next six weeks on sharing our stories and person a will go this week and person b will go in two weeks… That has to be what happens for me.

I need people to help me police boundaries because I really can’t do it all on my own. I don’t know where they are. I have to tell people over and over and over what happened to me because people expect me to be able to keep my shit together in situations where I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I need to learn to recognize that there are situations I can’t be in because they are simply too stressful for me. I am special. What happened to me was freakish and unusual and I need to stop acting like I can do everything all the time the way everyone else can.

Sometimes. And sometimes I have my shit together and I monitor my boundaries easily and it’s ok. This kind of sadness isn’t even all that common. It is something I cannot avoid doing when I am around my family though. I need to just accept that as part of me. There are places and people who make me into a sick person. I start lying and doing bad things in private.

When I was in kindergarden I pulled a little boy behind the book cart and talked him into letting me give him a blowjob. When I came back to the school in sixth grade he told people I had raped him. I called his mother and denounced him as a liar. Today I found him on facebook and told him:
“When we were kids at Lakeside I acted out inappropriately towards you and years later you told people I raped you. I stormed and raged and called your mother.

I need to apologize to you. What I did to you when we were little kids wasn’t ok. I am really sorry I brought that into your life and I did. And when you talked about the fact that it had been a problem for you I lied and shamed you in public.

I am so sorry. I hope you have been able to find people to talk to about what I did to you. I am not excusing myself for what I did. I was a very messed up kid and it is only now that I am stopping to start to think about what I did and why.

You are one of the people I hurt and I am so sorry. I have been sorry for 20 years.”

And I went and found the boy who tried to rape me in high school and I said:
“I need to say this to you. It’s going to seem completely out of the blue. I’m not sure if I want you to respond and acknowledge me or if it is better for me that you not respond. Either way I don’t get to control what you do. Anyway.

Right now I am going through a really rough period because I am stopping to think about all the ways in which I was sexually assaulted in my life. I’m trying to figure out all the ways that I was hurt by people so that I can get a grip on how much therapeutic work I have left. I’m pretty daunted. I was really horrifically raped and assaulted repeatedly for a long time.

And you were part of that. You got drunk and you didn’t want to hear my no. Cameron had to pull you off of me. That was an attempted rape, Justin. And that is what sent me running scared from Los Gatos High School and that friends group. I went and found a lot of ways to get hurt after that because I thought every single person in the world wanted to do that to me.

I think you were a stupid, drunk kid. I don’t think you are evil. I am almost certain that you don’t think of yourself as a rapist. But I am still very hurt by your actions almost 15 years later. I need to say that out loud. I need it to not be invisible that people did this to me. And that includes you.

Please for the love of god if you have an ounce of compassion in your soul please don’t call me a liar. It happened. I have so much evidence of these things happening to me. In some cases I have court proceedings and my family is still calling me a liar.

Even if you ignore this message. Even if you hit delete and you never think about this again. Please don’t call me a liar.”

If I don’t say these things I feel like I am concealing evil in my soul. I feel like I am perpetuating the shame and abuse that made the people who molested me. I will not abuse my children. I will figure out the boundaries. I will ask for help figuring out the boundaries. I will say my guilt out loud. I will come to peace with the things I did when I was helpless. I will look at what I am doing now that I am not helpless and I will not be merciful. I have to do this right.

Because if I fuck this up. I might create kids who hurt like me. And I can tell you right now that I am not going to be that kind of failure. Fuck that shit. I can’t keep my kids from hurting. But I can keep them from feeling like they are on the outside of a glass building looking at people who love them because their mother abused them heinously. I don’t have boundaries because my mother had no boundaries. And I kind of wonder if that is worse than raping me. Seriously. My mother did not prepare me to live in the world and she started neglecting me and leaving me to my own devices when I was a toddler. I have a story about sneaking out and trying to walk to the grocery store when I was three. My mother was asleep because she worked the night shift at Denny’s. My sister was supposed to be watching me, but instead she was out fucking people and doing drugs.

I had a pocket full of pennies and I was going to buy Barbie cards at the grocery store. I started to watch Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms yesterday. When I saw the little girl declaring “I’m self reliant” I freaked out and had to shut it off. I couldn’t bear to see some happy go lucky little kid declaring how awesome she was for being neglected and abused so I turned it off. Ugh. The joke in that movie is, of course everyone knows she shouldn’t be talking like that because she isn’t self reliant at all. She’s a child. She is completely dependent.

But I hold myself responsible for things that happened when I was a child because my mother refuses to acknowledge her own responsibility and guilt. I don’t have good boundaries because of this. And that’s the part my family won’t see. That is why they are closing ranks. They hold me 100% responsible for the things I did as a very small child while simultaneously not ascribing any real responsibility to my mother. That’s really broken.

And thinking about how broken they are is a waste of thinking time. Because they are. Even though I’ve been telling myself lately that they aren’t so bad, they are. They really and truly are.