Right now there isn’t much room in my head for anything but how very wrong and bad and stupid I am. Of course this means that I’m yelling at everyone around me and telling them how very wrong and bad and stupid they are. 🙁
Err, not the kids. The grown ups. I’m just crying randomly with the kids because I have nothing else to do with my frustration.
Last night I dreamed about my dad all night. I was a kid and he came up to Aunt Vonnie’s house to visit (which never actually happened). I asked Auntie to stay with me and never leave me alone with him. In front of him she said, “Stop being so nasty to your father.” Then she walked out. It was bad.
And I was awesome about sticking my fingers in my ear and going “lalalala”. Jenny’s wedding coincided with the 13th anniversary of Tommy’s suicide. And my brother Jimmy’s oldest son turned 10. I will never know him because it is all my fault that Jimmy’s kids don’t get to have an uncle or a grandfather.
I suspect I will have a bad day.
I don’t think I need to state out loud that I’m a stress monkey right now. That’s probably obvious. I have better days and worse days. I’m not doing great but I’m not hiding in the garage all day. I’m getting productive stuff done. I’m mostly doing ok with the kids. Except when I’m not.
And I’m really not doing very well with Noah. This is one of the things that it’s hardest to talk about. I’m not being very nice to my husband. I mean, I do things for him. I mostly don’t take everything out on him. Except that sometimes I do. And he doesn’t like it. I suppose it is probably reasonable and all that he gets sick of me being nasty. The thing is, I’m not sure what to do about this situation right now. We are both under a fair bit of stress (young children will do that to you anyway) and we both have an enormous amount of work we have to do that we don’t want to do. And I’ve had Big Life Events again this month compounding my lifetime of them that I’m not doing very well at suppressing lately.
Because the thing is, in order to be with my kids I really do have to suppress memories. It is a conscious act of will to do it. And given how I feel right this minute about being silenced, you know… this really sucks. It is very hard not to feel resentful of my children just because they deserve the right to grow up in complete ignorance of even the word incest. But they do deserve it. It’s my job to provide that world to them.
I wonder if that is (at least part of) why my mom refused to talk about it. I wonder if she believed that children shouldn’t have those concepts so we’ll just sweep it under the rug and it will be all better. Naw, I doubt she thought about it that much. But I think about it all the time. I think about the fact that I don’t want to be a bitter, harping shrew like my mother. I think about my vicious ex-boyfriend who threw it in my face that it was inevitable that I would be a nasty, bitter alcoholic who dies alone.
When I have days like today, when my anxiety is running high and I’m not medicated, these are the days that make me afraid. I don’t want to lose my life. I don’t want to lose my husband. I don’t want to lose my precious baby girls. I don’t want to lose me. I don’t know how to get a handle on my anxiety sometimes. And I am so very mean. 🙁
I’m not mean to Noah and the kids all day. But I go pick fights on the internet and rant and rave about them. I try very hard to manufacture a place for me to pour all of my unhappy feelings and stir them up. I don’t really have any place in my life where I can do that. My options right now are to bottle up my feelings or scream at my family. It’s not appropriate for me to talk about my shit in front of my kids. It’s not appropriate for me to ditch my kids all the time so that I can go somewhere else and talk about it. And really, I already feel like no one gives a shit. They are done listening. I need to stop whining because I am such a pathetic baby.
All I can do is write on the internet. And hope no asshole comes along and tells me what I should do to deal with my anxiety. Which isn’t to say that everyone who wants to help me is an asshole. But there are assholes out there, let me tell you. The thing is, even when it’s nice people. They want to help. They want so badly to help. And when I say, no that won’t work then they say, “Well how do you know unless you try!” My internal dialogue to that is FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU Until you live with the monsters in my head don’t fucking tell me what I should do. Because when you tell me what I should do you are telling me to be different from who I am.
It’s hard to explain why I have a hard time with advice without offending people. So I feel like I shouldn’t bother trying to explain. No one actually gives a shit why I don’t want advice. I’m supposed to sit and smile and nod and say thank you. That’s what polite people do, right?
Being polite hasn’t historically gone well for me. When I am polite I have muddy boundaries. I don’t know how to do polite and firm at the same time. I know how to have firm boundaries or muddy boundaries. When I am trying to be nice–they’re muddy. And that doesn’t go well. Because I ignore small incursions into my space and then there are more and more and then I blow up.
“Just be present in the moment.” I don’t have anxiety because I am worried about paying my mortgage. I have anxiety because I have had a shitty life and some times that is shittier than others. I’m cussing a lot because I’m frustrated. But I’ve been cussing way too much and way too close to my kids. So I feel like once again I’m a bad person.
If someone tells me to be present in the moment in my life I feel like they are telling me that what I have been doing so far isn’t being present. It doesn’t count. I am present in the moment, motherfucker. I’m talking. I’m interacting. I’m working. I’m getting shit done in the moment. I just also have a horrid stomach ache because somewhere in the corner of my brain I’m saying, “My mother didn’t love me enough to try to prevent me being raped and she didn’t love me enough to let me talk about it once it happened. My mother doesn’t love me.”
I don’t think I’m grieving Uncle Bob. I’m grieving my mother. I kind of wish she would die already so this could just be at an end. Hell, I’ll even take another suicide with a nasty suicide note. It would at least be peace from this constant feeling of wanting to go find her and beg for her forgiveness. I want her to forgive me for speaking. I want to promise I will never every speak of it again. I’m sorry. Yes, I lied.
