People have asked me this more than once in the last week so I’ll just make a post about it. I’m ok with people linking to my journal. You don’t need to ask permission. I like credit for what I say (of course) but I’d be thrilled if people started sharing things.
Which is to say it would be really hard for my neurotic brain to convince me that I am still invisible if my stat page jumped. Just Saying.
Yesterday I got a letter. Normally I am thrilled by such instances. In this case I believe the person sent a letter because if he sends a letter I can only respond on his terms. If he sent an email he knows I would just argue with him and refuse to let him set the terms of the conversation. As is, I don’t feel like this letter deserves a letter back of its own so I’m just going to ignore it. Well, maybe “ignore” is a bit strong. I’ll stew about it but I’m not going to respond to him. I hear he has me blocked all over the internet. Hallelujah.
I would like to say in public that I am under the care of a licensed psychologist, psychiatrist, and I do actually have a general doctor as well. The folks who “take care” of me are professionals in good standing in their various professions. They all agree that I should be on some kind of psych med at this stage and if pot is working, why bother replacing it with something that has more side effects. Does that make it an addiction? Is someone who takes thyroid medication an addict? It’s an interesting question.
I certainly need pot. I feel a grotesque amount of shame about that. I’m aware the 12 step folks want me to get off it entirely. Obviously that would make my whole life better. Given the magnitude of my mental health issues I would need to turn to western medicine and pills. Seriously, they make everything worse. But obviously I am a disgusting low life addicts. Obviously.
And because I am obviously I am an addict, that means I am bad and abuse, right? I have anger issues. I’ve had anger issues for a long time. I must be addicted to anger, right? It totally makes sense. I’m comfortable in that emotion so I default to it and if nothing happens for a while to make me angry I’ll go find some moron on the internet to argue with. Since I was eighteen I have kicked holes in drywall twice and punched a hole once. I kicked the cabinet doors off. That is the entire extent of property damage done in my life. That is manifestly an anger problem. I don’t hit people at all any more under any circumstances. I don’t do that “girl” thing of whacking people when they are irritating. I married someone who finds it offensive so I stopped. I’m not going to be doing bdsm play with anyone else again so I don’t think I will ever hit a person again in my life. It’s kind of weird to think about.
But obviously my anger is running my life. I’m angry all day every day, right? No? Wait. What?! You mean the gross assumptions about me might be incorrect? I spend all day every day in a mellow and cheerful mood. I am edgy and anxious when new people come around and I feel uncomfortable. I have this constant fear that people are judging me (but I get a letter ever year or so from someone telling me that I am disgusting and abusive so I think that isn’t a paranoia on my part) and it makes me more prone to fight with people I think don’t like me anyway. The best defense is a good offense. If you strike me as someone who is likely to shame me and put me down I am going to attack you and be on offense from the beginning. It isn’t always perfect. But then I get letters like yesterday and I’m glad I have that approach.
I’m not going to do what people tell me and then they get butt hurt and *I’m* the one with the anger problem. Right. Obviously if I don’t want to do what he says when he says it I am in denial.
I am not at a place in my life where I can start going to a bunch of meetings in San Francisco. Not even to make other people feel better about my “sobriety”. I can’t bring my kids and telling me that I could get childcare from someone who thinks I am disgusting is hilarious. I would rather drop my kids off to play in the park alone. They would be safer.
A lot of the reason I have no contact with my family isn’t because I am paranoid about them sexually assaulting my kids during an Easter Egg Hunt. I don’t allow my children around my family because my children don’t need to sit and listen to people talk shit about me. I’m far from perfect and I deal with that. My 19 month old and my nearly four year old don’t need to be in the house of someone who feels quite free to put me down and talk badly about me. Hell fucking no. That is a hostile environment for me and mine. Calling it “support” is pure hypocrisy and it sickens me. No you don’t want to support me. You want to shame me and insult me. I’ll pass.
Anger is absolutely the monkey on my back. I deal with it by trying to figure out why I am angry and changing the part that feels like an attack so I can stop feeling defensive. There isn’t a chance in hell I am going to go visit the house of someone who has shamed me up one side and down the other and not feel angry. Then he will take that as more confirmation that he is right. No thanks. That is a lose/lose situation for me. Shaming isn’t love or concern.
That’s the part that matters. When people come to me in love and concern to “talk about my behavior” (it happens) I try to meet them where they are and listen. I don’t think I am perfect. I listen to advice when it is given appropriately by people I respect. Someone who sends me a nastygram letter unsolicited where he recommends that I go stay in a residential rehab facility because I smoke pot? Yeah. Kiss my ass. I’m fairly unlikely to smoke for the rest of my life. But it is a drug I need right now. I guess I’m bad for that. I guess I should abandon my children to the mercy of people who think I am bad and head off to a place that will cause me massive panic attacks as soon as I walk in.
And after I walk in I won’t be able to go to the bathroom when I want. And if I don’t draw pictures when they tell me to draw pictures all hell can break loose. Oh wait. I’m just being paranoid. That doesn’t happen to people. Oh wait. It happened to me. Uhm, no. No thank you. I don’t think there is a chance in hell that residential treatment would improve my life. I think that would be the thing that sent me over the bend and I would never be released because they would be pumping me full of frightening chemicals just to get me to stop screaming. I will never go back to a treatment facility. I would rather kill myself. My therapists know this. They don’t think I need to go to rehab. My therapist thinks that rehab would be an entirely inappropriate place for me because I am not hurting my life. I am appropriately using a medication that my body apparently needs right now so that I can go on to be a (mostly) happy, highly functioning adult. What is the problem?
The problem is that someone is mad at me. He has shit going on in his own life that he is upset about and he wants to vent his spleen on someone. I’m a convenient target. This is what being the scapegoat means. This is how such patterns continue on and on in life. He acted like the bringer of truth. “You’ve surrounded yourself with friends who don’t see you(sic) addictive behavior as anything unusual, and with a husband who is a hard core enabler.” Yes. I have chosen to surround myself with people who are nice to me and who do not send me nasty letters. You illustrate nicely why I do that. You are not right. You have an opinion.
I’m addicted to anger, cutting, sex, and drugs. Apparently. Sure. Why not. All of these “addictions” spring from the same basic place of feeling unsafe and like I deserve to hurt. I’ve been looking into the treatment for these issues for some time. Guess what the first step is?
Safety. Safety, for me, includes not talking to people who are going to send me long letters about how bad I am. Whether I have issues or not it is not the job of anyone to send me nasty letters about my issues. This isn’t how you help someone. But it is how you contribute to the surrounding feeling of unsafe. I guess I shouldn’t let go of that paranoia of people sitting at home thinking nasty thoughts about me. I have yet more evidence. Shit dude. He felt motivated enough by his hostile judgment to print out a letter, find an envelope and put three stamps on it! That’s commitment! It wasn’t even an off-hand email in a bitchy moment. He put effort into it. He didn’t open a dialogue about, “I’m feeling worried about you. Are you open to talking about some of the stuff that is going on for you?” He has no interest in my consent. He’s just interested in telling me how bad I am.
“A while back you wrote about how outraged you were when you discovered that there were adults who knew that you were being abused as a child and didn’t do anything about it. Another time you wrote something to the effect that at least your kids were not being brought up by totally fucked up addicts, they were being brought up my(sic) a high functioning addict. I like Shanna a lot, and if we ever meet when she is grown up, I don’t want her to be able to say to me, “If everyone knew my mom was an addict, how come nobody did anything about it?”
This is for Shanna.”
Bam! That’s class A perfect color shame. He’s not telling me these things because he is a judgmental asshole! No! He’s doing it for Shanna. He thinks it would be far preferable to be on western meds so that I can sit on the couch and stare at a tv and not do anything self-destructive and recover from my “addictions”.
I feel the love in every line. Don’t you? I was raped over and over. I was moved more than 50 times. I was not allowed to develop any normal attachments in life and I’m bitter about it. Obviously he needs to step in because I am a stoner. It’s the same thing as rescuing me when I was a kid. I’m just as bad.
