part 36

Forgiveness is a strange concept. I guess the most common way I have heard it used is in the form of someone asking another if they could ever forgive them for something bad they did to hurt them. I have also heard the concept of forgiveness as a requirement a victim must grant in order to allow the harmer to go on with their lives.

It seems as though begging for forgiveness is an accepted way to demonstrate contrition for bad or harmful acts. If you can ask for forgiveness, then it means you are not a hopelessly evil person. If you are forgiven by the person you hurt, then it means the person you hurt has risen above pain and let it go for the betterment of peace, or something like that.

Forgiveness has been encouraged throughout my lifetime. It is important to forgive others so that I can be forgiven. This is a concept I learned in church. If I am holding on to all of the bad feelings I’ve had in response to someone harming me, then my arms are not open or available to receive forgiveness for my own harm to others.

In this way, it seems as though forgiveness becomes an obligation. If I am not willing to forgive someone, then I am not going to be able to live a happy and peaceful life. If I view my unwillingness to forgive someone as a means of hurting them back, then I am just as bad as the person who has harmed me. I have stooped to their level. I am allowing spite to keep me from being happy.

When the subject of forgiveness comes up concerning the things my dad has done to me, I am not really sure where I stand. I have been told over and over that forgiving him for what he did does not mean that I condone his actions, or in any way say that what he did was okay.

I have been taught that forgiveness is more for me than for the other person. I have come to truly believe that as well. I don’t think my dad gives a shit if I forgive him, because I don’t think he really believes anything he has done to me has been wrong.

Is being able to forgive him contingent upon his ability and willingness to acknowledge wrongdoing? Am I not able to forgive him unless he repents? Unless he apologizes? Unless he begs for my forgiveness?

I don’t think so. I mean, I am not trying to purport to know the ins and outs and wisdom and whatnot about forgiveness, but I have definitely been trying to take an honest look at myself and others and what certain things mean or don’t mean.

As far as forgiveness is concerned, my attempts to look at something I thought was simple have turned the entire concept into a big, slippery, icy puddle. I question what I have been taught – is forgiveness really necessary for me to move on with my life and be happy?

What exactly does forgiveness mean, anyway?

I used to think it meant that I was not mad anymore at someone who hurt me. As a person who has hurt others, I suppose I looked at being granted forgiveness as an allowance to move on without having to worry that my actions can continuously cause someone else pain. I mean, that would mean guilt for the rest of my days until the person I hurt is willing to forgive me.

So back to my willingness to forgive my dad: would it mean that he would feel guilty for the rest of his days until I was willing to forgive him?

I don’t think so. I don’t think that is what forgiveness is about at all. To be perfectly honest, the entire concept of forgiveness is pretty muddy in my mind. I think maybe I just don’t get it.

What I do get is that if I make this decision or transformation or whatever and forgive my dad, I am saying that it is okay with me for him to go about his life without having to be constantly reminded of the things he did to hurt me.

It is saying that I can love him as a person despite the pain he has caused me. It is saying that I am somehow morally or spiritually superior because I can turn the other cheek and go on with my life, and still love him regardless, or not love him and go on with my life, or whatever.

But I want what is real – I want whatever the truth is. At this moment in time, my version of “the truth will set you free” looks more like “cut the shit already.” My version of “forgiveness” looks more like “I will do my best to accept what you did to me and that I cannot change it and to not let it get in the way of living my life.”

I can’t make any promises along the lines of, “I no longer harbor any ill will,” because I do harbor ill will. I don’t know if I always will harbor ill will, but I know that I do sometimes and sometimes I don’t. I feel like forgiveness is saying that I am no longer willing to feel pain because of what someone did, and in return, I will live a better life.

Forgiveness seems so final, like a decision to be made and adhered to for all eternity. But that’s not how it really is for me. Sometimes I feel like I am perfectly willing to completely let go of my bad feelings toward my dad, and accept my pain, and to not be angry about it anymore.

But then sometimes I am angry, and I do not feel like I can free my bad feelings toward my dad, because I don’t think those bad feelings are ever going to go away. It’s not that I don’t want them to go away, it’s that he did some really fucked up shit to me and it has melded into my brain like a very well established tumor.

It is part of who I am. Whether I want to accept that or not, and that varies on a daily basis as well, it is what it is.

I want to be sparkly and purple, but someone else already painted me a flat black before I had any say in the matter. That shit is permanent, too.

I don’t know. I know that I will never be completely purple and sparkly, and I know that I will never not be flat black. But I am learning how to live with sparkly purple integrated into flat black, and I am starting to think it is a pretty color, even if it is not what I wanted it to be.

Right now, forgiveness feels like I would have to somehow give that up. It feels like I would be saying, okay, so there’s a bunch of flat black all over the place and I can’t change it, but I will do my best to paint over it and to try not to remember that it is there. It feels like I would be saying that I used to be flat black, but now I am sparkly purple.

But that’s not true! It’s not real! It’s not honest! I AM flat black and I AM sparkly purple. I am also a lot of other colors that I happen to discover or to add to myself, or that I accidently run into or get splashed by along the way.