I want my mommy. But I don’t get to have a mommy. Not really. Not this lifetime. It’s too late. I lean heavily on some of the women in my life, but it isn’t the same. They are peers. They are friends. I kind of feel like forever, for the rest of my life, I just don’t get to have anyone I love and respect in that kind of role. And that’s hard. I’m not ready to be the female head of household. I’m too young. I’m too fucked up. I’m not good at being the stable one for everyone to depend on. Today I feel like a complete failure at my life. What I am supposed to be as the mom here is the one people lean on. But I’m not. Because if you lean on me, I fall down. And my daughter already knows that.
And that right there, that is the thing that is making it hard to stay at 50% interest in surviving. Because I have already failed at the most important thing in my life.
Right now I feel so desperate that I feel like if I back away from any part of recovery work, any part of speaking my story that I will hit bottom. The only place I see to go from here is to beat the shit out of my kids so I can prove that I am a monster. Until this crisis passes I need to not be alone with my children. As humiliating and pathetic as I feel. That is what I need. I need help.
I have friends coming to spend time with my kids while I hide in the garage. I should contact a few more people. This is very hard. But I have support and I will figure this out. But it’s really hard.
I should have been removed from my family of origin because I was not safe. No one protected me. That is a failure on the part of my entire extended family and the system. The difference between what happened to me and what is happening to my daughters is I know I am in a place right now where I am not competent to care for them as they need so I asked for help. I went out and I admitted out loud that right now I need other people to care for my children so that they can come out of childhood unscathed. I may be fighting demons but they don’t need to get hit in the cross fire.
That is what my family doesn’t understand. My sister and my mother have gone through these periods. I’ve seen this from the kid side. But what my mother and my sister did was scream at me, bring people home and have sex in front of me, basically they did anything to prove that they were bad. But they didn’t start out bad people. They started out good people who were making mistakes. They became evil because they kept doing it. Because they shame their victims and require silence about what they did. I have that potential in me.
I feel the urge to harm them. I visualize how I should do it. I have detailed pictures in my head of what I should be doing to them. And that is why I am freaking the fuck out. The images are getting more intense. I am fucking terrified of hurting my children and I don’t feel in control right now. This is the cycle. That is what is going on. This is what my mother and sister were to weak to do. They were too weak and to stupidly prideful to say, “I am weak and broken and I need help.” So they perpetuated the abuse on to the next generation after me. In the approximately 6 years since my brother broke contact with the family I have had conversations with my niece and nephew where they detailed their own sexual abuse history. My nephew was raped. That’s not my story to tell but I’m not keeping silent any more. I was told I have no right to reveal his pain. But I do. Because he was abused by the same people who abused me and I have the right to stand up and say that my sister is a disgusting monster and she should be shunned. She should be in jail. She is not a good person who makes mistakes. She is a child molester. She is filth. She deserves every bad thing in the world.
And my family is siding with her. And I sit here and freak out with these pictures in my head. I want to abuse my children the way I was abused. And I pray that my friend drives very very fast on her way to care for my children today because I am very close to the edge. I am not going to fall over it. I can hold out long enough.
Because that is how you stop this.
And I’m glad I didn’t hit send. Because I went in there and I dressed my baby more warmly because she was slightly chilly and I nursed her and I put her to bed and my older daughter asked me a bunch of questions and I answered them and then she told me to go away again because she likes watching her movies in private.
Why do I believe I am a monster who is going to harm them any second?
Last night I went to my support group. It was more or less “my turn” to share my story but that was not given support or space. I was expected to give short sound bites in ways that didn’t scare the horses. But I don’t have that kind of story. It’s hard when the act of speaking my story traumatizes people around me.
This is more of that “what to say” thing. When I get up the nerve to say these things out loud, with my voice, it is a big deal. I don’t do that. As loudly as I trumpet Radical Honest Damnit! I don’t actually describe these things out loud very well. And I need to. Ok, maybe not every incest survivor needs to, but I need to be able to speak about what happened to me. It is not fair that I have to continue bearing this in silence. Silencing me means telling me that I am wrong for talking about myself. Silencing me means that I am invisible. Silencing me means I deserve it.
When I finally get to the point of sharing my story I need people to look right back at me like I am still clean. Like I am still worth seeing. That’s why I want people to talk to me about my story. I leave details out every time. Often on accident. But when people ask me questions I realize what pieces I am conveniently telling and what pieces I am conveniently leaving out. I figure out a lot more of what scares me. But people have a limited capacity for that. I can only ask the same people to listen to the same stories so many times. But I have to tell them. I can’t be quiet and nice about it. I can’t keep my voice silent so that other people can ignore that horror exists.
The family members who are upset with me? The ones who sent me long and impassioned, or angry and defensive messages? Yeah. They don’t get me and they can’t. My niece sent me a message saying she hopes I can get over my father some day and return to the family and she doesn’t understand why I am hurting her so much because of things that happened before she was born. My cousin is saying, “All of that shit happened before I was born and now you are being mean to me so fuck you.”
I am not allowed to have my feelings and processes. It’s not ok that I view my mother and my sister as culpable. I am supposed to “let it go” which means forgive and forget and move on with the victimization stuff. How do I tell my niece that I have to cut her off because of the ways her mother sexually assaulted her and her brother. Because I need to ensure that people like my niece, who have been pretty badly sexually abused, are not an influence.
I just did a nasty thing. I sent my niece a response and I shouldn’t have. I told her that this, right now, actually has very little to do with my dad. This is about my mother and my sister sent me off to be raped and my sister participated in the rape and molestation of her own children. As long as people continue to talk to my mother and sister like they are normal people I can’t stand near any of them. Because they are acting like my mom and my sister ate good people who made a mistake. I’m sorry but systematically sending your daughter off to be raped means you are not a good person. You lose the chance at good person status for this lifetime.
