part 16

***trigger warning: more bad shit***

Having so much of my blocked memories reincorporated into my history has had a profound effect on me. It is weird because it is not so much that I have learned anything new that would be especially horrifying – it is all the same old horrifying shit.

But I am seeing it now as someone who has actually gone through it all. For the first time, I am able to remember what it was like for me when all of those things happened, as opposed to just remembering sort of an abstract montage of images and movements and sounds.

Instead of being overwhelmingly repulsed by the ideas of everything that happened, as I had been for most of this recovering process, I am now just aware that they are not simply ideas. They are real events that happened. To me.

My dad did these things to me.

I’m not crazy and I’m not irrational and I’m not drunk and I’m not high and I’m not stupid and I’m not a liar and I’m not trying to just get some attention (what the fuck does that even really mean, anyway?).

I’m just here, right now, sitting on my bed listening to the rain and feeling the cool air coming in through the open windows.

And I would like to say with the utmost confidence in myself the following:

- My dad started molesting me when I was three or four years old.

- My dad started handing me out to be raped and molested by other people when I was about five or six.

- My dad started raping me himself when I was seven.

- My dad used me to star in his creation of child pornography; he took pictures of me and he videotaped me with other people – he was always behind the camera.

- When I was fifteen, my dad tied me naked to a pine tree and poured gasoline around it and said he was going to set it on fire, and I believed him. He didn’t set it on fire, but he left me there for a while. That is what happened when I really stood up to him for the first time and defended myself from him and from the abuse and from the idea that it was somehow okay for him to do all of these things to me.

There are things I still do not choose to share here, because of the public nature of a blog. However, I can say them out loud to another person (mostly my therapist). I can look in the mirror and know that all of this shit is true and real and I’m not doing something bad by telling people, and that people will not think I am a worthless, crazy piece of shit for allowing such things to go from my mind into my lungs and out past my vocal cords and into the world where they can hurt and torture and kill.

Because I am not a hurter or a torturer or a killer.

I’m just me. And I can now look at my past and know with certainty that when someone tells me I’m strong, they are telling the truth. I don’t know where the strength came from, whether I should give my self some credit, or if I owe it all to my higher power.

I do know that some people go through things like this and they are not strong – they don’t make it to the other side, into the light that is in life. They carry the evil to another generation, or they inflict pain on themselves until they die alone and miserable. They live in crushing fear and shame and physical and mental illness every moment of their conscious lives.

And I mean EVERY moment. It doesn’t go away, even though it has been years and years since it all happened, and even though I have had absolutely no contact with my dad for over five years, and when someone says to me, why don’t you just let the past be the past, I want to scream at them that I would give anything at all to be able to let go of all of that shit – well, I guess not anything.

I would not give up my kids, or my peace of mind, or the fact that I have never abused a child the way I was abused. I would not give up what I have here and now. I would not give up my life because it is mine, and I would rather go through the hell and torment of the healing and recovering and suffering and remembering and feeling and counseling and thinking and even more feeling to have what I have now than to give him one more piece of me by continuing to hurt myself.

But it is hard. It is hard to be around people I love who will never be able to understand how I feel and what happens in my brain, because it is just something that can only be understood by people who have experienced things like I have experienced.

It is hard when I know that I am doing the best that I can – and that considering all circumstances, doing much better that most people could or would – and people still look at me like I am lazy, or shiftless, or irresponsible, or just in any way trying to get the most pleasure out of life with the least possible work.

Why anyone would think that being too scared to leave my own house would be pleasurable is beyond me. Why anyone would think that going to therapy every week and all of the other things I do on a daily basis just to stay sane would be pleasurable is also beyond me.

It is also beyond me how anyone could conceive of the steps I’ve taken to recover – that I will have to take for the rest of my life - as anything other than work. It has been the hardest work I have ever done in my life – and I have done some really difficult work before.

On top of all of that, why anyone would think that simply being awake and aware of who I am and of what I have experienced and of the pictures in my head and of the lingering pains in my body and in my heart can amount to anything less than working really fucking hard just to be able to live the life I’ve been given?

I don’t know. I don’t know what it is like to be a person who loves another person these things have happened to. I just know what it is like to be the person these things have happened to. I mean, that’s just it – the bottom line. I am who I am, and things that happened to me happened to me, and I am where I am right now because here is where I am right now.