That’s what feels real to me right now. That is what feels honest. And forgiveness, whatever it means, does not feel real or honest right now. 

part 35

I have always been fascinated with the histories of serial killers and child molesters and rapists and child abusers and spouse abusers. Sometimes each of these categories of monster can all be found in one person. A lot of times, there is some combination of two or more of the monster categories in an individual. Sometimes there is just one monster category that can describe one person.

Regardless, these people are monsters. I know people are not born monsters – this is a controversial topic, whether or not people are born bad. I personally do not believe people are bad from the instant of their conception, or of their birth.

I have heard monster-people described as being different from birth, as though even as a newly born infant it was easy to see something dark and wrong in them. I have also heard descriptions of beautiful innocent babies whose monster behavior as young children or as young adults is completely baffling.

I have heard mothers describe their monster-adult-child as a completely shocking and different person than she had ever known as her son or daughter.

Seriously, though – it never requires having to look very far into the behaviors of babies and children and the people upon whom they depend for love and support and nurturing to see how it all could go so wrong.

There is no definite formula, or any requirement of actions or events or behaviors of one’s past to determine whether or not they are monster-people. There are many similarities among these things, but certainly no scientifically proven method of how someone came to be a monster.

I personally believe, though, that a child born into a consistently and constantly loving and nurturing environment, even a childhood involving any form of trauma, will not become a monster. I really, truly believe that it is impossible for someone to become like my dad without having experienced deep and resonating pain at the hands of someone they depend on for love and security at some time before they are fully grown adults.

Maybe I believe this because it is easier to think that my dad was, at even the earliest stages of his life, not a monster. It is definitely easier for me to think that than to believe he was just born evil. If he was just born evil, if that was possible, if that was really how it worked, then …. I don’t know. What? Something that does not make any sense, or something I cannot make any sense of. Something without hope.

I have been thinking a lot about my dad’s childhood. I think I have mentioned before that he did not speak of it often, and when he did share something of his past, it was usually something negative. The only positive interactions I have heard him share from his childhood involved his relationship with an animal. A dog or something that he could think back on fondly and actually smile while remembering.

Everything else my dad shared about his childhood involved pain.

From my dad’s perspective of his childhood – which is really the only one that counts in the end – he was alone or being abused or experiencing some other form of pain pretty much the entire time he was growing up.

He described his father as cruel, his mother as distant, and his older brother as horribly abusive. I don’t recall him saying anything bad – or anything at all, really - about his sisters, but I have heard from others that he attributes good things to them, and always has.

Maybe this is one of the ways my dad became a monster. Maybe he had no ability to see people any other way than as good or as bad, with nothing in between.

It’s funny – I have recently described my view of myself as either all good or all bad. I mean, I am really beginning to integrate all of who I am into someone I can definitely live with, but before all of this therapy and everything, I was either bad or I was good.

Since my dad was the one who always made that determination, I was always good sometimes, and always bad at other times. He hated me or he adored me, and not just in that moment – he applied his hate and adoration retroactively probably to a time before I was even conceived, and he projected it into every breath I would take in the future and then into whatever afterlife I might have.

It was baffling, but no matter what he did to me, I tirelessly sought the good in him. No matter how cruel he was, I could not bear to think my father was entirely evil. It was crucial for me to reconcile my ideas of him as something other than a monster, and I have pulled it off beautifully for my entire life.

I have a hard time thinking of him like that still. I know logically that the kind of person my dad is does not have the capacity to love others, and especially not the capacity to love a child unconditionally. When I was about 20 years old, I asked my dad why he treated me so badly. He told me, “it goes both ways.” I was stunned – I had not ever considered that my dad would require me to prove my love for him before he would love me back.

I don’t know why I had never considered that before, and I have definitely considered it a lot since then, but at the time I was baffled.

I had my own child by that time, and I could not imagine ever not loving him, no matter what. I feel at the core of my being that loving my child is what it means to be a parent – it’s the bottom line. Not discipline, not preparation for the world, not guidance – to me, the bottom line of being a parent is loving that kid and making sure he knows it – NO MATTER WHAT. I suppose I expected as much from my dad. I always knew that my mom loved me that way, and I had never questioned it, but I guess it was a pretty big assumption I made about my dad.

Maybe before that time when I was 20 and my dad told me “it goes both ways” I always believed he loved me unconditionally, because that is what I needed to believe. I mean, if your own parent cannot love you unconditionally, who could love you at all?

Not only that, but I very much adored that man. I mean, that monster. It has taken me a long time to comprehend that he hates me so much now – he started hating me years before the last time I saw him, and I truly believe that has not ceased in the years since.

It hurts – it hurt then and it hurts now. And let’s face it – it is a lot easier to accept the pain of his hate than risk damaging any more of myself on a chance for even a sliver of his love.

Maybe the reason I have such a fascination with the childhood and life experiences of monsters is because it is a way for me to recognize a progression of the sickness in them. It makes it very easy for me to see that the kind of people their victims are has absolutely nothing to do with why and how they are victimized.