And I told my niece that as long as she wants to continue to act like her own abuse didn’t happen and she can go about her normal day to day life with her mother and my mother acting like they are ok reasonable people… I can’t know her. Because she obviously feels like that kind of abuse is ok and she continues to take whatever people dish out. And therefore I don’t want her interacting with my daughter because she will pass on the feeling that girls deserve that treatment and you should keep your mouth shut when it happens. Not my fucking babies you pieces of shit.
I am frantic, scared, and angry. And I feel like it’s not ok to say what happened to me. I feel very unsafe. I feel very attacked. Even here, within my family in my home. In my sanctuary I still feel like someone will show up at any second and do horrible things to me. Want to know why I feel that way?
Because I am in a place where emotionally I am a small child. But I have small children. And they have needs. And small children don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves. Small children want to be protected and to sit and stare and dream and become. I can’t be the grown up right now. Thank god I don’t have to.
As I sit here and spin my wheels getting more and more upset with that group and my niece and my cousin and… I realize that I am trying to look around me for unsafe people and then getting mad when they are unsafe. My niece isn’t even close to going through recovery. She’s too close. And I need to leave her alone because sharing my story in the way I am is kicking her. Maybe she doesn’t deserve to have me take on the abuser role too. I do think I’ll be able to long term live with myself though. I didn’t say that Tyra was bad in and of herself. I said that as long as she associates with them she will accept their reality and it is broken. She doesn’t get to pretend that they are not monsters with me. With everyone else, fine. Not with me.
Now I’m drifting off into thinking about my kids. I need to have chats with my friends. As much as I am a raging pervert, I’m also the victim of incest, rape, and molestation. I need to not have sex stuff around my kids. I need that to not be part of their existence in any way. And people think Shanna isn’t listening. It’s not ok. I have been interrupting people for a while, but I need to take a more proactive stance. I need to talk to people before the conversation gets going about what is ok in my house. Because that is how you break cycles. My daughters will not learn what a blowjob is at this age range. That will not be part of their world. And when my daughters do learn about blowjobs it will be because we are having an age appropriate discussion about sex with our clothes on and there will be no porn to demonstrate. I am not going to lock up my books about being a survivor of sexual abuse but I want to get through this awful period of recovery so that I can stop talking about it around them.
My children cannot support me. It does not matter that I feel like a small child right now, I’m not. And my children should not have to support me in any way. That is not the role of a child. I’m hurting but they cannot fix me, nor should I in any way ask them to try. I’m not going to an extreme so don’t get paranoid. I’m not going to be able to help the fact that I cry randomly sometimes. But what I say is, “I’m thinking about stuff that happened a long time ago. I should probably start thinking about you though because you are awesome.” Then we run off and play. But I can’t do that today.
Today I am too small.
I have a thing for difficult people. I am not an easy person to be friends with and I tend to like people who are also difficult to like. Sharp people with a lot of edges and defenses. I understand them. Unfortunately there are some down sides to hanging out with folks like that.
Last night I invited a good friend over. The support group I am in is going to involve me sitting down and trying to tell my ‘whole story’ some week soon. I haven’t spoken these things out loud much. The majority of my communication about these topics has been through writing. I feel like I go mute when I want to speak of them. It is very difficult to overcome a lifetime of taboo and speak the words. I need practice doing it. The thing is, I like difficult people. People with sharp edges and defenses. It didn’t go so hot. Basically what happened is that this friend and Noah both have similar geek tendencies and in order to feel optimally comfortable they don’t step outside those patterns when they are in the same room. But uhm, those geek tendencies make it so I am completely unable to speak about my stuff.
So when things weren’t going particularly well and they were not reacting in the ways I needed I got very frustrated. And then Calli woke up and I had to go nurse. We had been sitting in the hot tub. I was hoping the dark would make it easier for me to talk. When I got out of the hot tub I realized that I was pretty much done outside anyway. I tried to communicate that I did not intend to come back and they should follow me in fairly quickly. I didn’t mean for them to do so instantly because I needed to nurse the baby anyway. But the wires got crossed. They didn’t come in for about an hour.
So I sat on the couch and rocked and felt increasingly invalidated. This isn’t exactly something I do much. I don’t even say the details out loud to Noah much when we are doing our metaconversations. No really, I am not able to physically speak about these things well. As time passed I felt increasingly unsafe and like I had made a bad decision to try. They came in and acted like little kids who broke a window and are hoping no one noticed. I flipped out. I called them names and ran to the office and sobbed. Then I got up and I went to the cupboard for a towel and I walked back into the office and I picked up the scalpel.
I don’t know what it is like for other cutters, but I love it. I love the fact that for those seconds the only thing in the world is the hot, terrible burn on my leg. I can’t think about anything else. By the time I get to cutting I am no longer capable of finding the words to talk about the monsters. I can’t. I am too much absolutely in the present. I cannot think about the past because I am unrelievedly in the present. I feel like cutting is a gift. Cutting allows me to walk away from any situation in my past and not think about it. No matter how intense my feelings are, I can make them stop. I can go completely and totally flat line. It’s not disassociating. It is forcing my body to have no space for anything other than the pain. That may sound unpleasant, but I promise you that emotional pain is harder and hurts more.
