Part 23

So I was thinking that the end of my last post would be a fantastic way to wrap it all up and finish my whole “putting it all out there” experience. I have to admit – it was an attractive thought. However, it was not the end of the story…which leads me to wonder: will there ever be an end to the story as long as I’m alive?

I don’t know, but I know this whole healing and recovering thing will be a lifelong process, so probably the wellspring of shit to “put all out there” will not dry up. I can say definitively, though, that the experience described at the end of my last post certainly marked another one of those points in my life that are a “before this happened,” or “after this happened,” kind of thing.

Before the hospital, I was lost and drowning and didn’t know what to do or how to even take a breath in and then let it out again. After the hospital, I was lost and drowning and was figuring out how to take a breath in and then let it out again, and I was also no longer trying to do it all on my own.

Here’s the thing about my own perception of events that have happened to me: they are NEVER as bad in my own mind as they actually are in reality. I can finagle a way out of any situation or experience or thought that can change my perception of what was real into something that was not real.

For example, I could be perfectly aware that someone touching me in a “bad way” was bad and I could tell on the person. However, what my dad did to me was not even in the same realm. What my dad did to me was a lot of different things, but never anything I could tell on him for. I BELIEVED in him – even when I was fully conscious of the fact that what he was doing to me was wrong, I could write it all off as something in my head that I exaggerated and made bigger and lied about so that I could get attention.

Additionally, I had somehow adopted this idea of being able to take the punishment I “deserved” as something I just had to do – I brought it on myself, so don’t try to blame it on anyone else. It’s not that I never tried to get out of trouble, it’s just that after I was already in it, anything I felt that I said or did could only be looked at as attempted retaliation for whoever was punishing me.

The times that I would be angry beyond denial of what my dad did to me were the times that I would get punished. I would try to stand up to him, and he would knock me down. And it wasn’t just him – my mom, siblings, neighbors, relatives, family friends, people at church – they all tried to convince me that I was over-reacting and exaggerating and lying in order to retaliate against my punisher.

All of those people would say things like, “Now, Beck….blah blah blah…you know your dad loves you…blah blah blah…he only wants what is best for you…blah blah blah.” It was just repeated confirmation from people all around me that my dad could do whatever he wanted to do to me, and regardless of how wrong I thought he might be, I was just a child who was upset over being held accountable for yelling or throwing a fit or whatever it was I had done that could be publically called “bad.”

I would have extreme swings in my state of mind that would go from pure fury and indignation about my dad to pure hopelessness and helplessness and defeat about my dad and everything else in the whole world. I feel tired thinking about it. It is a horrible, horrible place to be.

As a result of this kind of thing happening over and over again throughout my childhood, I would constantly question my own judgment. I mean, it was very obvious to me that tying me to a tree naked and pouring gasoline around it and threatening to set it on fire was NOT ok. But then I would do things like tell my mom that my dad had chained me to a tree, when in fact he had merely tied me to the tree with yellow tow rope. My mom would confront my dad, who would reiterate that I was a liar and crazy and bent on messing with their marriage.

She would believe him. Why wouldn’t she? The things I accused my dad of were heinous, outrageous, and unimaginable – and I did alter the stories to make them sound worse. I didn’t think it sounded so bad for him to tie me to a tree, but to chain me to a tree really sounded like something everyone would know was wrong.

But he would call me a liar, and I would stomp off to cry alone in my room because I did lie. I could feel the injustice of it all, but the fact that I lied about those details removed any credibility of my own judgment. If I lied, then what I was saying was not true. It was an all-or-nothing type of thing – if I lied about any part of it at all, that meant other people would not trust that any of the other things I said as real.

And then I would question whether these things were real or not, and I could always – ALWAYS – convince myself that what had happened to me didn’t happen, at least not in the way I remembered it happening. I believed there was something wrong with me, with my brain or even with my soul. And then I would be mad at the world for a little bit and all of my anger would instantly vanish once that man said something nice to me or looked at me and smiled or said, “hello daughter.”

I could not bear to think of my dad – and all of the nice things he did for me – being accused by me of these horrible other things. If I did that, I would not have the part of my dad I believed loved me. He would take it away at the drop of a hat, and then I would be back to the perpetual self-hatred and worthlessness, because the part of my dad I believed love me was the only thing I believed I could be loved by.

I was utterly incapable of defining myself as anything at all independently of his influence. As I got older, though, I began taking parts of myself from him and declaring them my own. Those parts were the things that he would hate, that god would hate, and that I would go to hell – or juvenile hall – for. For example, smoking cigarettes, or being promiscuous, or steeling his meds, or acting out in school. All of that felt like I could own it and he couldn’t stop me.

And he couldn’t. Once I figured out that my own self destruction was better than him destroying me, I was off to those bad-girl races.

But then, here I was, twenty years later, in a mental hospital.

I could not deny the reality of that. What he did must have been really, really bad, not just in my mind, but in everybody’s minds. I was in a mental hospital and he was connected to everything in my brain that got me there.

And so the bits and pieces of acceptance and remembering and hurting and suffering and healing began to tumble around me and fly out at me and hit me like hailstones in a storm.

But at least I knew I was finally somewhere safe enough to survive it.