I can’t say learning about how people become monsters has made it any easier to forgive my dad, or at least to even consider forgiving my dad. Nothing that happened to him as a kid makes anything he did to me any less horrendous. But I really do feel a lot better being able to see the sickness as his alone, and not as something that is in me, too.

part 34

People can hear what has happened to me and wonder how I survived it all. Even people who get regular updates on how I am doing will sometimes stop and say how sorry and hurt they are that I had to experience these things.

I was telling someone new about my experiences last week, and during my descriptions, he stopped me and asked how I got through all of it.

I very sincerely appreciate compassion and support, but lately it has gotten to the point that I look back at what has happened – being repeatedly raped, starting when I was such a little child, being physically and mentally tortured, being handed over to other predators, being in front of that goddam camera small and ashamed and naked – and the question of “how” I survived it all becomes irrelevant.

I mean, it is a really good question. How have I survived it all? I try to think about what my life was like before the abuse ever started. I try to remember what it was like to be like everybody else. I have this vague sense of brief happiness way in the back of my mind, but other than that, I have no memory of what it was like to be someone who had not been molested, or raped, or tortured, etc., etc., etc.

I have no comprehension of absolute security. I cannot comprehend how affectionate friends can be with each other (I’ve been watching Friends on DVD, and they are really affectionate with each other). I cannot comprehend someone standing next to me and reaching their arm behind me and feeling anything other than panic.

I’ve gotten pretty good with hugs. I have learned that I don’t have to hug everybody, and just because I hugged someone once, it doesn’t mean I have to hug them every time I see them. I am even almost to the point where I can just put my hand out and say “please do not touch me” to someone I really don’t like and who insists with their entire body on putting their hands and arms on me every time I see them.

I have not actually been able to do that anywhere other than in my imagination, though I have gotten to where I can at least not reciprocate the gesture in any way except to throw a shoulder toward them and lean my head away as far as possible. Also, looking away with no smile on my face while they are touching me, I really think, would be an indication that what they are doing is unwelcomed and that they should stop it already, but for some people it isn’t. Those people are the creeps.

Being almost to the point of directing others concerning my own body is a really big deal. It has gotten very easy with people I don’t know, or have only met a couple of times: “whoa, buddy, I don’t know who you are and you are gonna have to back it up.”

However, with people I have known for a while, I just can’t NOT let them touch me. I suppose my inability to assert myself is another of those inexplicable pains in my ass that come along with all the other shit.

Anyway.

I have gotten to a certain level of acceptance of what has happened to me, and who it was that did it. It has taken me a long time to comprehend all of what has happened to me, and it is a very heavy comprehension to carry around.

When someone says to me, “how are you dealing with all of this,” I can no longer appreciate their inability to comprehend such horrible acts. I have to remember that I have been dealing with all of this shit pretty much 24/7 and have had a lot more time to adjust to the reality of it. It makes me sad, though, when someone asks me how I have dealt with it all, and the only thing that comes to my mind is, “what the fuck else was I going to do?” FYI, I don’t actually say that out loud – compassion is very important to me, and I am not about to start shutting compassionate people down just because my perspective is different from theirs.

This surviving, or overcoming, or recovering, or dealing process has become a part of who I am. In a way, it IS who I am. It’s kind of lonely. It reminds me of the freak I used to be, especially as a kid: someone who could not settle into a group of people without any sort of point upon which to relate with anyone else. As an adult, I learned what things I could relate to people about, and could grab onto that (“So, how about this weather?”).

Now I feel like I am very capable of relating to other people about a lot of things, and also am very capable of recognizing that it is okay if I do not relate to other people. That knowledge about myself makes feelings of loneliness and isolation scurry away.

But there is this part of me that longs for idle chitchat about those horrendous things that other people really can’t comprehend. It is not easy for me to throw some random thought out that concerns the abuse in my past and have any reaction other than long, uncomfortable silences. Party foul!

I know there are other people out there who are capable of idle chitchat about living through hell. There are not that many, but there are a lot more than what I believe the general public is aware of.

And we find each other. Consciously or not, we know who we are. I find a lot of comfort in reading online or in a book about others’ experiences of abuse and how they have dealt with it and are still able to function years later. The lack of intimacy that accompanies reading someone else’s words instead of hearing them spoken out loud and in person is comforting.

Being able to have that connection without having to feel too vulnerable is nice. It reminds me that I don’t have to do this by myself, even if “not by myself” means knowing there are other people out there with whom I can relate but with whom I never actually have any personal contact.

I feel like what I have survived in the past cannot be questioned: I mean, I survived it, it’s real, it happened, it won’t ever change, I will never not survive it. So why bother thinking too much about how I survived it when I could be focusing a lot more on how I can live right now in spite of how it all shaped me in ways that make simply being awake really difficult?

I mean, what the fuck else am I going to do?

part 33

It took three days of repeatedly slathering lip balm on my mouth and being sneezy to figure out it was the lip balm triggering my allergies. Unfortunately, I did not figure this out before I got a full-blown allergy attack featuring the ceaseless sensation of fleas jumping around in my nostrils for hours at a time and snot running freely from my nose like water from a faucet.

Fortunately, I had an opportunity to use the word “triggering” outside the context of residual effects of childhood trauma. Yay!