I’m sure I am not reading this is the best possible light. I hear that 80% of all things read in text are read with the wrong tone. I guess it is too bad that this person didn’t have the respect for me to ask to talk to me in person, you know, if he was serious about wanting to help me. Instead he sent an aggressive and hostile letter (you can’t miss that even if you tone down my paranoia) and I’m supposed to just… what? Smack myself in the forehead and say, “You must be right! How have I lived without such sage advice commanding me how to get my life together!”
Why do I write about these things? Because if I didn’t write about it I would mutter under my breath all day. I would slam cabinets. I would be pissed off as fuck because this fucking asshole just god damn ruined my day. But if I come and write about it I can let it go. I went through all the thoughts. Now I can stop talking about when the kids are around.
There are always going to be people who dislike me and disapprove of me. If I let that ruin my day I can just go kill myself and get it over with. There are enough of those people for every day, forever.
In the best light I can see this letter as him trying to say that he misses having me as a friend and he won’t hang out with me until I get treatment so please hurry because he misses me. There is definitely a way to see it that way if I’m generous.
But this is a whole lot of shaming. I don’t need people in my life who shame me. I don’t need to be made to feel bad. That’s not ok. That’s not an acceptable thing to do to a friend. If he wanted to talk to me about these things he could have. He didn’t. He wanted to sit on high and give me judgments and orders. Well who died and made you the king of anything?
Don’t worry. I’ll tell Shanna you sent me a nasty letter trying to protect her. I’m sure it will make her feel much better.
If someone actually wants to talk to me and offer polite conversation about their concern, I promise I won’t write a hostile blog post about it. If you treat me like a reasonable person I’ll treat you like one. If you send me shaming text, I might print the whole thing verbatim and I might keep it private. You are taking a roll of the dice. I don’t keep secrets very well.
Do you know what not forgiving means? It means dying alone and angry no matter who is in the room. I don’t want to die alone. I don’t want to die afraid. I don’t want to be angry that after all this misery all I get is death. I don’t want that. I want to die knowing that I have honest to fucking god made the world a better place. I helped other people be happier, better, stronger, wiser. I want to die smiling. I want to know that I did exactly what I was supposed to do and I helped as many people as I could. I want to feel peace. Some day I want to know peace.
As long as I am angry like this there is no room. I have nothing to give. Being angry takes up so much of me. I don’t want this. I don’t want this to be my life. I don’t know the path and I am so afraid.
Every marriage involves different compromises. Different accommodation of irritations. Different forgiveness. Because the human condition is that we bump each other funny sometimes. Thank you to all the women who wrote me to tell me that you are angry at Noah too. It actually made me feel better. I felt like the anger wasn’t just mine. And that’s complicated too. Life is long and life is hard. Noah really fucked up. But he has never done anything to break my trust like this before. He has carefully in pre-negotiated ways pushed me right up to the edge of my limits and off a cliff. But that’s not the same thing as breaking trust. He has never broken trust before.
That does have to count for something. He knew he was being a raging dick. He didn’t mean to do what he did. I have never seen him cry before. He says it hasn’t happened since junior high. He probably already feels bad enough. Beating him down isn’t a way to have a happy marriage. It really isn’t.
I will never again bear a child. That is a decision I have made for myself. I want to spend my life with the only person I will ever really completely join my body to. I want to. And he’s going to fuck up some times. And I am going to get very very angry with him. But I keep my promises. I promised him a lifetime.
What does forgiveness even mean? It means telling him how I feel about sex with other people and watching him cringe. It means filling in the dots for him on some of my broken. It means telling him that I don’t want to have sex with other people any more. Even though taking that hit on my identity is going to be massive for me. I am going to feel compulsive. I am going to want it. And I think I shouldn’t do it any more. It’s not actually a good decision for me any more. Given who I am I don’t think it will actually be a healthy thing for me to do with other people ever again. I think this broken is too deep.
It’s time to try something else.
I’m trying to decide what mood I want to be in for today’s writing sprint. My first date yesterday was an only date. That’s ok. I’m glad I had the “I want to be chased” thought yesterday. By the time I got to the date I was real clear that I was uninterested in being the one to do 100% of the physical aggression. I’m happy to do 50%. But I’m not running the fuck. You don’t want me bad enough. No more pity fucks.
I don’t need to go have pity fucks with strangers. I had sex with Noah twice. It was hot.
I was thinking about the fact that a lot of folks have been discussing “appropriate topics” lately. Over here at Soggy in Milk we are the all-inappropriate-all-the-time channel so I’m going to wax poetic for a few minutes. Bear with me. So imagine you had this nice normal life. You have great parents and a couple of siblings you adore. As you go through your life you get to spread daisies and sunshine and shit when you mention your euphoric family. Everyone compliments you and tells you how wonderful you all sound. Then I want you to stop for thirty seconds and think of what you have read from me here. Man I really want you to do this again after you read the book, if you want to.
Now. How the fuck do you think I feel when people talk about their families? What exactly should I say if in response to questions about my family? Should I lie? Evade? Be as curt as possible so as to minimize the damage I am invariably going to do? Be honest and watch as people all but run as fast as they can to get away from me?
Seriously. Where is my good fucking option. Because you assholes seem to think that the topic of “childhood” and “families” is perfectly appropriate in public. Oh, people will tell me, “Well you can talk about Noah and the girls!” How generous of you. I’m so grateful that I have a pat answer now that will satisfy your need for idle chit chat about things you are uninterested in. Let. me. make. you. more. comfortable. I live to serve.
I am angry about the so-called polite conversational topics because they exist to silence people like me. They exist to make people like me invisible. And powerless. They exist to make it impossible for most people to successfully prosecute their attackers because it’s not ok to say what has happened to you. Ever. People who say, “Well it’s ok to say it to the police” have obviously never pressed charges for sexual assault. I have. Do you know how the police treat you? They say that you have mental problems and you should be in therapy. Despite the fact that the next door neighbor heard the whole thing and reported it to the police. I was still dismissed as crazy.
Fuck appropriate conversation topics. Do you know what is an appropriate conversational topic? Police brutality. Incest. Rape. Poverty. These are things that can and must be talked about as often as necessary. In any circumstance. Ok, not in any circumstance. But in any circumstance where there are only adults present. I don’t think every five year old needs to hear about incest. But every child should grow up hearing frank conversations about police brutality and poverty. They should know that these things exist. This should be part of their lives too. Because it is part of being aware of the world around you.
If someone brings up a topic you don’t like you can try to change the conversation and make it all about you, or you can engage in a dialogue. If you are feeling massively uncomfortable, say that. Look at why. If your upset is about your irrational beliefs being challenged… fucking go with it. Get over yourself. Seriously.
Things don’t change until people are upset enough to make them change. The longer you brush uncomfortable conversations under the rug only to be had at rare, carefully pre-selected, never risky times you are growing at a snails pace. That’s not something that fuels real personal growth, I’m sorry. I’m that kind of control freak. I can do that. I love doing that. It means I don’t do any personal growth. It means I hide in my little freak ghetto and get into a rut.
I’m better than that. I need to go have the uncomfortable conversations. I need to be honest. I need to exist in the world. I need to demand the right to take up just as much space as everyone else. I’m not going to evade or give a half-truth when someone asks about my family. I will answer questions honestly. I will act like I have nothing to be ashamed of. “Oh, what’s your family like?” “Incestuous rapists.” And I will take the blinking eyes I get. I will take the look of shock and horror. And I will try not to flinch. And I will try not to cry. And I will try not to run away. And I will try to answer the following questions graciously without my voice cracking.
I’m not doing something bad by telling my story. I’m just existing. Yes, it’s a harsh story. Sometimes life is harsh. Sometimes people have harsh lives. It’s far more common when you live in poverty. That is a big part of the story. Why did I move so often? Because my mother was running away from my dad and from one abusive situation to another. Because we lived on charity. Because we had no choice. Because we were evicted repeatedly for non-payment of rent.
I’m tired of trying to make up a story that will make other people feel comfortable around me. I have spent my entire life trying to figure out how to lie well enough to be able to talk about myself. I’m really tired of it. I’m really tired of trying to invent a me that is good enough to be in public. If I carefully censor myself enough, maybe I will be a good enough person to deserve to be part of public discourse. This feels really shitty you know.