I yelled at Noah that he said… something. I don’t even remember what. Something about them wanting to hurt me. Noah’s response was, “No. We didn’t say that. And you will know it later.” I thought that was wonderful. It gave me space to think it then without trying to demand that his reality supplant mine right then. My friend apologized profusely and genuinely was upset. He is a wonderful person and he would move mountains for me. He loves me a lot. But you see, I like sharp, difficult people. And they often have a lot of defenses. He was trying to make himself feel comfortable because the things I was talking about upset him. He wanted to comfort me, but he didn’t know how.
I spend a lot of time living at that juncture. That is what living with an Aspie is like. They can stand near you and really not understand at all that you are having a whole emotional experience in front of them. I don’t know how to describe what that is like on a day to day basis. To be fair, Noah has learned my “tells” for when I am having an emotional experience at this point. Noah is quite good. It took him years and we’ve had some awful arguments. But he learned. My friend hasn’t learned my tells. And when Noah is distracted by other people he stops staring at me intently looking for tells. So they both managed to miss almost all of the signals from start to finish.
They didn’t mean to, but they did actually create a space where it was unsafe for me to talk. And they are big boys and get to put on their big boy panties and deal with feeling bad about that. And I need to put on my big girl panties and accept the fact that I set them up to fail. Talking about this stuff is hard for me. I need very specific kinds of support to do it. There is not a worse possible two person combination for creating that space amongst my entire network. Both of my boys can be wonderfully supportive and safe to talk to… one on one. When I get to dictate 100% of the terms of the conversation. Heh. But when they are standing next to one another (or sitting, whatever) they all of a sudden have to take one another into account and I feel like they are both pathologically unable to be safe for me around another alpha male geek. I’m not sure why. But they trigger the fuck out of one another. (Ok, I have suspicions as to why, but that’s not part of this story.)
Thing is… this isn’t news. At all. And I invited these two men to be the ones I tried to practice telling my story to? Awesome way to ensure that absolutely everyone is upset. That was the wrong decision. I could have invited just about anyone else. I could have invited that friend and sat with him in a separate space from Noah. I could have told them early on in the night that I need them both to take a vow of silence because if they talk over me I will be unable to speak–and they would have done it. They love me. They love me so much that they have both been through years of me being nasty and mean to them. The friend in question? Uhm, I cracked a few of his ribs years ago when I was overly rough with him. He wasn’t thrilled, but he has never ever been nasty to me because of it. (It was an accident. Really.) Naw, it is part of this story. I think this friend would have walked away from whatever else he was doing and married me if I had asked him to. He loves me. A lot. And Noah and he kind of have a low level dick contest when they are together. And they are both socially clueless all the time anyway. Yeah. I really invited the wrong combination.
Why do I do that? Why when I get to the point of wanting to spill my guts, do I need to talk about my sexual abuse in front of men who feel slightly competitive towards one another and are unwilling to be flexible when the other is present? Maybe because I don’t want to tell the story and I want reason to be upset and angry instead so I can focus my energy there. I want to be mad at my boys because they love me so much and I want to hurt them badly for committing the unforgivable sin of loving me. I want to start getting hyperbolic now because that’s the headspace I am in. I think that is the underlying reason. I think I picked them because talking about these things is horribly painful and I would rather derail onto another strong emotion than look at them. I would rather look for any reason in the world to turn around and start emotionally kicking the people who love me as hard as I can. I am quite certain my friend didn’t sleep well and he probably feels very bad for hurting me. At this point he probably is blaming himself for being a terrible friend.
Or not. Or maybe that is my story and he went home and slept great and he thinks that I am in a place where I am hurting and he is sorry that I am hurting so much and it’s not about him. I hope that is what happened. I’m not sure he has boundaries that strong, but I’ll hope for him.
And that leaves me. In the office. With a leg I can’t let my kids see for a long time. Right before our big European vacation. Awesome. It won’t blow up my life, but it is going to add a low level of stress for a long time. I am going to be freaked out about the possibility of Shanna seeing it. We are kind of a naked house. I am more of a clothes person, but when it is hot I don’t have a problem with stripping. I often work in the yard with no clothes on because I’m easier to wash off. It just seems practical. But that’s off the table for a while.
It’s really not big as far as patches go, at least not for me. I was pretty tentative last night. I haven’t used a scalpel in a long time and I was having trouble figuring out how I wanted to hold the blade. You see, as much as I may be suicidal, I am a perfectionist. I am not interested in going in deeper than I intend. I want to be very particular about going through just one layer of skin at a time. It makes it a much longer more burning process. It also requires more self control to move very slowly. That is what gives me the intense focus that severs my connection to the memories. My old therapist, Traci, was a Harm Reduction person. She didn’t think that addicts or cutters, or whatever other self destructive behavior pattern you have, necessarily needed to stop. Obviously they were filling a need. You just should be aware and careful of how you use it. Obviously it is better to find other ways of coping. But if this is what you got, you use it.
I haven’t needed to cut in a long time. Last night it didn’t feel optional. Last night I felt like I was completely unsafe and in danger of being actively hurt or reprimanded or something if I continued to feel those feelings. It was not ok to be in that part of my brain. I’m not even sure I understand entirely why. Ok, yeah… their behavior was sucking. But I know that about them. My entire relationship with both of them is predicated around me bullying them into acting how I want them to act. I’m probably not supposed to admit that out loud, but no… really. The default expectation when we are together is I decide how they are allowed to behave. I give them longer and shorter leashes depending on my mood. Really. That is pretty much the only way I can stand being around them and oh man that sounds horrible. I’m feeling terribly guilty right now. But the thing is, I’m setting boundaries. And it’s ok for me to set boundaries. The boys don’t notice when I try to set my boundaries in subtle, nuanced ways because that is not part of their language. They both really appreciate a 2×4 upside the head because otherwise they do not notice what is going on. They cannot step outside their own stuff to listen to other people unless the other person bullies them into silence.
