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.