This wouldn’t be such a big part of my story if other people didn’t require that I tell elaborate lies in order to appear “normal”. It’s not lying! It’s just… not mentioning things. Uhm. If you don’t know that my family is full of incestuous rapists then you don’t know anything about them and I shouldn’t bother talking. Because it affected everything. It makes a big difference when I talk about my mother hating that I swore if I mention that I was raped about twenty minutes before she beat me for cussing. It gives a whole new perspective. That was my life. I was raped and then I came home to more poison. Multiple times. It’s kind of weird that I would come home from being raped and be mean and nasty and full of rage, right? But that kind of behavior was not to be tolerated and I was to be brought down a few pegs.
It’s time to go start writing on the book for today. For better or for worse I found my tone. It’s time to go put a narrative on this bastard.
Often I do not get along with rabid feminists on the topic of rape culture. The reasons for that are myriad, but mostly revolve around the fact that I think most feminists are too sensitive. I think a lot of women cry rape when they are stretching. I think we need another word. I think that there should be some commonly understood word for coerced or unwanted sex that the woman never actually refuses. I think there should just be a way for women to talk about it.
“Yeah, last night he totally ______ me. It was ok.” I don’t know what this word should be. There is something missing in our language.
I have a hard time asking my casual sex partners to not choke me. Do you know why I have a hard time with this? Because I was brought up in a family where sexual assault was as common as dirt. Anything short of penis in vagina rape isn’t even worth talking about. I have had members of my biological family tell me that because my father and brother never had their penis in my vagina that I shouldn’t complain. Orally raping me with a gun to my head doesn’t count. The fact that I had to physically fight my brother off of me over and over and over… doesn’t count.
I have a hard time believing that I am allowed to feel good during sex. I’m going to tell you a secret, oh open internet. That whole “being trained to orgasm on command” thing? I actually don’t like that about myself. I feel pretty disgusting. But it’s a really good trick for when I am in a lot of pain and I’m not enjoying the sex much. I can whisper in someones ear that this works. And it does. Hypnotic suggestion is awesome. An orgasm involves vaginal muscle spasms. It’s more complicated than that. But the vaginal muscle spasm part can be triggered. It’s enough to keep the endorphins up in my brain to numb the pain so I can get through the experience.
I’m also going to tell a secret, I mostly only do this with men who are physically too large for me. I don’t need to resort to this “trick” when I am sleeping with someone who has a smaller dick. Which is why I prefer sleeping with men who are not that big. I don’t like having to use over ride tricks to talk my body out of throbbing pain. It’s not very fun. It feels like cheating.
It feels like cheating that I can’t depend on my partners to only do nice things to my body. It is a rape culture adaptation. I know that men are going to be doing things to me that hurt. When I was younger I was smart enough to have an overly endowed partner figure out how to make sex with him bearable. It’s a good trick. But it’s a trick. I always know later that my body didn’t want to be there. My body didn’t want that experience. It hurt.
I lost my ‘virginity’ when I was 12 and I asked a 25 year old to fuck me. He did absolutely no foreplay. He spit on his hand, wiped it on my cunt, and started fucking me. That is still how I have sex. These days it is better if he grabs me by the head and has me suck him hard first. A lot more saliva is deposited that way.
No, sex isn’t about orgasms. I have learned how to have sex with my husband that feels nice and makes me feel like a whole person instead of a hole. I rarely orgasm. If I need to get off, if I physically feel that ache… I need to feel like a hole.
I don’t like that I have become so thoroughly part of rape culture. I am the byproduct. If it doesn’t feel kind of like rape it probably isn’t going to get me off. But I’m honestly only kind of willing. It hurts. It makes me feel bad about myself. That I need to be treated like that. That I’m not very interested in sex with people unless they hurt me.
If I swear of masochism I swear off orgasms. I don’t want to say that out loud. It’s not completely true. But my days of numbering my orgasms in the hundreds are over. I can’t do that without someone hurting me.
I get off because someone else is using me to pleasure themselves. Because they want me that much. I don’t orgasm because things feel good. There should be a word for that. There should be a word for this feeling of needing violent sex but not enjoying, kind of. Yeah, we mutually got each other off. It was kind of emotionally uncomfortable. Yeah, we exchanged a little light-hearted sexual assault. Yes we totally _____________.
I need a word.
I was asked: “I do wonder, what would be the appropriate action to take if I see similiar signals in dc or their friends as they get older? If I suspect something is happening do I go to the teacher? That didn’t work for your friend’s mom. Principal? CPS?”
I think that question is my life’s quest. I feel absolutely entitled to rail at my family for not protecting me. I was raped over and over again as a small child. No part of that is my fault. It is the fault of the people who sent me into life threatening situations and abandoned me. I am an extreme case, and I’m aware of that. Now. I wasn’t aware of that before. Whenever I hinted at my story people would say, “Oh me too!” They don’t say that any more. Now I’m hearing, “I had stuff happen… but nothing like yours.” It’s isolating. I feel increasingly like a freak. My paranoia is (hopefully almost done) peaking.
What do I wish people had done? I wish that me telling this story now was so far outside of everyone’s lives that it felt like science fiction. And it kind of does. It kind of does because of how many different things went wrong–the intensity is the issue. Everyone has bad things happen. If I had one story to tell about this one thing this one time… most of my stories are not actually that severe.
It’s that I’m not done telling them. It’s that I have memories in my head that I have never spoken of. I do not have words for them yet. They are feelings in my body. Violations that just about severed my body from my soul. And that doesn’t mean they were more violent or physical. They are the scars I have emotionally from being made to believe from the time I was born that I deserve to have my father hold a gun to my head and rape me. That is what people like me deserve. I am an extreme case because of the degree to which I believed that was true. But I got out.
What do I wish people had done? I wish that all of the individual people who knew I was being molested would have done anything possible to bring attention to my life. If the teacher refuses to intervene, call the principal. If the principal refuses to intervene, call the police. Make. Some. Fucking. Noise.
And for god’s sake, if someone has a bad day and says, “I want to kill my kids” do not call the police “just in case” because what you are doing is abdicating responsibility. You are saying, “I think what you said is bad, but I don’t know if you will actually do anything bad or not so I’m going to threaten you with this Big Scary force and make you shut up. That way if you do something bad I won’t have to feel responsible for not acting.” It’s a cop out and a waste of resources. Just about every parent has times when they feel rage, overwhelming frustration, and has violent ideation. I’m not glorying in this. I don’t think it is a good thing. I think it is a serious problem that has to be addressed.
If you see someone acting out like that, I believe that communities should get involved. It should not be shrugged off. Do not start gossiping. Fuck gossip. If you are genuinely worried, get involved with the kids and/or the parent. It may mean you have to make space in your life by giving up things you would rather do. I really don’t care. There is no way that the police can adequately protect all of the children who are being harmed. Do you know what helps? Not being isolated. Not be stuck in that house with the crazy all day and all night. Offer to babysit. Yes, babysitting that child will be a nightmare.
You are going to have to be careful because your first responsibility in life is your own children. At this point one of my life goals is to add on to this house in a few years and once my girls are well into their teen years we will start fostering. I have wanted to foster since I was in the system.
Do.Not.Risk.Your.Children. I’m not saying that. But there are ways to integrate abused children that does not put them at risk of aggressing and does not put your children at risk of being a victim. It’s complicated though. I’m asking people to learn how to speak honestly about very hard things. And you have to learn how to do it without shaming or silencing people who have been hurt pretty badly. Little kids who have been abused can act like wild animals if challenged.
Educate yourself on what danger signs actually are. Get to know the kids who go to school with your children. Learn their personalities so that if something changes, you can say to the teacher, “Have you noticed a change in Betsy?” Ask the teacher if she knows what is going on. Be pushy. No really. Get over this idea that you don’t interfere in other peoples lives. I’m not saying be an asshole. But be persistent.
But don’t over react either. It’s a balancing act. It’s very hard. Ok. I’m not saying that anyone has to feel like they are required to troll the neighborhood looking for children. But if your friends have kids? Don’t let them fall of your radar. Include those kids in gatherings. Even if you think you know your friends and you love them and trust them. Act like the kids are real people who are worthy of attention. Every child will benefit. If you know that someone you like, or even love is hurting their child? Speak up. I’m serious. Don’t dither. Don’t be an asshole, but do it.