No, really, I mean it – yay! And for a number of reasons. One reason is that I am able to recognize the significance of using the word “triggering” for something other than what happened to me as a kid. Another reason is that even though I have been feeling like shit warmed over, recognizing that significance has gotten my mind out of my snot-filled head and into my joy-filled life. I already feel better!

It reminds me of that time my car blew up on the way to Charleston, leaving me without a car in a new city for the duration of my first pregnancy. With the unfathomable state of not having transportation looming on my horizon, I just kept focusing on how lucky it was that my mom was there and able to come to the rescue.

My ability to keep things in a certain perspective has gotten me through a lot of really hard times. I am proud of my ability to see the positive in situations that would otherwise kill me just by the sheer weight of them.

I began to be consciously aware of how I molded my perceptions sometime during my teen years. I would be faced with some sort of very difficult challenge and would drop right into despair, but then would soon think to myself, “how could this be any worse?” Then I would think of something that would make that situation worse, and then focus on being glad I wasn’t in the worse situation.

I don’t really think I have ever considered where this perception-morphing thing came from. Since so many of my tendencies and habits, good and bad, were shaped and created from the experiences I had growing up, I automatically wonder where this tendency found its roots.

Then I think about whether or not I could just have something I feel is positive about myself without analyzing the hell out of it and tying it to something bad.

No. I don’t think so. Not right now, anyway.

In hindsight, it is pretty easy for me to see that my ability to look at the bright side has been a significant component of my survival. But one of the things that has been floating in and out of my mind recently has been the way I minimized the situations that were very harmful to me when I was growing up.

I distinctly remember times when I was very angry or indignant about my dad’s punishment methods. My dad loved creative ways to punish. Sometimes I would have to memorize chapters from the bible, sometimes I would have to write a paper about the seven deadly sins or something of that nature. Once when I was in high school I got in trouble for … something…I don’t even remember – talking to boys or something. For my punishment, he had me take my phone out of my room, put it out on the driveway, and smash it to pieces with a sledgehammer.

SIDENOTE: my siblings also experienced a lot of these things along with me, but I do not feel so comfortable airing their laundry on a public blog – that’s very much something they can do themselves if they ever get that inkling.

Looking back, the phone/sledgehammer thing was pretty fucked up. I could analyze my dad’s motivations behind that particular punishment for days, but I will just sum it up by saying that it was a very deliberate and sadistic form of psychological abuse.

At the time, though, it was a story I could tell my friends the next day at school. My friends were often outraged and shocked at the stories I told them about my dad. Rather than share that feeling of shock and outrage, the act of telling other people what happened made it all much smaller in my mind. In other words, I minimized it.

It wasn’t that difficult to do, especially after learning about kids who were beaten by their parents. For some reason, that form of child abuse was always worse than anything my dad did to me. I had a close friend who would show up at school with a black eye, and I would ask what happened, and he would say something like, “I got hit with a boot.”

He could have meant that his dad had hit him with a boot, or it could have meant that his dad had kicked him in the face, but no matter what it meant, my friend had a black eye that the whole world could see. Considering that he lived in a neighborhood where everybody knew everything about each other and each other’s kids, such blatant evidence of abuse was immediately learned and circulated over telephone wires and on front porch steps.

Everybody knew. Everybody knew his dad was a bad guy – not just a guy who was bad, but a bad guy, like the villains in cartoons and movies. Everyone judged them, and regardless of any existence of empathy or support, they were the family that was featured when a sitcom took a turn for the serious in order to take a stand against violence.

They were the family that made-for-television movies were based on. They were the family that everyone could see had something wrong with it. Not just anything wrong with it, but something wrong that had been deemed unacceptable by society at large.

Anytime my dad would execute one of his clever and carefully crafted punishments, I would think about my friend and wish my dad left bruises that other people could see.

But he didn’t. He didn’t leave bruises. The marks he left on my body were in places very easily hidden by clothing, and I couldn’t imagine going out in public and exposing myself and saying, “Look! My dad did this! Do something about it!”

And so those marks and incidents and whatever you want to call them became minimized. “At least he didn’t kick me in the face.” And there was the bright side, warm and inviting and willing to carry me through another day.

I really do appreciate my ability to see the cup half full. It makes for a much more fulfilling life. But I wonder if people hear my story and think that what they experienced was not nearly as bad as what I experienced, and thereby minimize the abuse.

I tell my story because it empowers me, and because other people have told me they have felt less alone knowing it.

I do not want my story to be an example of something “worse” that has happened to somebody else. I mean the shit I experienced was unimaginable to most people, but what happened to me does not make whatever happened to you okay, regardless of how much more or less valid you might conclude by comparing your experiences next to mine.

I’m not on a separate boat, alone and out at sea, to be pitied and with only sticks to serve as paddles. Sometimes that is what it feels like to me, but that it is not where I am.

Where I am is on a gigantic and powerful ship that cannot be broken, no matter how hard people try. I am on this ship with anyone else who has ever been hurt – by being hit, even with an open hand and only once; by being burned, even if it was only the tip of a lit cigarette and it only happened one time; by being molested, even if it was on top of your clothes and left no marks on your body and only happened once.

