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.