I’m not saying micromanage everyone else’s parenting. You don’t have to like everyone on the planet. Some personality types clash. That’s not what I’m talking about. Let me knock that strawman off the pole. I’m talking about actual abuse.
Everyone has bad days and people shouldn’t be crucified for them. But even good people can slip. Even good people can become monsters. I have monsters in my head. I could very very easily be an abuser. And no one would ever know. Because if I did that, I would listen to all of the advice that is thrown at me from everywhere in the world and I would shut up. As long as I am holding myself publicly accountable I know I won’t slip. Too many people would catch me. I need that safety net. I need to *know* that people give a shit about my kids. Because let’s be clear here, it’s not about me. I was brought up and trained to hurt people. That is what the grown ups do in my family. Even if we don’t actively abuse our children sexually ourselves, we are supposed to think of ourselves as weak and powerless. We are supposed to believe that we have no power or control over our lives. We are supposed to think that things just happen to us. We are not supposed to examine our own choices.
Fuck that noise. I don’t really care if the things I admit here are embarrassing to me. I don’t care if it worries people and makes them wonder about calling the police. What I care about is keeping my children safe. And yes, I have to write on the internet to do that. I don’t know any other way of building that safety net for my children. I grew up alone and isolated. I am weird and touchy. I’m quirky. I don’t do very well with a wide variety of personality types. I’m just not comfortable around them and I get angry instinctively. I don’t want to teach my daughter that. So I invite people back to my house instead.
I invite people who are very different. We have friends who are very different from me but they all have one thing in common. They love me and they love my kids. They are choosing to be invested in watching my children grow. They are ensuring that my children are safe. They watch me. They watch my kids. And the only reason they continue to know that it is important to do so is because I write about how very hard this is for me. If I stop writing, people will no longer know how hard this is for me. They will stop making the extra effort to come see my kids. My kids will have to depend on *just me* to monitor my behavior. I wouldn’t have had kids if I believed I lacked the self control to raise them. But man I like backup plans.
I have contingency plans for everything in my life. What do I want people to do? I want people to learn how to look at their lives in a more objective way and evaluate how they are creating the same situations over and over again. I’m not saying that everything is their fault. But lack of planning creates a lot of problems. If you recognize your patterns you can make plans well in advance for how to change them. It’s pretty much impossible for me to improvise how to change my patterns. I can’t. I have to preplan or I’m screwed.
Right now I am a weird creepy shut in because until I had children I believed that being sexually assaulted as a small child was my fault. I don’t think I understood that I wasn’t responsible. I didn’t see how weak and powerless I was. And right there, I had to go back and capitalize all of those I’s in this paragraph. I always capitalize I. It’s absolutely ingrained in my touch typing. Maybe.
Right now I am parenting three kids all day every day. Two are perfect, wonderful, shining examples of a healthy childhood. The other was horrifyingly abused and she wants to lash out at everyone else because it is just not fair that she hurts so much. Why do I always have to be the one who hurts? Why me? I don’t want to be the vessel for this pain. It is too much. And I’m angry. Oh my god I’m angry. My mother knew he was a monster and she violated court documents to send me to him.
And I’m doing it. I’m parenting all three of these kids. Sometimes that means that when the hurting child needs attention I arrange for help with the other two. That’s how you balance everyones needs. I can’t give up on this hurting child. Everyone else already did. I’m the last one standing. If I give up on her too, there is no way through this.
I just kind of realized what I need in a therapist. I need someone who will sit back and let me tell the story. The whole fucking story. Sit through years and years of me babbling till I can get through all the horrific under layers because it will take forever to sift through it. And I need a therapist who knows that me telling the story is how I talk myself through figuring out the solution. It isn’t until I tell these stories out loud to someone else with zero judgment that I can get to the end and say, “That wasn’t a good childhood, huh?” and have them respond, “Nope” without much emphasis. Just matter of fact. Yeah. That sucked. And I am a god damn mother fucking courageous person for getting through that. And no matter what, anything I did as I flailed around and tried to survive was ok. I was a child and they were trying to kill me.
And then I need the therapist to not give me suggestions as to how to get better. I need the therapist to learn when I am evading and call me on it. I need a Noah who is more objective. I need someone who can crawl inside my head and find out why I am doing the things I am doing because until I can deconstruct why I have no idea how to fix it. Other people do great and fine with other short term things with treating symptoms instead of problems, but that isn’t my story.
My story is that I have no idea what “normal” is and I don’t know how to find out. I need to explain every single fucking day of my horrifyingly twisted childhood and have someone go through with me why I did things right and where I did things that were maybe not the absolute best, and ok I can apologize for how my flail landed if it makes me feel better, but it’s still ok. I’m still ok. I am the right kind of me. I do not need to change who and what I am to make any one else happy.
I am a writer. I need to write about the things in my head. I need to express them. The noises and the voices are drowning me and when I get them out I find peace. I need to say that my childhood was not ok a few thousand times because I have to say it for every time I was raped, molested, abused, made to feel invisible, hit, called names, and told I was worthless.
I need to find out that it really isn’t normal for a 12 year old girl to ask one 25 year old man to fuck me then date another 25 year old and accept jewelry from him after going down on him the first time. I was well on my way to a bad life. My first chosen lover was a 25 year old drug dealer named Sean David Segura. He fucked me without a condom. He fucked me without foreplay. It hurt and it sucked. But I thought I just had to get used to it. I dated a DJ from KRTY. His real name was Rick Rood but he went by the name Glen Richards on the air. We only dated for like a month. But my mom seemed to think it was just fine that I was dating him. At least he was a nice guy? Who liked to have 12 year olds suck him off. He was also a singer. I went to watch him perform at the county fair. Uhm. He sang childrens music. Right.
And these are the things in my story that my family points at. These are the things that i have done that they use as evidence of why I am bad and dirty and crazy. The thing is… this is what happened when I was 12. It was really kicked off a few years before that.
I was 7 when Tommy was hit by the car. My whole world exploded. Everyone turned and looked at Tommy. I was very invisible. I started acting out really hard. To be fair, I was raped not long after his accident and before I saw him and it became real for me. So the accident tripped things off. Then Michael raped me and my mom beat me. Then my mom up and disappeared for months and left me with my sister. My sister was 20. A drug addict trying to abstain because she was pregnant (but she would not receive prenatal care because she was afraid of drug tests) so she was a nasty fucking bitch. Oh she was awful. She was horribly abusive a lot of the time. From my current point of view I feel like she was probably actually doing pretty well all things considered. But that wasn’t how it felt at the time. And then I was sent home with a family I only kind of knew. By home I mean I drove home with that family in their minivan from Texas to Southern California. It was a horrible trip and I was terribly traumatized and everyone expected me to just buck up.
We bounced around Southern California. I can’t tell you what happened then because I have nearly no memories. I know that eventually we were with my Uncle Larry for a while (my brother has since filled me in that my mom was fucking him for rent–nice, huh?) and Uncle Larry liked to premake his screwdrivers and just leave the pitcher in the fridge and I got very drunk. And my mom and I stayed up on New Years watching horror movies. It was really pretty awful. I was obsessed with horror movies and my mom let me watch them all the time. Some day I should stop and look at the movies I watched: The Gate, Poltergeist 1, 2, 3, and the Nightmare on Elm Street series again. I bet I could come up with recovered memories that way. Derail!
After that I’m unclear until we lived in Whittier. That part of my life was very bad. We lived there for 18 months. So many things happened then. I know that is the part of the story I need to get to right now but I am dissociating hard. It’s actually hard to maintain eye focus. This is scary. I keep being pissed off because people aren’t posting enough on facebook. Please god, isn’t there something in the universe that can distract me from this pain? I want to go play with my children to avoid this. Right this minute that would be a derail and I know it. Fuck.
My instinct is to call it the darkest part of my childhood. Because then I can go off on a digression about whether it really was or not. But that’s not the point. It was god awful horrible horrible horrible. We lived there with Tommy during the brief time they tried to have him live outside a facility. It wasn’t good. My mother and my sister were not prepared to deal with the kind of care that a brain damaged disabled kid needs. My sister was trying to get her life together. She was trying to go to college and she had a good GPA and she was smart. But her husband dumped her after my nephew was born because he wasn’t interested in being a dad. That man deserves to rot in hell for what he let happen to his son. I hope he has nightmares every night. Bobby is a selfish, self-centered son of a bitch. He was more interested in being a kept pretty boy than in caring for the son he made. My sister went off birth control without his permission but he didn’t want to bother with condoms. He helped make the baby, he deserves responsibility for how my nephew turned out.