Abuse is abuse. The law can categorize different types of abuse into different levels of severity. I may do the same thing in my own head. But I know how little it takes to hurt a child, how easy it is to mark a little girl’s or little boy’s lifeline with a deep, dark smudge, and how hard it is to clear that smudge away.

I also know how little it takes to keep an abused person quiet, even into adulthood, regardless of whether or not there is still abuse occurring, and regardless of whether or not it has not always been the same person doing the abusing, and regardless of whether or not any moral or religious or other excuse has been put forward to justify whatever it was that someone did to hurt you.

Getting hurt hurts. Someone who has smashed their thumb with a hammer may not be able to relate to someone whose leg is broken. Smashing your thumb with a hammer might not hurt as much as breaking a leg, but it still hurts. The pain is still there. It is real. And it matters.

For me, the reason that pain matters is not because of what should happen to someone else, or if someone should be confronted or charged or deemed bad by anyone. It doesn’t even matter if I view the pain as something I deserved, or put myself in the path of. The reason is because it hurts me, and I am tired of being hurting.

part 32

Shame is worse than death.

Shame is what shuts me up. It clamps onto my heart like cold, cheap, grainy metal and adds just enough weight to produce a sensation of being pulled – not pulled really hard, but just the right amount of pull that leads to a deep, throbbing pain that is always worse than a quick, stabbing pain.

Where does my shame come from? What is it that I have done that has resulted in the shame I have amassed? Right off the bat, shame makes me think that I have done something to hurt someone, which in turn makes me feel really shameful.

The ability to feel pain as a result of inflicting pain upon others – it is supposed to be some sort of virtue, but what does it really mean? How is someone else’s pain determined and measured? How is it tied back to me and something I have done directly or indirectly? Why is the existence of shame in someone looked upon just as negatively as the absence of shame?

Where the hell did all of this shame come from? Why is it so important to me? Why do my attempts at ridding myself of it just heap more on top of the big steaming pile of shame that is already there?

Why am I so preoccupied with shame?

INSERT BIG RED FLAG: when I start to think of something that makes me feel bad, and I begin to barrage myself with overly-philosophical and obnoxiously unanswerable questions concerning this source of feeling bad, that means that I am fucking with my head.

All of the question marks at the ends of the sentences are an obvious tip-off that whatever it is rolling around in my head is not a productive or healthy thing for me to be rolling around in my head. It is really easy to see the red-flags of self-inflicted-mind-fucking since I have learned what they are and try to look out for them. It is not complicated – just scroll up a little and look at all of the question marks I have typed onto this page.

Right there – red flag. Red means stop. Red means danger. See what I mean? It is not complicated.

There was this breakthrough concept that sprouted from a book published when I was a kid. The book was called, “Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” Copies of the book began to appear on coffee tables, and in the special selections of reading material thoughtfully placed in magazine racks that are both conveniently and subtly positioned near the toilets in private homes.

Posters with rainbow-colored, childlike fonts listing the only things I need to know and that I learned in kindergarten started sprouting up all over the place. Teacher’s classrooms, the waiting rooms in doctor’s offices, hanging on filing cabinets at the DMV (I actually don’t really remember the DMV having those posters, but I needed a third thing and that sounded good): this adorable new-fangled epiphany about the beauty and simplicity of life.

Even as a kid, it really irritated the shit out of me. I mean, come on – if everything I really needed to know I learned in kindergarten, then why the hell did I have to go to first grade? It was a ridiculous concept.  

For me, the beauty in the simplicity of life was definitely not something I learned in kindergarten. In kindergarten, I learned my home phone number and address, and how to shrink up into myself so that I could feel brave enough to go to school, and how to tie my shoes, and how to spread peanut butter without tearing up the bread. Kindergarten was a lot of things, but it definitely was not a delightful time of discovering the beatific simplicity that is life.

It was really the beginning of an era in which I learned just how complicated life was, and how finding the beauty in anything was not relevant to survival. It was where I learned how to start out diary entries (and later blog posts) with phrases like, “Shame is worse than death.”

Give me a fucking break.  I sound like the miserable, morose teenager I used to be. Don’t get me wrong – just the thought of that whole “everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten” thing still irritates the shit out of me, but not for longer than a second or two.

Giving my time and energy to something as stupid as “everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten” for more than a second or two is what makes life complicated, and depressing, and boring.

So enough of that!

Jonny and I went to a Christmas party last night. It was a “college party” (meaning there were a lot of college students there) and we brought Jonah with us because we couldn’t get a sitter. I was kind of concerned about how the noise and rowdiness would affect Jonah, because he is kind of sensitive to that type of stuff.

The plan was to get there early, and then leave before the alcohol and loud music and dancing and other such rambunction (I made a new word!) took off at full force. It was only the seventh or eighth time we were going to this particular friend’s house, so it ended up taking us almost two hours to find it.

The plus side was that we got to drive around Atlanta at night looking at all of the pretty lights and decorations and stuff. The minus side was that we missed the calm part of the party.

I am usually a little anxious around big groups of people, especially when there is a lot of noise and movement and things, but I felt okay going to this party because I knew we could leave any time we wanted, and I hadn’t seen my friends from school in a long time. Jonny and I look out for each other in situations like that, too, so it was easier to just try to have fun.