What an interesting symbiotic relationship. To be fair, I am describing them while picturing them at the absolute worst of their combined behavior while together. Both of them are much easier to communicate with one on one and I normally only need a flyswatter and not a 2×4. Ahem.
Through the writing of this I have gone through feeling hurt, angry, sad, melancholy, amused, and at this point I’m shaking my head with resignation. My boys were my boys. The problem is, I wasn’t me. The little girl who was badly sexually abused and who was badly emotionally abused at home isn’t part of who I am on a regular basis. I am not a hesitant person. I am not withdrawn. I am engaged with the world. I am strong and assertive. I have opinions and by Gawd I’ll not hesitate to share them. But I’m also nice. I believe in justice and bullying is one of the fastest ways to make me stand up and shout someone down. My boys are bullies. Lovable bullies, but bullies. Normally I am great with that dynamic. I think it is fun and funny. It is endearing.
But my little girl doesn’t need a bully. I shouldn’t have invited that friend. That was a very hurtful thing for me to do to both of us. This is the kind of thing that is normally a stumbling block to forward progress. I know that the friend in question doesn’t know this blog exists let alone read it. So I could go forward feeling like I made my mea culpa to the world and “oh look how evolved I am for dissecting my feelings” and then I will stop trying for a while because I proved that talking about these things in person is unsafe. But the thing is, I picked someone who doesn’t know how to talk to a little girl. That’s not really his fault. He doesn’t have that life experience and he doesn’t recognize whatsoever that I’m having a massive psychological experience in front of him. He thinks I’m me. And I’m just as much of a bully as him and I love him for it and he loves me for it. We accept and like that part of one another. In respectful ways. Our dynamic has gotten much healthier over the years. I still have to set the terms for our interactions. And I didn’t last night. I’m not sure I would have been able to keep it up even if I had tried because the space where I can talk prohibits that kind of strength.
I need to talk to someone else. And that’s normally the stumbling block to progress. I need to create space in my life to talk about this more. It’s hard though. Calli is uhm, resisting weaning efforts. I think she is nursing twice as much as she was three weeks ago and I’m ready to put my head through a window. She is, in fact, in the living room with Noah fussing loudly. But I have 2 more minutes of personal time. Damnit.
So I’m a counter phobic 6, as least that is what Noah tells me. And Rebecca. And other people concurred. Maybe someday I will study the Enneagram and I will decide if I agree or not. Until then all I know is the more something scares me the more intensely focused on it I am. And right now I am so terrified of what I am currently thinking about that I am shaking. It is difficult to type. The thing is, what I am afraid of is being called a liar. I’m afraid of someone reading this and saying it isn’t true. When I first starting writing about things like this I was in graduate school. It was actually a fiction writing class. I chose to write creative non-fiction, basically telling stories about my trauma, because I couldn’t think of anything else to write. I didn’t present it that way to the class. One of the other students was very assertive in her position that what I was writing was unrealistic and not very good. I haven’t ditched that criticism yet, though I should.
I’m scared to write about these things because they are crazy. Really, seriously crazy. Why do I think they are that crazy? Because I have spent my adult life around atheists who have no patience for the woo. But I believe in the woo. And I need to own that and stop beating around the bush and just… say it.
Oh god this hurts. I found it. I had to come back to it. I had to come looking for the dark place instead of waiting for it to find me. That was harder than I thought. It was a lot harder than I thought to get back to this frantic state where I have to type or I am going to explode. It is even neat to me that I can’t say these words, I do need to type them. Thank god for computers. Fuck computers. That’s my life. And I’m already losing it. Shit.
After therapy this week Noah and I decided that it was a great night to go do more of the two chair thing starting at about 10. I was wired for sound. Something that came up a lot in therapy and then later with Noah was thinking about my current level of suicidal ideation. It’s really at an alarmingly high level. I feel more active compulsion than I have in years. My therapist asked me if I wanted to get into it with her and I told her no. When I told Noah that I had done that he responded with, “Ah! A challenge!” or the slightly less bombastic equivalent, which nonetheless means the same thing.
I am suicidal. Statistically speaking it’s really quite unsurprising. My particular brand of suicidal seems to be spurred mostly by shame. But here I am using my analytic voice. And each word of composition is ponderously considered, difficultly spelled, and not conducive to actually doing this. Let’s try something else.
It’s really scary to let these feelings come up. I feel intense pressure in my chest. I feel my throat tighten. I want to sob uncontrollably and yet I can’t breathe enough to get out sound. This is one of the feelings that produce intense, copious liquid tears. Often in other times when I cry I rack with sobs but no liquid comes out. I wonder why there is such variation in crying. And oh look. That was a really weak ass, uninteresting derail. Maybe some discomfort? Ha.
I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna talk about being terrible. I don’t want to say out loud that I believe I am evil. I believe my brother and my father are dead because I was loud and drew attention to myself and everything bad that came after is all my fault. I believe I am evil because my father whispered into my ear from when I was a tiny child that I was a witch. I have casually told stories for years about my maternal grandmother being a witch and I’ve told stories about things she supposedly did.