Anyway. But my sister was dating Tom. Who was a drug addict, alcoholic loser. She claims she actually decided to get pregnant with my niece, which is really an interesting statement. Wow. You wanted to have a kid with that man? You wanted to ensure contact with that man forever? oooooook. You are baby mama number what? Ok, and now is when I look like a classist bitch.
And that’s ok. Because wanting to not be that, to be something different saved my life. Denise’s boyfriend Tom came on to me over the years. It was subtle and I encouraged it. I own that. I thought that was what I was supposed to do with him. After all that is what my sister was doing with him right in front of me. Closed doors are for prudes! Only prudes wear clothes! I strongly suspect she was drunk and/or on drugs through that whole period but I was totally unaware of the drugs.
You see, my mom and my sister thought that as long as they didn’t tell me what had happened to my sister and they didn’t do drugs *in front of me* that I would be ok. They would break the chain. They would free me from the cycles of abuse. And that is what my brother thinks will work too.
But the problem is that they continue to hold abusers to their bosom and permit them their “mistakes” because after all, everyone is human. We all make mistakes. Right? Look, I lay before all you anonymous people on the internet that just like the rest of my family I too am a rapist and a molester. I will tell you the atrocities I have committed and I do so because this is how I figure out where I end and they begin. This is where I explain that I feel like I am a rapist because I sexually aggressed when I was a very young child. I will explain the circumstances in which I crossed boundaries for people and I don’t want people to tell me it is ok and I am still a good person. That is a dark spot on my soul and I will carry it till I die. No one can absolve me of it and trying to do so minimizes my pain. I have to live with that guilt. I can learn to have compassion for myself as I do, because I was a child. And I was just flailing around like a trapped animal trying to survive.
But I still did it and I still need to hold me accountable.
Just like my sister and my mother need to hold themselves accountable for what they did to me. I am not interested in granting anyone mercy in this game of life. If you grant mercy then you allow poison to spread. I am not going to be part of the sickness. And god it sucks to see how I was when I was a child.
But I’m not going to turn around or find Wicca or go do Reiki and cleanse my chakra as a way of absolving myself of guilt. Fuck that. I think that’s the fucking easy way out. I’ll have my husband beat it out of me. It will be awesome.
I know people are reading. My stats page is shocking the shit out of me. Thank you. A few minutes ago I put together a paragraph and stopped and reread it a few times. It feels real, but not true. And I’m not sure why. If anyone has a few minutes to babble a comment at me about what they think about it, I’d like that.
I had to see how bad my life is now compared to how bad my life was then and how bad my life is compared to their life now. I want my life. Staying like them is so completely horrible to me that I physically reacted. So I turned around and I hit them just about as viciously as I could. And now I’m trying to make peace with the fact that I feel like it makes me an abuser when I tell people that I was sexually assaulted repeatedly with collusion from my mother for almost 20 years. That’s hard.
I feel like I spend most of my life lately saying, “It’s complicated” because no matter what subject I am looking at there are many different things that could be combined/fixed/told. And I don’t know how to begin. Luckily I have the internet, and friends who are awake. My friend Peter pointed me towards the class where I met him. There is material there. And he’s right.
My first semester of graduate school was in 2003, before I met Noah, right after Tom ended our M/s relationship. Before Tom and I were poly I started grad school. Naw, that’s not even true. That’s when I applied to grad school. I started spring semester so I started grad school in January of 2004. I met Noah in late February. So this story is going on concurrently to me starting to tell the story of my abuse out loud in the context of my relationship with Noah.
I went to a fiction writing class. Honestly I picked it based on when I wanted to be on campus. Always the best selection criterion, I tell you. I did write some fiction for the class but all of the fiction I chose to wrote was borderline pornographic (or very explicitly pornographic depending on which story) or I wrote creative non-fiction. I didn’t tell the class that I was writing about my own childhood abuse. I did not explain that the horrific, gut clenching story about a 7 year old being raped was my story. I kept distance there. Most people in the class responded just fine and they gave me very valid feedback on my writing.
But there was this one woman. Liz? I think her name was Liz. She didn’t like me much. She didn’t like my stories. She didn’t like my attitude. She was one of those out and proud lesbians who acts like all heterosexual sex is rape. I doubt she would have actually said that, but that’s pretty much the place she was in. Now, like 7 years later, I can see why she was the way she was. Then she just felt mean. She picked on me when I shared my stories.
What do I mean by that? I mean that when I was visibly upset when people were workshopping the story about my rape she was very hostile. She specifically said, “This story is ridiculous because this kind of thing doesn’t really happen to people.” Now I kind of wonder if she was denying her own abuse. Her response was really hard for me. I brought stuff that was too intense to class and I felt like I got screamed at for it. To be perfectly clear, the professor was awesome. I’m quite sure he had strong suspicions about me because he gave me great writing feedback and he gingerly patted me on the shoulder and told me I would make it. Men like him have been the rock I have built my life upon. Women rarely manage that kind of support properly.
But oh man. I’m not over Liz. How dare she tell me that my story was unrealistic? That’s not fucking writing feedback. We had a guy in class writing stories about people who were kidnapped by aliens! She chose to tell ME that my story was unrealistic! Ok. Fuck her. I feel like she is part of the great evil cabal that wants me to kill myself instead of speaking because she doesn’t want to hear about my pain.
But I’m in a lot of pain. And that’s a hard thing to talk about. How do you express your pain properly without hurting anyone else? I mean, the problem with Sharon and Liz is that they feel I am overstepping their (or someone elses) boundaries and I don’t have the right to do that. Thing is, I don’t have any clue whatsoever where boundaries are supposed to go. I flail and I fuck up. Sometimes they are really far away from me and no one can get close enough to have a conversation and sometimes they are in so close that I can’t defend myself when someone rapes me. I do not know what healthy boundaries feel like to naturally have them for ones own body. I don’t. I pretend. I try to make it up. My boundaries shift depending on time of day, how many people are around, how recently I have thought about my family, what I’m eating, how often I sleep…
And that’s not cool for the people around me. That’s messy and abusive. Because then I go off on people for correcting my grammar. I saw that I know it is a little thing, but it felt abusive. It felt over the top. It felt like you were trying to publicly humiliate me and make me look small and stupid and you look big and powerful. Thats not what was happening, but that’s how muddy my boundaries are. I can KNOW things and not feel them.
I hate being sober. I can’t tell the stories. See how I am dancing here? But Sharon made a crack about the marijuana and how I should stop using it and go on psych meds. Despite the many many many years of problems I had trying to get psych meds to work. Despite the fact that the people who are in my house with me monitoring my behavior tell me adamantly that marijuana is the right decision right now in this crisis point because it is clearly helping me and it does not have the miserable side effects. But someone in authority, someone I feel “knows more than me” told me that I should stop. So I am not smoking this morning. Even though I am going round and round in circles and winding myself up.
I don’t know how to get past the anxiety and look at the stories without it. My brain is too effective at shutting down those avenues of thought. When I try to sit here and think about being raped when I was 7 years old my stomach starts to hurt, my neck hurts. I feel tense. I am breathing fast and rapid. If I were trying to speak out loud I would be doing it so fast and so quiet that people probably wouldn’t really be able to hear me. I’m scared. I’m small. And I have no real voice. Even if I could start rattling off the facts, I was 7 years old when a neighbor raped me. There was a witness in the room and another witness (his mother) came in and saw what was happening and then walked out leaving it to continue.
Many many people saw my story. People were there watching it while it happened. People actually physically saw me being raped and didn’t stop it.
Why shouldn’t I be angry again? Why in the hell is it surprising that I have rage issues? Why in the hell should I learn to tell my story in a small, inoffensive way so that other people don’t have to be hurt by my story? Why is that my responsibility? I didn’t do anything. All I am doing is telling the truth. All I am doing is saying, “Hey I was a little kid and people hurt me” and people then react to me as if I am a monster. They want me to shut up. They want me to be little and silenced. They want me to make my story palatable.