I really didn’t know what to expect from Jonah – he is eight, and adorable, and gets extremely agitated when strangers look at him.

I needn’t have worried so. Jonah was a BIG hit. Right away, he began collecting an entourage of beautiful and holiday-festive twenty-something year old girls. They put sticky Christmas bows on his shirt and asked him what he wanted from Santa. He basked in the attention, and even though he started out not wanting me out of his sight, he eventually asked to be allowed to go roam around on his own.

It was awesome. We capped out at about an hour, and when Jonny and I went in search for Jonah to get ready to leave, we found him standing in the middle of the kitchen literally surrounded by a serious and captive audience while he flexed his guns for them. When we walked up to him, he started smiling mischievously and telling everyone out the side of his mouth how Jonny (his dad) loves unicorns.

Again, it was awesome. And Wes, Jonah’s 15 year old brother, is so jealous that he didn’t get to go to the college party.

And now I am not thinking anything at all about shame!

How about that for beatific simplicity? 

part 31

One of the things that has really consistently motivated me to learn how to live life and to quit doing things that are harmful to myself and others is the realization that my dad can’t hurt me anymore, so why should I continue the job for him?

It was never really difficult for me to connect my self-destructive tendencies to my relationship with my dad. Over time, I have learned more and more about the specifics of the effects of his abuse, and about the abuse itself, and about what kind of person my dad is, and about what kind of person I am.

But I always knew he was behind it all. I always knew he was the source of my self-hatred. I always knew he laid the foundation for the pain in my life. I did not realize, though, that hating myself and harming myself and harming those I love were ways for me to allow him to keep that pain in my life.

Self-loathing has been a fantastic way to rationalize doing really fucked up shit to my own body and mind. It has been one of the most difficult things to overcome, and it takes constant and steady work to maintain my edge over it.

The reasons behind my history of hating myself have been easy to figure out, too. Why wouldn’t I hate myself? I was taught that I was bad, and crazy, and only useful in life as a tool to assist in the methods of satisfying the very sick desires of very sick people.

I can’t change what happened to me. I can’t make my dad be someone who would never do anything to hurt me. But I can change what all of that means for me.

Initially approaching the recollections of horror was incredibly overwhelming. I could not see beyond my past. I could not see how I was supposed to be a productive member of society and a good mom and a good person and anything other than a disaster. How could I be anything other than a disaster? What else could I be with all of the knowledge of what had happened seeping into my conscious mind at disturbingly consistent and persistent intervals?

What the fuck am I supposed to do with this? How does anyone survive shit like this? The only other people I know of that have endured such things have been accused and convicted of atrocious crimes. My history is cut from the same cloth as the histories of serial killers, of child rapists, of sadistic maniacs, of pure and simple evil.

What do I build on that kind of past?

It’s an extremely daunting question, to say the least. But my life and my mind have been equipped with certain things that make it possible to not follow in my dad’s footsteps. I have been surrounded by people who love me and want good things for me, and once I was able to see that and accept that, I knew that my dad was not going to win.

I began to view my inability to take care of myself or to nurture myself as a residual effect of what my dad did to me. Not only was I never afforded the opportunities to learn how to nurture myself or take care of myself, I was specifically forced into situations that taught me the extreme opposite.

I am scared that people will think that I am trying to make excuses for the bad things I have done. The mocking tone of “oh, it’s her parents’ fault” taunts me. The disdain that comes with the idea that a bad childhood can atone for all bad deeds follows me around in a black, creeping cloud.

A few months ago I went to a funeral for someone I had met when we were little kids. We did not ever become close, but I knew who she was and she knew who I was and we had that connection of knowing each other when we were little kids. We lived in the same area and went to the same schools and had a lot of the same friends.

She drowned after passing out in her bathtub. I was deeply affected. I had not seen or spoken to this girl in over fifteen years. Even when I did see and speak to her on a regular basis, which was years ago, I would not have described our relationship as one of friendship. For some reason there was a distinct wall between us that I had installed during that period of time between when I first met her as a little kid and when we were in the same circles as teenagers.

I don’t know what that was about, and I don’t see how it is even relevant now. She is dead. Her life continued on where at some point mine deviated from that path of certain doom. Somehow I am still here, and I am surrounded by love and support, and I can look in the mirror and like what I see behind my own eyes.

But she is not.

At her funeral, her father stood and described what it was like when he first learned something terrible had befallen his daughter. Then he explained that she did drugs, she had done them for years, and this is what happens when you do drugs for years.

He was very angry with her. Disdain dripped out of every word he shoved from his mouth as he spoke of his beautiful, dead daughter. It was his tribute to her.

I almost threw up. I walked out. The entire service was strange and uncomfortable for me, but I tried to focus on the fact that it was not about me – it was about this life that was full of pain and had now ended.

But after her dad said that stuff, I couldn’t handle it anymore. I walked out. I felt walking out was a good alternative to hanging around until after the funeral and seeing her mom for the first time in probably 25 years and telling her how sorry I was that she lost her daughter when I really believed that her daughter was probably now much better off.