I learned every single one of those stories from my father. And the grandmother in question was not his. He was villainizing—no… he was literally demonizing my mother’s bloodline. He bloody well convinced me that I cannot escape being evil. He repeatedly encouraged me to seek out black magic because I had powers. When I was a teenager I read a bunch of books about Wicca, Shamanism, and a few other off-shoot pagan religions. I tried to cast a spell on a then-boyfriend to make him become obsessed with me. Hey, The Craft had just come out. He did become pretty obsessed with me. I think it’s much more likely that he became obsessed with me because I was a pretty girl who was willing to have sex with him.
But oh my god. I have built up this entire narrative in my life about how that scared me off of trying to pursue more magical endeavors because I have power. That is the crux of it. I have power. I do. The fact that I have survived my life is pretty much proof. I have survived my father molesting me all through my earliest memories. I have survived risky sexual activity during the periods of intense acting out I have had. The 25 year old man who fucked me at my request when I was 12 years old didn’t wear a condom. He was a drug dealer in Santa Clara. His name was Sean David Segura. And no, I don’t feel bad for naming him. Yes, I do. I hate that I feel like he deserves the shield of anonymity. He didn’t rape me and I’m not claiming he did. Only I was 12 years old and reeling from the last time my father sexually assaulted me and I wasn’t being supervised because no one gave a shit about me and I ran wild. I did it because everyone in my life was forcing me to be a grown up but I wasn’t fucking ready. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready. I have been having sex as a consenting adult since I was 12 years old. That’s 18 years. Super Bowl Sunday is my “anniversary”. No wonder I feel so.fucking.old. I started working when I was 15. It was intermittent at first, but I contributed an awful lot towards my support. My mother would pick up my paycheques and dole out my $20/week allowance. It was festive. This is relevant, but not what I am doing tonight.
I have power. I have gone through fucking hell. My early childhood was abusive in ways I am just beginning to be able to understand. I became an adult at 12 years old. I made some really really bad choices along the way. I did not choose the straight and narrow at pretty much any point. Why did I survive? How was I able to keep so much of me private from my family and the abuse? I think I have power. I don’t know how to explain this and I’ve spent my lifetime wracking it back and forth in my brain. I don’t even know if this is just how it works for absolutely everyone on the planet. But when I decide I want something I god damn make it happen. Whether it is good or bad. The only thing really big goal I have set that I haven’t made was getting my masters. But I started grad school because I wanted to have more knowledge before I started being a teacher because I felt unqualified. Uhm, well, I met that goal. Why again am I a failure because I didn’t obtain a piece of paper that would impress other people but not improve my life? Yeah, scratch that. I am a god damn rock star. When I say I am going to do something, I do it.
Only that’s not true. That’s the positive side of my brain. I’m there maybe 70% of the time when I’m doing extraordinarily well. I’m there like 45% of the time right now. It’s odd to flipflop back and forth between that kind of optimism and the kind of overwhelming self-hatred I have. I don’t have ‘meh’ feelings about myself. I either think I am amazingly wonderful or I am so despicable that I am using the power I have to do evil. Oh, and I have lots of silly examples of things that I decide I want and then they magically appear in my life (no really) but the best one is the dream about Tommy’s accident. I haven’t explained that yet. It’s 11:43 pm on a Thursday night and my children will be awake (possible multiple times) within 6 hours. Why the hell not tell that story. (Editing note: it is now 3:48 am on Saturday and I haven’t slept much since starting this.)
(Minor background note: my parents divorced when I was 3. There was knowledge at the time of the divorce of sexual abuse but the belief was it only happened to my sister. Or at least that is what I was always told growing up. I am currently struggling with my feelings around what I think my mom did or didn’t know and that’s challenging for me. But that’s a digression for a different day. My mom and I bounced around moving a lot. I went to 25 schools before dropping out of high school in my junior year. My brothers mostly lived with our father.)
So to start this right, I have to set the stage. That’s what you do, right? I was either 6 or 7. Tommy wanted to come live with us for a while. We were living with Auntie and Uncle B. in Northern California in the house they still live in. One night Tommy and I were bickering, as a 6ish and 10ish year old sibling pair will do that sort of thing. My uncle intervened. Specifically speaking he started yelling at my brother and spilled a cup of boiling liquid on my brother. Luckily my brother escaped major damage. But that was it. We were out.
Basically, I baited my brother and then we had to move. But I don’t want to leave the story like that. There was a lot going on. My brother and I had weird sibling dynamics. I was significantly more intelligent than him and better in school but he was good at sports and charming and knew how to get along. I was prickly and difficult and acting out. I wasn’t an innocent victim in the situation, but neither am I to blame for all of it. And ultimately it was my mother, as the adult, who handled the situation badly and abused us and set us up to fight so… yeah. Maybe not any of it was really my fault. But it will always feel like my fault. It will always feel like I was mean to Tommy and then everything in my life blew up. That is my story. That is what is stuck in my head. That is the age I am. I’m 7. Maybe I should do some research on 7 year olds. And that is the end of where this digression is useful.
My mom packed up our stuff and drove south through LA to drop off Tommy back at our dad’s house. My mom and I went off to Oklahoma and Texas and that was a whole adventure. Texas is was where I was raped for the first time when I was 7. But one night in May of 1989 my brother Tommy was hit by a car. Specifically, he was hit by a drunk accident injury attorney. It’s almost comedic. Only it’s tragic. He was on drugs and the belief is that he was more or less trying to commit suicide. He succeeded. He was hit by a car on Imperial Highway, which if you know Southern California is a major road.