Well fuck you, none of this is palatable. This is disgusting and horrible and I had to live through it. How fucking dare people tell me that I don’t have a right to speak. How dare people tell me that I have to make my story palatable. I had no choice. I was raped. I was raped over and over during my formative years. I was programmed to think that my value was in sex and I should be silent the whole rest of the time.
But I am not that person. I am loud. I am here. I have a voice. And I’m not going to stop using it.
In May of 1989 my brother Tommy was hit by a car. My entire childhood is told in relationship to that event because that is the Big Obvious Date that I can remember. I turned 8 in September of 1989. Tommy was in a coma for five months so he woke up in October. When he was hit by a car we were living in Texas. I dreamed about the accident and woke up and told Mommy that I saw Tommy get hit by a car. She told me it was just a dream but couldn’t get a hold of my dad for three days to find out how Tommy was. I have no idea how long this lasted, but my mom was there for a bit before rushing back to California to sit at Tommy’s bedside. She left me with Denise (my sister) who was pregnant and her then husband Bobby. I was raped after my mom found out about the accident but before she left. So I am pretty sure I was 7.
This is how it works with all of my memories. I have to stop and think of all the collaborating details or I am afraid I am making it up. I have to be able to list off long, extensive lists of things that happened the same day to prove that I was alive and I had that day and I saw those things and other people believe me about all the other things (often these details are verifiable) so therefore they will believe me about the abuse. But people don’t. People tell me that I am lying or exaggerating. That my stories cannot be real. But they are. My stories are real. I am real. This was my experience of the world. It is bad and scary and hard. But it happened. Dirty things were done to me but I am not dirty. I am not bad.
His name was Michael and I had quite the crush on him. I followed him around. I was desperate for any sign of love and affection. I was willing to do anything he wanted me to do. I don’t think I told that part in the story in class. This event wasn’t the first time Michael and I had sexual contact, it was just the last. One day when we were in Michael’s room and he and his cousin were playing video games in between saying degrading things to and about me. I can’t tell the whole story right now. Not right. Not the real thing. I can’t. I want to but I don’t feel safe. I feel like if I tell the whole story again someone will be nasty, and they might and I can’t control that.
I feel like it is my fault Michael raped me because I put myself in the dangerous situation. I went after him. I pursued him. I am in the phase of recovery where I can’t tell the story from the point of view of a victim. I am the monster. Right this minute I want to tell the story as a bragging story. I want to talk about how I am so into sex that I knew when I was a little girl that I wanted it. That I picked a boy I wanted and I went after him. I didn’t let any obstacle get in my way. And I fucked him.
That’s all I want to say. I want to sound tough and bad ass and brave. I want to sound like I had choice. I want to sound like I was active player. I wasn’t a victim. I wasn’t abused. I wasn’t raped. I was just ready for sex earlier than other girls. Do you know how many times I have told that story? More times than I can count. That is how I survived. That right there.
I have been raped so many times in my life I’m not sure I can count them any more. The vast majority of the sex I had was only consensual in the sense that I got into a situation where a guy wanted sex and I didn’t believe I was allowed to say no. I wanted to be touched. I wanted physical contact and I knew no other way to get it. When I was a toddler and I sat on my fathers lap he would put his hands under my panties and slip his fingers into my vagina. That was love. They showed me porn. My mother started giving me tips on blow jobs when I was 11. It was my fault, of course. I brought it up. I asked. She didn’t initiate that conversation so she feels like she is innocent.
But my mother gave me advice on better blowjob techniques when I was 11. That’s not ok. She needed to hold that boundary. That is how she continued the cycle. That is why I do not trust her. My mother does not know what kind of boundaries other people have either. But she is in her 60’s and she still doing things that are that kind of inappropriate and if you call her on it she goes into this long explanation of why she isn’t responsible for her behavior. Bullshit!
I am responsible for my behavior. Me. Not God. Not my father. Not my mother. Not my sister. Not my therapist. Not my husband. Not my children. Me. Me. Me. At the beginning of the day, at the middle of the day, at the end of the day… I am with me. I always have been. I always will be. I am not looking to be any one else’s ideal of the right person. I’m afraid that right now I am at the point where I have to stop relying on anyone else. Maybe I can find the right therapist if I keep looking but it will really and truly have to be the RIGHT therapist. Sharon isn’t it. Sharon wants to make me into her image of the perfect post-abuse mother. No.
Why do I want to recover these memories. Why am I doing this to myself. This is horrible and I am beating myself over the head with it. I am very good at forgetting. I was told I have to forget. I was told to be quiet about what I do remember. But instead I am completely structuring my life right now so that all I can do is look at these memories. But I’m letting the memories control me. I am letting personal time become all the time. Why. That’s a big thing to do.
I’m afraid that if I let myself have these memories fully, if I really examine them I will become the people who hurt me. When the people around me react with horror I feel silenced. I feel like I am driving myself insane. I have to say these stories. I have to tell them in all their tear filled agony and I cannot bear to see peoples reactions. I think that officially makes me a writer. Right now Noah is making breakfast and my babies are playing and singing with him. I am not allowing my rage to destroy my family. My family is beautiful and strong as I am beautiful and strong. Most of the time I bear my burdens lightly. I do not feel weighed down by the weight of incest. I know the right road for me and I am on it. I don’t want to change who I am. I really like me.
I want to feel like it is ok to be me. I want to feel like who and what I am is right. I want to feel like it is ok that I am different from everyone else. I want to feel like it is ok that I am special. That sometimes I need to say, “Hey can people use gentle voices with me even when I try to escalate things” and have the people around me understand that saying that is humiliating and embarrassing and I feel like a disgusting person for saying it. I need it to be ok that I talk about my past. I need to get to a place where I know in my heart what the right amount of information to give my children is. I do not want my children twisted by my legacy of shame. I want my children to continue to grow in the absolute safety I have provided. My children are a strange mix.
So here’s my thing. My daughter is verbal. Astoundingly verbal. Exceptionally verbal. Who knows what that will mean in terms of her overall achievement in life. That’s not the point. It’s not about competition and I don’t know how to talk about it without it sounding like I am being an asshole. So I don’t speak about this problem. This is a problem. I am having a very hard time with how verbal Shanna is. Shanna asks me questions and she mentions things in off-hand ways that sound like they might maybe be questions and I don’t feel like I know what the appropriate amount of information to give her is.
Shanna wants to know why I am sad. Shanna is acting out being sad and I feel horrible about it. So far I have told her that I am sad because bad things happened to me a long long time ago and I think about them sometimes and that’s hard for me. I have described my anxiety as “I have a lot of work to do. And you know how you feel when you are tired and really hungry? I feel like that all the time when I am trying to do this much work.” I have no idea if I am doing this right. I honestly think that I am freaking out so much because I feel like I have to hurry up and get over feeling like this because otherwise my kids will grow up with someone like me who just checks out for a while.
And I have a lot of shame about that. That is what my mother did. My mother was on so many drugs to numb her pain it was absolutely ridiculous. She popped so many pills it was unreal. That was normal. I grew up convinced that I wouldn’t do that. And I have such an aversion to taking pills that prenatals were nightmareish for me and I have now stopped taking them because I simply cannot do it even though I should take them as long as I am nursing.
Instead I am smoking pot. I’m not drinking. I’m not taking pills (and I won’t), but I’m smoking pot. I am having a hard time with that. I am not a lifelong pot smoker. I really don’t enjoy doing this. I’m not enjoying how it feels. But it keeps me level. It keeps me from snapping while I can’t get the memories under control. It is making me go flat line. And while I am doing it during the day I have people here watching my kids for me. That is the difference between me and my mother.
I cannot meet all of my children’s needs by myself right now. I am having a crisis. But I am dealing with it. I am dealing it with it in a way that is safe for me, for my children, and for the people who are offering help. I am not stepping on anyones toes. I am not doing something bad by asking for help. I am not imposing. I am not hurting anyone. I am weaker than normal and I cannot carry my load. People with room to spare, people who love me are helping me. I am doing the right thing for me. I am.