I also felt walking out was a good alternative to finding her dad and telling him that his daughter was not born with the desire to hurt herself or other people. She was at one time innocent and had hope for the future, and that it would have been really nice to hear from at least one person – at her FUNERAL - about that innocence and hope.

It could have so easily been me.

But it wasn’t. It isn’t. I hope it never will be.

When I finally made that connection between my dad harming me and me harming myself, I felt a distinct surge of indignation toward him. I knew that what he did to me was wrong. I was hearing other people agree that it was wrong, and that he was horrendous, and that I deserve to be loved and to love.

And I was beginning to believe that myself, too. And because of that, and because of my anger and pain at what my dad had taken from me, I decided that continuing to live a life of self-destruction was only helping him keep his sickness and abuse and evil alive in my soul.

And I don’t have to do that. I don’t want to do that. I don’t have to allow my past to dictate what I do now, or what I do in the future. I didn’t have a choice about what my dad did to me then, but I definitely have a choice about how I am going to live every day now.

He took so, so much from me, and I became determined to cease continuing what he started. My best revenge would entail being a healthy, loving, successful, happy, fulfilled human being. I can easily imagine that he would expect me to fizzle out and die, fat and drunk and unlovable and unable to love.

But I am not going to do that. My dad will not be able to stand up at my funeral and tell everyone there that I got what I deserved. That is of course considering he would even make any effort to be at my funeral, and then considering that he could get past the large number of people who would like to hurt him because of what he did to me. And then, even if I was dead and unable to defend myself, I truly believe there would be more than one person there willing to take him out and beat the shit out of him before allowing him to speak of me that way at my funeral.

And that would not be the case if I had not told anyone what happened to me. It would not be the case if I had not worked so hard to learn to love myself and let other people love me. It would not be the case if I had continued down my road of self-destruction and died after passing out in my bathtub.

My writing today has been difficult, and I feel like it is a bit disjointed. To be perfectly honest, I have been having a really rough week coming to terms with some of the things I have experienced in the past. Thinking of my life in the way I have just described in this post is how I will make it to next week.

Of course, that ability to love and to be loved also helps tremendously.

part 30

***TRIGGER WARNING***

I have mentioned before that I am trying to be more open about how what happened to me has affected me. I have actually been speaking to my loved ones and asking if they are aware of the extent of the damage I sift through on a daily basis.

They are not.

I have made a big assumption in thinking people would connect what has happened to me in the past to how difficult it is to deal with simply being alive now. I guess I just thought if people knew what happened to me, they would also intuitively know how much damage it has done.

Apparently, this is not the case.

One of the big things I have gained through accepting what has happened to me is the ability to see that I don’t know shit about anyone else. I may be able to relate on many levels, and I may know many facts about a person, and I may even be related by blood or be married to or have given birth to some of these other people, but it doesn’t change the fact that I really don’t know shit about who they are in their own minds, or even who I might be to them.

I am learning to know who I am in my own mind. I have been quite shocked, maybe naively so, at how differently my self-perception is from those who have known me my entire life. At the beginning of this recovering process, about three and a half years ago, something happened that made me think differently about myself.

Within a few days, a number of different people I had known since childhood separately and individually mentioned to me that they had always viewed me as having strength. Their perception of me while I was growing up was in direct conflict of my perception of myself.

I think about how I felt about myself when I was growing up. I can definitely recall feeling a lot of anger. I can also definitely recall feeling a lot of heartbreak, and of betrayal, and of hopelessness and powerlessness.

But what did I feel about myself?

I can remember alternately feeling that I was a very, very bad person, and that I was somehow better and above others. I viewed myself either as the shittiest of shit, or as a light among people. I know now that these are two extremes do not exist, at least certainly not within me.

But I did not know that for most of my life, and especially not as a kid. I remember feeling these two extremes as a small child, as a teenager, as an elementary school student, as a preschool student, as a high school student, and even before and beyond that.

As I got older, and learned to openly hate my dad, and to openly hate myself, I realized the idea that I was somehow supernaturally superior to other humans had no place on my lips or in the ears of anyone else. However, it was a fundamental belief I held about myself.

I was always very sensitive and defensive about my dad. I would hear other people say things about him that were not nice, and it would hurt me deeply. I did not make the connection, at that time, that if my dad was not the great being he claimed himself to be, then I was not who he always told me I was.

My dad was the sun and the moon and the stars; he was life itself; he was my heart beating in my chest and my blood running through my veins; he was the air I breathed.

I loved him desperately and hated him passionately. But I was also him – I fundamentally believed that I was as much him as I was anything else. It would stand to reason, then, that I also loved myself desperately and hated myself passionately.

When I was a teenager, my dad finally let me in on the big secret he had been hiding from people and waiting until I was ready to hear. We were alone on the boat in the lake in Alabama. We had been there overnight, and had been floating around aimlessly for hours.

I had not been permitted to bring anything to read. There was a radio on the boat, but he would not let me turn it on. I could not be still, and he sat there and watched me not be able to be still. I searched the boat for anything with printed words. I read the tags detailing the materials the life jackets were made from.