(Side note: shoulders, center of breath and ability to move between mindsets)
Tommy died. Sure they brought him back but he was never the same. He had a severe traumatic brain injury. He had a horrible life up until I prosecuted my father and Tommy once again tried to kill himself. This time he went out walking and bought a gas can. He went behind a shopping center. He doused himself in gasoline and he lit himself on fire. Tommy was still alive when they got him to the hospital even though 80% of his body was burned. My father, in one of the most magnanimous acts of his life, told them to turn off life support and let Tommy die.
The story in my head is that Tommy’s suicide was my fault because I prosecuted my father and Tommy couldn’t handle the idea of our father going to prison. But it’s total fucking bullshit. The truth is Tommy had been suicidal from when he was a small child and he tried over and over and over and over in more and less successful ways over the years. There was a long period where he had to wear a helmet and boxing gloves full time because he had a habit of shoving his head through windows for fun. How in the hell is it my fault that he finally succeeded?
But it is. And I am trembling with terror as I try to write this. My lizard brain is screaming out in terror no no no no no no I’m bad I’m bad I’m bad it’s all my fault. I killed Tommy. I killed Tommy twice with my selfishness. God gave him back and let me have a second chance at being a good little sister and I killed my big brother twice. And I believe this because I believe I have the power to influence things great and small. And I hated Tommy more than almost anyone on this earth.
Admitting that about my poor, dead brother makes me wrack with sobs. You are not supposed to speak ill of the dead. Tommy had a brain injury. It wasn’t his fault. I should be loving in my thoughts towards him. But I’m fucking glad the son of a bitch is dead. As much as my every memory of my father is laced with molestation, every memory of Tommy is laced with cruelty. He liked to see me in pain. Really it was my first SM relationship and I just didn’t know it. Tommy would arrange to have other people beat me up. Tommy was there the day I was thrown off the monkey bars and broke my arm when I was 6. He pretty much told the kid to do it. After the accident Tommy hated me with the intensity of the sun. He did things to me that hurt every single day. Practically any time I came within arms reach. As he got older and further through puberty he would attack me and try to knock me down so he could rape me.
Our father told him that if he couldn’t get sex outside the family it was my responsibility to provide it for him and he was allowed to take it.
This was my reality growing up. These were the things that went on behind closed doors. And I’m talking about them. I’m telling the secrets. And I feel like I will choke to death. I feel intense shame and horror. Seeing these stories in front of me like this hurts. When the stories just keep coming and there is detail after detail after detail and I know I am leaving 90% of the horror out of the story for the sake of time to write it all down…oh my god. It was monstrous. Why does this continually surprise me? Because day by day one atrocity at a time you can’t see the picture. You can’t see how horrible it is. And this is a nice digression and all, but it feels awfully comfy and that can’t be useful.
Yes, actually there is something very useful here. I grew up to have a four year long bdsm relationship with a man named (tbd). I called him Daddy. For two of those years (the middle two) we were in a 24/7 Master/slave relationship. Oh my god. There is so much there to write about. I need to write about him. But not today. Not till he says it is ok.
I’m supposed to be talking about being suicidal. But I really don’t want to. It hurts to talk about being suicidal. And I’m experiencing a lot of bursts of manic creativity in other directions and that is really rare for me so I am on to something big. This has to be huge. What the fuck is this.
I’m feeling a lot of internal pushback about talking about the witchcraft stuff. This is really hard for me. This is the part where I start to feel awkward and uncomfortable because I don’t feel secure that it is ok to have the beliefs that I have. Right this minute I’m feeling very freaked out because what portion of my very odd belief structure is taken directly from my father’s brain washing. Oh my fucking god I was brainwashed into believing magic and believing that I am an evil force in the world.
No no no no. Fuck you. I’m not going to do that. Saying that does not make it true. I feel incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of being brainwashed. I’m not going to let that be something I sit with right now. I’m allowed to make that choice.
I believe in magic. I believe that if you want something bad enough you will take action and create that thing in your life. I believe this is a
positive and good thing. Given that I have repeatedly managed to shove myself through ridiculous amounts of work in very short periods of time I would say it works for me. I’m allowed to have this belief without my father being allowed to take it away. I wonder if that is behind the current obsession with Alice in Wonderland. I’m playing in my mind with the idea of agency and Alice is certainly a very different character through the different representations of her. I feel like I am turning about looking in funhouse mirrors trying to figure out which version of my agency is the right one. How much control do I get to believe I have in the universe.
Oh god this hurts. I found it. I had to come back to it. I had to come looking for the dark place instead of waiting for it to find me. That was harder than I thought. I believe that my father’s death is my fault. I believe it with an intensity that consumes me. And I have a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome and I want my fucking Daddy. That is what is going on. I am thinking about him molesting me. I am thinking about him hurting me. I want him. I want to be hurt. I want to do an intense sm scene. I want to do something horrible and destructive.
I want to kill myself.
What other act is there in the world that I could commit that would prove beyond the shadow of a doubt to every single person in the whole wide world that I am a worthless piece of shit and my father wanted to rape me and I kind of wish he had. I wish he had raped me instead of killing himself because then I wouldn’t feel this fucking guilty. And that is what I am hiding from. And that. Oh dear god.
I believe that prosecuting him was an evil act that forced him to do it. I believe I had the ability, with my hate, to do that to him. But I don’t really have that power. And I wasn’t acting out of evil. I was a scared half-kid-half-adult who was flailing around trying to not die. There was no bad in defending myself. I’m allowed to say no. I know that now, as an adult.