Believing that is the first step to recovery for me. That’s it. Right now, for this moment of this crisis that is my step. I have to believe it is ok for me to be weak and need help. I have to believe that it is ok for me to ask for help. I need to feel like I can allow other people to help me. I need to actually accept the help.
Baby steps, people. I see several of the offers and I love you and I want to respond and I can’t right now. That is too big of a step. I don’t yet believe I am allowed to take it.
Right this minute I am stone cold sober. I slept for more than 9 hours. I am trying to get through some thinking before the kids get up. An online friend mentioned that when you go through stuff like this you want to harm the people who hurt you. Your body gets all of this energy so that you can fight off an attacker. But no one is attacking me. No one is hurting me. But my body doesn’t know that. My body feels like I am a tiny child and people are horribly abusing me. It’s a weird kind of regression. My children are major triggers right now because little kids are rough. They crawl all over you heedless of sharp elbows and knees, they pinch and grab, and just generally they act like I shouldn’t have feelings. Like I am invisible. Kind of like my dad. When he paid attention to me he brutalized me. When my mom paid attention to me she complained that I wasn’t doing enough work. Yeah, I have some anger.
I fired my therapist yesterday. After an exchange that made it sound like very different approaches to healing I decided that I need to find someone who is more like me. I don’t do well in the nice clean office in the nice part of town with the nice upper middle class woman who wears pearls. I think I have a nasty attitude before I walk in. That’s my shit and my baggage and stuff I can mostly deal with most of the time. I don’t think I can right now. Right now I need a therapist who is used to dealing with addicts and people who don’t have their lives together even slightly. Because right now I am reverting to shit with my family and no matter how many high fallutin psychology “experts” you can quote long passages from, if you don’t know what a seriously abusive family is like… I don’t think I can talk to you right now.
My therapist had fuzzy boundaries. She made a big deal in group about how it is specifically illegal for her to share her story… but then she dropped details. She is not rigorously accurate with her word. She thinks it is ok to say, “Ok, person A will go tonight and person B will go in two weeks” and then something happens in the intervening week and she decided that person B wouldn’t go in two weeks. I was person B and she didn’t tell me that she decided that we should do something else on Monday. That’s why she didn’t give me room to speak. Because she didn’t understand that I was clinging to the ability to speak. That was the only reason I crawled my way out of my house shaking and upset. And then she expected me to sit there and listen to everyone else process and only take my short turns and be appropriate for the group.
I can’t do that right now and the fact that she acts like I am a problem because I can’t? Yeah… not a good fit. Most of the time I am highly functioning. Most of the time I can sit there and explain why she is totally right.
I have been awake for ~40 minutes now and I’m sober. The longer I think the harder I shake. I’m scared because I know that I do have rage issues. I know that I am angry with my entire family. I think that is why I am sitting out here shaking. Someone HAS to be in a lot of pain as their punishment for me hurting so much. And the only people here are my kids. This is how the cycle goes on through generations. I am not able to hurt my father because he is dead. I have cut off my mother and sister and quite frankly the only damage I was able to do to them was to refuse to keep my silence. That is the only tool I have. This therapist does not understand that being able to speak my truth regardless of how or where or how appropriate it is, that’s what is keeping me alive right now. The fact that I am allowing myself to express what happened to me. The fact that friends are coming out of the woodwork to listen?
Maybe I can’t walk into a group and find the support I need. Maybe I am too broken. This isn’t the first group I’ve terrified. But if I am too broken to go find a group because the people in a group are too broken to support me… it’s hard. I get good support from my friends. Sometimes I feel like it is better than I deserve. But I don’t have people in my life who were abused like me. I actually just sent an email to a woman I used to be close with. She has a horrifying background of sexual assault, prostitution, drug abuse, etc. I hope she responds. We’ve kind of lost contact.
I know why I am afraid to be cold and why I keep my house so warm. When I get cold I start shivering and I feel like I am going into shock. When I feel like that I have a harder time keeping the memories at bay. I used to sit in our house in the mountains under a pile of blankets and think about my abuse. My mom and my sister went back and forth between telling me I was an abuse victim and saying I was just a whiner. The story was always that what happened to me wasn’t as bad as what happened to my sister. So I shouldn’t complain, because look! She’s fine! Only she’s not. She can’t hold down a job usefully. When she manages to get into a relationship with a nice guy she destroys their life until they stop dating her and go off and fix the damage. She is a very broken person.
So I keep my house warm so I don’t have to sit here and shiver and feel scared.
A few minutes ago I had to break and go nurse Calli for a bit. Of course I felt like I was a better mother because I was sober. But there is this thing that happens when I nurse, I don’t know if it’s common and it’s weird body tmi. Nursing makes me have to poop. For the 5am nurse, if things are timed badly, I sometimes lie there in agonizing pain trying to not shit the bed because I need Calli to go back to sleep and she won’t let go of my nipple so I can go to the bathroom. During this time period, honestly it’s only like a 2-3 minute of crisis feeling, I sit there and visualize the ways I want to hurt Calli in response to her hurting me. Because I feel like it is her fault that I am in so much pain because it hurts only when I’m nursing her.
Maybe the right answer is to let her scream and get up and use the bathroom. Today what I did was I told Noah that I was in a lot of pain because I have to use the bathroom and she won’t let go. And Noah stayed up late last night so I didn’t want to bother him and I was feeling really upset about the fact that I was in pain and wanting to hurt my baby because of it. Noah told me, “It was my choice to stay up late. I’ll take the baby. Go.” I love him so much. He is so good at giving me permission and space to have whatever feelings I need to have. I don’t know what I would do without him.
So I have some rage issues. Ok. When folks like Sharon (or my ex-boyfriend) tell me that I am destroying my life with rage I feel confused. I get the impression I feel way more rage than other people. But I don’t really see how it is destroying my life. I have bad periods where it puts my life on hold. I am out in the garage right now and I am absolutely not part of my life right now. It’s sad. I’m not happy about it. But I don’t see how I am destroying my life. I am stepping out of my life for a little while and I am having my rage issues come out by myself with a computer in the garage. No really, that is about the best kind of control anyone can ask of me. The alternative is to tell me I’m not allowed to feel the rage at all. Excuse my language, but fuck off you fucking cunt. Don’t tell me that rage is destroying my life because it isn’t.
Rage is causing me to sever the bonds with an abusive family. Rage is causing me to admit out loud that my father raped me. Rage is causing me to have the strength to stand up and say that my mother and my sister are evil. That they are child molesters. That my sister is a rapist. I need to say those things and I do not have the courage to say them without this level of rage. Not really. But given that I am surrounded by people who love me and support me, and given that I am extensively checking in about my mental situation (I feel more than a little uncomfortable with the fact that I am live blogging my breakdown, and yet… I feel like I am being very accountable so I know that I am not crossing any lines) I don’t feel it is in any way shape or form appropriate to say that I am destroying my life. To be clear Sharon said, “Your rage is going to burn you and your family alive if you don’t get some support. Expressing the rage is fine for a start, but you can’t sustain this level of fury on a moment-to-moment basis forever.”
Forgive me for laughing as I think about the idea that maybe I should get some support. I have many many people checking in with me as I do the hard work. Maybe I’m just doing it in a way that doesn’t work for her. But I am doing it. I’m tired of feeling invisible. I cannot see a therapist who sees no value in the way I am processing. The way I am processing has allowed me to have a very good life and very good friends. I am no longer in an abusive situation. At this point in time I am surrounded by people who love me to distraction who want to give me every ounce of help they can. And I’m letting them. People are coming over and caring for my kids and doing my laundry. People are showing up with food. People are calling and leaving comments and texting me and emailing me and… I have support. I am not past (See Ali, I do listen) the crisis yet. But I will get past it. I will. I have done it before. I’m not sure if this is the darkest place I’ve been, but it’s pretty bad.
Let me state this pretty clearly. I am not dead because I will not do that to Noah or my kids. My will to live is a flickering flame right now. But god damnit I am going to get through this. Those mother fucking pieces of shit aren’t going to kill me. They aren’t powerful enough. But I’m still scared.
I think I should fall down the rabbit hole and tell stories.
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.