That is all I care to write for today – I have some living to attend to.

part ... 15?

*Psychological trigger warning – bad shit in this post*

Ok, time to step back. I started out with this whole “putting it all out there” thing when my perspective of the abuse I suffered was only one of hindsight via recovered memories. I wanted to take you through my journey in similar chronological order to how I actually experienced things.

The chronology has changed.

I have been going through this … experience…lately, maybe over the past few months. It is really hard to measure the time, because the stuff I am experiencing now is just on a continuum of all of the other stuff I have been experiencing over the past 3 years. There have been very few definitive moments, but a few days ago I had what could be almost a definitive moment.

I had been gradually becoming aware of my awareness (excuse the awkward wording – I’m doing the best I can) of the abuse during the period of time in which it was actively happening.

Ok, let me go back again – three years ago I began to recover memories of horrendous abuse at the hands of my dad. Since that time, I have experienced overwhelming waves of flashbacks and terror and fear and all kinds of other shit that has been devastating and crushing and crippling and generally a nightmare.

Until about a month or two ago (I think), I had not been aware that I had previously been aware of what had happened to me. In other words, I believed that the memories I began recovering three years ago were the first moments I have ever had of being consciously aware of the abuse from my childhood.

That is not the case today, hence the change in chronological order.

I remember how it felt to go through every day knowing what he did to me. Sometimes it would leave my mind, only to return with a tremendous shock at the slightest trigger, usually something my dad would say or do, or something someone else would say to me.

I don’t know if I am explaining this in a way others who have not experienced it can comprehend. Basically, as a kid, I would be able to not be aware of what my dad did to me for short periods of time. In other words, I would be able to not think about it in the front of my mind for brief reprieves. For example, my dad would go from being a sadistic monster to this wonderful person who made me feel like I could move the entire earth with only my exceptional mind.

I have mentioned in previous posts that he taught me I was somehow better than everyone, because I was his flesh and blood. In turn, he would give me these bits of hope in myself and in his love for me, and I would fly as high as the sun. At those times, what he had done to me was not in the front of my mind. Only his love for me and how special I felt would be present.

I lived and died for that feeling. There is a line from a Noah and the Whale song: “And you don’t know how it feels to be alive/until you know how it feels to die.” I know how it feels to die, and I would do anything for that reassurance that I was alive, and good, and worthy, and loved.

And my father was the only person in the whole world who could make me feel any of that – actually, I don’t think that is necessarily true. It was more like he had the power to take those feelings away from me in a single glance. He defined who I was, down to each molecule of my being, he was in charge.

And I remember what it was like growing up that way, knowing the things he did to me, knowing that there was something about me that could never be completely good, knowing that I had to love this man or I would be nothing.

I think I was seven the first time he raped me. It wasn’t the first time he sexually abused me, but I think it was the first time he raped me. I was 15 the last time, and became pregnant as a result. I had an abortion. I was very angry about that – about getting pregnant. He told me I was a slut and that it had happened from me having sex with someone else. But we both knew that wasn’t true.

I made all of the arrangements and he took me and he paid for it. The people there were not nice, and it was cold, and all I really remember other than that was that the needle they put in the crook of my arm hurt very badly, all the way up to my shoulder.

Afterward, he took me to a hotel down the street from his company and left me there by myself with a bag of chips for the rest of the day while he went to work. It was a Friday.

That Monday was when I freaked out at school. I know I wrote about that already in a previous post…maybe someone could let me know which one it was. I don’t think I would like to look back through them right now.

Again, I am struggling with putting this out there. It is so ugly, so sick, so revolting – I am afraid I will hurt other people by telling them, giving them the knowledge, of what happened to me.

That is what he told me would happen if I told anyone. That my whole family would be torn apart, that my mom would be devastated and wouldn’t have anything to do with me, and that no one would believe me.

And I believed him.

And now I remember what it was like to be the kid all of that happened to, during the time it was happening.

When I was 16, someone confronted me about it – about him doing things to me. As I denied the allegations against him in outrage, the denial became what was real to me. It was like one of those gigantic power switches you see on movies in submarines and shit. In that moment, it went from something real to something that had never happened to me.

And it stayed that way until three years ago, when I was 31.

A fifteen year reprieve.

But I remember all of it now.