The funny thing is, reading this… you’d think I have trouble expressing boundaries. But I don’t. I’m actually fantastically good at expressing boundaries. I explore how to expand and retract them as necessary on a frequent basis. I put exhausting quantities of energy into defending my boundaries in a way that I believe is in the “range of acceptable normal boundaries” and I have to see it that way or I can’t do it at all.
I’m going to take a break here to say that this piece of writing is brought to you courtesy of a California Medical Marijuana permit. Without it I would be crying and beating my head against a wall and trying to slit my wrists. Instead I am writing productively in a way that is completely outside the parameters of my normal life and I am able to carry on as a functional human being during the day. Right now I am fighting to save my life because if I don’t deal with the extent of my father sexually assaulting me I don’t know if I will see my daughters grow up because I don’t know where else to begin fighting the monsters in my head. I have to say all of this out loud. And that is hard. That means going places my brain doesn’t want to let me go. I have to hack my brain and it hurts a lot. I’m not sure I can say I recommend this method of dealing with trauma. But if you feel like you don’t have a lot of time, why the hell not. I think this is my favorite digression ever.
See, I don’t want to talk about being suicidal. Being suicidal hurts. It makes me cry. I feel like I am evil and bad. No really. I believe that with an intensity that overwhelms me at random points in my life and I cannot focus on what is before me. I think I am barely aware it is happening, but it colors my intense paranoia. I am not reaching out to specific people right now because I believe no one wants me to. And I truly know this is paranoia because I sent out an invitation to a birthday party on Labor Day weekend five months in advance and within 24 hours I had 27 people who said they wanted to be there. It is simply not possible that everyone in the world thinks I am bad. It is more likely that people are busy and don’t notice me. It’s not personal. But I am doing what my mother does. I am sitting at home feeling like everything is wrecked forever and ever and ever because this terrible thing happened to our family and I can’t get passed it. Only for me right now it is the story of my abuse. I am stuck in cycles that are not good for me. I am trying to blow up my life because I cannot handle stability. I cannot handle stability because I was horrifically abused. I need to work through that and it’s going to hurt.
I am suicidal because I am the victim of incest and sexual assault. I am suicidal because I believe the things my father told me. I believe I am evil and a witch. I believe it deep in my monkey brain and I don’t know how to get these things out of me.
No. Fuck that noise. I don’t know yet. I haven’t done it yet. Just because I haven’t done it yet doesn’t mean I won’t. It will just be harder. I’m really tired of harder. I’d like a break one of these years. But if I have to get stronger I will. Because that is what I do. Because that is who I am. I have a really good, really stable life now and I am not going to fuck it up. I am going to hold it together. And I am going to write in the middle of the night. And I will get passed this.
But not in this essay. Because it is now 5:22 am on Saturday morning. My agenda for today is rather a busy one you see. Today I get to: finish the side yard drainage problem no matter how long it takes me nor how much it hurts because otherwise I won’t have a smooth pathway for people to walk on when they come to my Easter party and it is very very very important to me in my neurosis that when people come to my home they have a smooth path. No one there would judge me poorly in any way if I said, “We had a flooding problem in the last rainstorm and the yard is full of weird potholes because I have been dealing with a severe mental health crisis and I haven’t had time to deal with it!” But that’s not ok to say. That would be stepping all over the boundaries of everyone who wants to be generically, softly encouraging of my life in a light social way. So instead I will write intense journal entries in the middle of the night. I will frantically repair my side yard until I believe that I will not be embarrassed to have people see it. Before anyone gives me a panicked phone call, I’ve got it mostly done. You see, I don’t have the luxury of sitting down to do a project all in one go in one day basically ever. I’ve been working on the side yard for days. My entire body hurts. I am physically and mentally exhausted. I feel like I have nothing left to give to any part of my life.
But do you know what I will do? I will finish the delicious scone I have been noshing on with a nod to my wonderful online girlfriend who is doing a lot to help me grow right now and I will plaster a smile on my face. This was a really really big success in the war for me. I’m proud of it. No one gets to make me be silent any more. I can talk about my demons. I can brainstorm ways to deal with them. I can invite commentary. I can be real about the fact that there are two sides to every story but the only one that matters in my recovery is mine. I have to be aware of not losing my story to thoughts of being the scapegoat. I am not to fucking blame for almost anything that happened to me as a child. And I have behavioral patterns that I watch like a hawk. Because I have come a long way. I do hold it together. Shit. Or maybe this will be a rough day. Fuck.
This morning as I was plugging along on my merry way I received a phone call from my mother. One might think was a positive event if you didn’t know me. However this was pretty heinous. My mother called me to tell me that I was not sexually molested as a young child and she wants me to get my story straight. Right. That’s why I have been nearly continually in therapy throughout my lifetime. Excellent. Thanks for clearing that up. By the end of that phone call I was very nearly hysterical. Thank all the stars in the heaven that a friend was due to arrive very soon after. Today was therapy day. Excellent timing, Mom. My friend helped me get through the day. When my beloved eldest child woke up before I was ready for her nap to be over I was decidedly unthrilled. I really need the alone time to think right now. Luckily I have the most delightfully manipulative child. As we cuddled together in the rocking chair she perked up a bit and tilted her head to the side ever so charmingly. A lovely lilt moved into her voice as she said, “I know how to make your life better!”
“Oh, really? And what would that involve?”
“I think it would involve watching your very favorite movie, Ponyo. I think you would be soooooo happy that you would be able to remember all of the rules for a while.”
So much for a non-screen kid. So much for not watching the same movie on repeat. Today I fail at crunchy. But, I win at being a parent because every single person in my house is physically safe, emotionally safe, and doing what they want to be doing. At least the day might end well.
