Every so often someone will tell me that I am “really good at anger”.  I’m never entirely sure what they mean by this.  Are you saying that I walk around ranting all the time?  Are you saying that I don’t feel bad about myself for being angry?  Are you saying that I try to say why I’m angry out loud more than other people?  It’s kind of ambiguous whether it is a compliment or an insult.  I think it probably varies depending on who is saying it.

Yeah, I have a lot of anger.  Sometimes I feel like I have a halo of anger around me.  That’s not very often. I don’t go through my life feeling that way.  But I can get there.  Quickly.  I refer to those times as being incandescent with rage.  I worry about that.  I worry because it has been made very clear to me throughout my entire life that I shouldn’t be angry.  That being angry isn’t good for me.  Thing is, my mom is the one who started delivering that message.  I hurt people when I am angry, so I should learn to control my anger. I’m getting kind of tired of people telling me that if my story worries, annoys, or hurts other people it is all my fault.  It really isn’t.  Right this minute, oh people on the internet, I’m getting these stories out of my head so that I don’t drown in them.  When I write them down I begin to understand what I am dealing with.

Most of the time, most of my life I have no active physical connection with these memories.  When I do I am small and scared and oh so very angry.  I feel increasingly like there was a giant conspiracy.  There are more and more people coming out of the woodwork saying it wasn’t a secret.  I wasn’t invisible.  People knew.  And I’m feeling angry.  People knew that I was being molested.  They didn’t know the details.  But no one ever intervened.  It was never bad enough.  What exactly qualifies as bad enough?  My sister thinks that CPS is the devil and evil and only out to destroy families.  I prayed over and over throughout my childhood that someone would take me away.  Maybe that is when I lost faith in God.

I am hostile to people telling me to go to church.  I’m really ok with other people finding consolation anywhere they can.  But I can’t.  I have been burned a few too many times in my life.  And before someone says, “Well one bad experience doesn’t mean you should give up!” There was never just one try.  Fuck anyone who ever in the slightest way says I haven’t tried hard enough.  Fuck you.  Fuck you.  Fuck you.  I was raped over and over.  I was moved around all the time so that I had no support network.

I survived.  I survived being told when I was 12 that the only viable career for me was prostitution.  That would be my brother Jimmy, the still alive almost-ally.  The one who is ok with me talking about my childhood assault to a couple of people, but I can’t broadcast the story because then I am going for shock value and I am trying to hurt people.  How is that for an assumption of motives?  I’m not doing this because I need it to heal.  I’m doing it because I want to hurt people.  That, right there.  That is what my family thinks of me.  When people on the internet tell me that I shouldn’t be telling my story… imply that there is no value in it.

I feel like there is a giant conspiracy.  Since I had the bad… manners? juju? luck? to have my father rape me I should just shut up about it and not compound the situation.  I should shut up.  I should spare their feelings.  I shouldn’t talk about the bad things in my head because if I think them and admit them out loud I am already damned as an evil abuser.  If I say them I might incite someone else to act on my fantasies.  And that would be ALL MY FAULT.  Because everything is my fault.  Even the actions of strangers on the internet who read my writing.  I have been told this constantly my entire life.

Fuck you Olivia, whoever the fuck you are.  How dare you sit there in your pretention and your privilege and ask me if what I am doing is really necessary.  Don’t tell me that talking about violence on the internet in an adult-only opt-in space is damaging to my children.  That is bullshit.  That is kyriarchy bullshit.  That is telling me that your pain is more important than mine.  Threatening to call the police on me because I blog about the effects of being raped and raped and raped and raped.  This is why people like me kill themselves.  Because I feel like the whole world wants me dead.  I feel like people would really prefer that I take my pain and my anger and I just go die.  Get the fuck out of their pretty world so that they no longer have to look at my ugliness.

No.  I’m not going to do that.  I am going to continue to write on the internet.  I am going to say all of the things that are going through my head because I haven’t done anything wrong.  And when I do actually fuck up, I’m pretty savage with myself.  It’s not like I am excusing a lifetime of fucking up.  It’s not like I am sitting here blaming my family for my problems.  I am holding my family accountable for their actions.  I am talking about their actions (in a very judgmental way) in public.  I’m allowed.  I’m allowed to talk about the things that were done to me.

I’m tired of being told to shut up.  I’d really rather go find a podium.  Hi, I’m Kristine Lenora Gibbs and my father raped me.  Depending on definitions he did it many times or one big spectacular time after years of more mild molestation.  My family thinks I should be ashamed of myself because he did that.  I think they should be ashamed of themselves.  I think that anyone who allows a helpless child to be abused the way I was abused deserves to feel bad.  They deserve to feel as much pain as I do.  Yes, I want revenge.  I want my family to have no choice but to look in the mirror and see who they truly are.  I want them to know just how badly they hurt me.  They don’t get to pretend my feelings don’t matter.

And for this I am demonized.  I’m not suing.  I’m not trying to get money.  I’m not trying to get anyone fired from a job.  I’m not prosecuting for the outrageous abuse.  I’m telling the truth.  I am telling my life story with as little embellishment as I can manage.  If that makes you want to call the police?  Well… maybe you should think about that.  Maybe you should think about your own actions.  Maybe think about what things you aren’t accepting responsibility for that maybe you should.

I am doing nothing wrong.  My children are a shining example of physical and mental health.  My house is kind of messy because we have small children, but we don’t let food rot on the counter (uhhh…. outside the compost bucket).  No children here watch inappropriate movies.  No children here see inappropriate books.  No children here know words like sex, incest, rape, porn.  She does know how to talk about her vulva, vagina, anus, clitoris, and labia.  She knows that playing with your bits is an in your room activity like brushing your teeth is an in the bathroom activity.  I don’t have sex in front of my children.  I don’t talk to my children about my sex life.  Hell, I don’t even make double entendres in front of my kids much.

But if I say on the internet that sometimes when my anxiety is high I start seeing pictures in my head of picking Calli up by the feet and hitting her head against the wall people think I should lose my children.  I deserve to have my whole life taken away because I have that go through my brain.  And yet no one ever took me away from my family.  I am so evil I deserve to lose my children for my (very rare) bad thoughts even though my actions are consistently good.  But my family committed atrocity after atrocity and I deserved to stay with them and take it.  And while I’m at it, why don’t I shut up.

Fuck you internet.  I will not shut up.