I read the stenciled safety warnings printed by the ladder that swung down into the water, and by the post where the rope was attached to pull someone skiing or tubing. I became intimately familiar with that boat.

My dad was alternately amused and infuriated. He thought it was hilarious that I could not be still and quiet for hours on end in the middle of a lake that was in the middle of nowhere. He was delighted at the lengths I went to in order to find something – anything – that had written words on it that I could read.

And when I would ask if we could leave or if he would at least turn on the radio, he would be furious.

After experiencing this bazaar rite for hours and hours, my dad felt that I was finally ready to tell me the big secret. He was disappointed I had not figured it out already. He told me he was god.

Not “a” god, but “the” god.

I remember considering for a moment whether or not this could really be. I quickly concluded that my dad was bat shit crazy.

But where did that leave me?

I had been taught my entire life that any part of myself that had any value was because I was his daughter, his flesh and blood.

And he was bat shit crazy.

But this is who raised me. This is the person who taught me everything I knew about myself and my worth in the world.

This was my dad.

My spiral of self-destruction began not long after that – sex, drugs, starving, stealing, etc., etc., etc.

And it was not until I began this recent process of my recovery that I was able to understand that I was not my dad. That I was an actual human being that belonged on the earth and was alive simply because I was alive, I was a human being, and I was on the earth.

My whole point in describing all of this is that this is how I was programed. My awareness of this as lunacy and sickness does not make the lunacy and sickness I have always felt in myself suddenly go away. That has taken a lot of work.

By “work” I mean changing the actual way I process words and thoughts and feelings. Do you know how much I think and feel? Pretty much all the time. My only escape is sleep, and even that can be taken from me with nightmares and restlessness.

Flippant sex and drugs and food and alcohol had given me brief reprieves throughout my life, but were also killing me and keeping actual peace farther and farther away from me.

And then the memories started coming. I don’t know if I have made this clear in past posts, but the memories were of things that I could not stop thinking about, EVER. They invaded my mind and my soul.

Images of my dad hurting me and telling me how it was okay, and of blood, and of clothes I wore as a small child, of large video cameras, and of men who had no faces, but only very, very big hands with which to hurt me even more, and the sounds of my dad’s voice in all of the ways he spoke to make me complicit, and the sounds of camera shutters clicking, and of the faceless men’s voices telling me that they were not going to hurt me, but then hurting me anyway, and the actual real and concrete physical sensations of being grabbed and held down and ripped open and restrained and touched and violated and of NEVER, EVER, EVER being safe.

Call them flashbacks, memories, intrusive thoughts, obsessions, preoccupations, morbid reflections – call them and try to describe them however you want. It doesn’t make any fucking difference. They are still there all of the time, whether I am actively thinking of them or not.

It has taken a lot of work (again, “work” being the reshaping of how I process thoughts and feelings at every fucking second I am alive) to get to the point where I can just breathe in and out and know that life has such beauty and that I am not evil and that I deserve to be loved and am capable of loving other people.

I can wake up in the morning and participate in mundane things like getting out of my bed and taking a shower and brushing my teeth. I have even gotten to the point where I can go to the lengths it takes to put makeup on and to give a shit about how I want to look.

I can make coffee and get the mail and leave the house to pick the kids up from school. I can even leave this town and go into Atlanta so that I can go to school, too, and make an effort at becoming someone I can respect and have the chance of making a living while doing something I love to do.

I can look at the blue sky, or the murky clouds, or the bright stars, or the hazy moon, and know how beautiful it is, and how fortunate I am to be able to realize and recognize and appreciate that beauty.

These are my brief reprieves now. The brief moments when I am not thinking about what has happened to me and who I am in this world and whether or not someone will hurt me again or hurt my kids and how much I wish I had a dad who loved me and wanted me to be safe.

The things he did to me are ALWAYS THERE. By “ALWAYS,” I mean EVERY FUCKING SECOND OF MY EXISTENCE. It is a part of who I am. What happened to me in the past will NEVER, EVER NOT BE REAL. I will ALWAYS be someone these things have happened to.

So I may get terribly anxious when I am around a group of people. I may shake violently throughout most of each day. I may feel the need to spend an inordinate amount of time in my bed. I may need to specifically ask someone to smile at me or give me a hug just so I can feel that I am really here, now, and not still in the living hell of my childhood.

I may go to great efforts to take time to do things to protect myself from certain situations, or to deliberately put myself somewhere I know will be good for me. It may take a considerable amount of strength and resilience and faith just to walk out my front door.

But I am doing it. And it is hard. But I love my life, and I love who I am today, and I love my family and I love my friends and I love the hope I have for the future.

Despite all of that shit ALWAYS being an integral part of the very fabric of my being, I have light in my life, and I can feel the warmth of it on my face and in my heart. And it is so, so, so, so worth all of the work I do every second I am alive.

I am not writing all of this to garner any pity – pity has never done anything for me and I have no need for it anywhere in my life. I am writing this so that maybe people who have not experienced these things can get an idea of the damage done to people who have been hurt in this way. So that maybe people this has not happened to can realize that they really don’t know shit about what it is like, and that maybe just being able to have some compassion and empathy – even without understanding – could actually be a good thing that can make this world a better place.