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.