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 was outside working in the yard and my neighbor started talking to me. He has been coaching softball for one of the local high schools for years. This year, for the first time, he is coaching the JV girls team. He’s struggling with the emotions and the drama. He was ready to quit. I asked him how he would feel if it was his kid having trouble with a coach. Would he want them to quit or would he want them to work it out? I also told him that these girls desperately need men like him and he is doing a great service to the world if he helps them become stronger and more confident in listening to difficult to hear feedback.
He said he won’t quit and he’s glad he talked to me. Today is a good day.
As of Saturday morning things were not so hot with my dear friend. However, on Saturday evening I got a phone call from that friend. He called me to tell me was sorry for the ways in which he was derailing the conversation. The stuff I was talking about made him think about very uncomfortable things from his own life and he couldn’t handle it and he wanted me to stop talking. He admitted the whole thing top to bottom. I laughed and I cried. I thanked him for trusting me enough to be honest with me completely and totally for the first time in our friendship. Then I bossed him around (see how that works) and I told him to come back over.
Noah, my friend and I sat around and talked about broken dynamics. We talked about where we are reacting to old baggage and where we have created new stuff together. We talked about the parts of our dynamic that are good and healthy for us and we talked about the parts that are not healthy for us. Then we tried to figure out how we can get more of the good and less of the bad because we are ready to grow up. We are ready to stop hurting the people we love so much.
And I can’t get very detailed because an awful lot of what we talked about isn’t my story.
And Sunday we had brunch with another very long time friend. I like to call him the California Mindfucker because he is very interested in getting into peoples brains and playing with the goo. Not to mention that he was one of my first lovers/play partners in the bdsm scene and he has done a fair bit of fucking with my brain. But the ways he does it are so screamingly over the top weird California new-agey feeling. I love it. Of course we did more spelunking into brains but this time, for the first time ever, I paid attention to his story. That feels horrible to admit. I feel like I should not be the one who “takes” in a given interaction. But I often am, and that feels bad.
But oh man. Since I have started consciously trying to ask for and accept more help I have seen a dramatic increase in the intensity of my friendships in a really wonderful way. I am allowing people to do things for me I’ve never allowed them to do before. I didn’t realize how lonely I have been my entire life. No wonder I pursue sex with such vigor. It’s the only time I let myself have a close, mutual relationship. I don’t let anyone I am not currently fucking do anything for me and I make those people go through hell before I let them do stuff for me. Instead I set myself up as the victim/martyr with all the need.
Interesting. Enh, sorta. Ok that’s hyperbole too. But that’s my story about myself sometimes. Anyhow, at this point I am trying to change up how I relate to people I love the most. It’s an interesting process because almost all of the people I love the most have some fairly major issues. That’s the whole “prickly and difficult” thing. In order for us to get to a place where we know how to be more respectful of one another I have to start to look at my friends more. I have to actually see them in a way I have never looked at them before. I need to figure out where my defensive mechanisms are and actively try to change them.
I’m not really going to be able to go where I originally thought I was going with this post. I got derailed by a wonderful, awesome person. I got to go talk to an old friend and tell her about the highs and lows of our relationship and she gave me feedback on her perspective of them so I could figure out where I end and she begins. And she tolerated a lot of babbling. It was nice. She has been my friend for so very long.
I’m starting to realize that anyone who is in my life at this point is fucking serious about loving me or they wouldn’t be in my life. It takes intense effort and tolerance to be my friend. And lots of people do it. No really, lots of people. I am putting out feelers for my birthday party and fixing my house and people are showing up. Not hundreds, but lots. Lots and lots. More than I imagined. I am really lucky. I am really blessed. I want to figure out where I end and they begin. I want to see them more clearly. I want to stop seeing ghosts.
I choose life.
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.
That is one of the most common things I’ve heard throughout my lifetime. It’s not a bad thing to say. It’s honest. This stuff is scary and hard. And I’m currently in the middle of writing one that is really hard for me so I’m hiding from it right this minute thank you very much. Something scary enough that I can’t face writing it for a few days is not my favorite. Just sayin. So that said, I am not going to say that this post is generally applicable to people other than me. I will say that these are things that I have noticed over time that help me a lot.
I spend a lot of the time feeling very alone in the world. Very unseen. I’m not sure why but that is one of the hardest parts for me. It’s not true, but I feel like people are avoiding me because I am bad and dirty and gross. I feel like people don’t respond to the stuff I write because they think terrible things about me because these things happened to me. It’s very challenging to shout things into the deafening void. I have virtually no contact with my family. I have Noah. I have the girls. I have the friends who show up. That is truly all I have in the world. When people bitch about blahblahblah obligation with their family… I sit at home alone. Seriously. This sucks.
At this point I barely leave the house. I do absolutely necessary errands and I usually make Noah come with me. I go to therapy. Otherwise people have to come to me. Right now I do not have the extra patience, stability, reserves, whatever you want to call them to deal with the fact that life is uncertain. When I go out somewhere with the kids by myself I have to be prepared to deal with Shanna having a melt down, or Calli having a massive poop explosion, or me having a panic attack. Right now it’s not worth it. So I’m doing mad work on my house and yard so that being here is super fun and wonderful. I really like visitors. They make my day. If you read this stuff and you feel genuinely uncomfortable talking about it but you like me and you want to be kind of vaguely supportive you could ask to come visit. If you come during a time when my children are awake I won’t get too intense on you. Occasionally I cry but it’s not the norm. Especially if you have cheerful babble about your own life I am easily derailed onto fun topics.
If reaching out in person doesn’t work for you (and that’s ok, there are lots of reasons that is true) I really appreciate comments. The stats page (God bless the stats page) lets me know that people are actually reading this. But I don’t know who they are. I don’t know what they think. A lot of what is going on right now for me is that I am being slammed in the face over and over and over with these things that feel monstrous, but I’m not a monster. So I have no scope for understanding how bad these things were.
I’m not sure if people understand that a lot of the reason I write this stuff down is until I write it down it doesn’t feel like trauma it just feels like my life. I’m not sure if I can say that strongly enough. Most of the time walking through my life I don’t feel like a ‘trauma victim’ if you know what I mean. I’m just me. These are just the events in my life. Everyone has events in their life. It’s really not something worth getting upset about. Only… the stuff that happened to me is worth getting upset about. And I’m already upset. And I need to deal with that. But how do you deal with it when you don’t even know what it is that is upsetting you because it was just life stuff and no big deal? So I write. And I realize over and over and over that what happened to me was horrible. And I have difficulty understanding the scope of it right now. I don’t know how to wrap my brain around stuff this awful being my story.
So what can you say? You, oh lovely person on the internet. You can say something as simple as, “You are right to be upset. This is not within the range of normal treatment from a parent. This should not have happened.” Do you realize that a lot of the time I don’t even know what the range of normal treatment from a parent is? When I ask about “normal” parenting I am really trying to ask what is the range of acceptable parenting behaviors that will not permanently damage your kids. I really don’t feel like I have a handle at all on what is “ok” behavior. I’m guessing. I’m reading and trying to figure it out. But I still don’t know.
I really like questions. I’m aware that most people who are trauma victims are very afraid to talk about things. I don’t volunteer more details or information because I believe no one gives a shit. Seriously. I have thousands of pages of writing inside me about what my life was like. About the stupid little indignities and how they complicated the larger issues of abuse. I want to write about my experiences moving from the kind of poverty where you live in your car and take government cheese and steal food going to being a, frankly, rich suburban hippy housewife. That’s been fucking mind blowing. The privilege I see in my day to day life now is… disconcerting. I feel out of place. I feel like an imposter. I feel like any minute someone will show up and tell me that all these improvements I am making to the house and the property (even the weird ones) mean that I can’t live here anymore because it’s too good for me. It’s intense.
You can ask me questions about body memories. You can ask me questions about details in the stories you don’t understand. If you want to understand this experience, I want to talk about it. But I don’t want to talk to people who don’t want to listen. I mean, be polite and all. But it’s ok to ask questions that feel weird and invasive. I reserve the right to say, “I don’t know how to talk about that yet but I’ll think about it and get back to you.” I reserve the right to say, “That’s too intense this minute.” I reserve the right to say, “Wow. The way you asked that question made me feel defensive and I bet it’s just me reading your tone wrong. May I ask you to try again because right now that question feels attacking and I’m not sure how to respond.”
Communication is good. I want more of it. Really. It’s ok.