part 33

It took three days of repeatedly slathering lip balm on my mouth and being sneezy to figure out it was the lip balm triggering my allergies. Unfortunately, I did not figure this out before I got a full-blown allergy attack featuring the ceaseless sensation of fleas jumping around in my nostrils for hours at a time and snot running freely from my nose like water from a faucet.

Fortunately, I had an opportunity to use the word “triggering” outside the context of residual effects of childhood trauma. Yay!

No, really, I mean it – yay! And for a number of reasons. One reason is that I am able to recognize the significance of using the word “triggering” for something other than what happened to me as a kid. Another reason is that even though I have been feeling like shit warmed over, recognizing that significance has gotten my mind out of my snot-filled head and into my joy-filled life. I already feel better!

It reminds me of that time my car blew up on the way to Charleston, leaving me without a car in a new city for the duration of my first pregnancy. With the unfathomable state of not having transportation looming on my horizon, I just kept focusing on how lucky it was that my mom was there and able to come to the rescue.

My ability to keep things in a certain perspective has gotten me through a lot of really hard times. I am proud of my ability to see the positive in situations that would otherwise kill me just by the sheer weight of them.

I began to be consciously aware of how I molded my perceptions sometime during my teen years. I would be faced with some sort of very difficult challenge and would drop right into despair, but then would soon think to myself, “how could this be any worse?” Then I would think of something that would make that situation worse, and then focus on being glad I wasn’t in the worse situation.

I don’t really think I have ever considered where this perception-morphing thing came from. Since so many of my tendencies and habits, good and bad, were shaped and created from the experiences I had growing up, I automatically wonder where this tendency found its roots.

Then I think about whether or not I could just have something I feel is positive about myself without analyzing the hell out of it and tying it to something bad.

No. I don’t think so. Not right now, anyway.

In hindsight, it is pretty easy for me to see that my ability to look at the bright side has been a significant component of my survival. But one of the things that has been floating in and out of my mind recently has been the way I minimized the situations that were very harmful to me when I was growing up.

I distinctly remember times when I was very angry or indignant about my dad’s punishment methods. My dad loved creative ways to punish. Sometimes I would have to memorize chapters from the bible, sometimes I would have to write a paper about the seven deadly sins or something of that nature. Once when I was in high school I got in trouble for … something…I don’t even remember – talking to boys or something. For my punishment, he had me take my phone out of my room, put it out on the driveway, and smash it to pieces with a sledgehammer.

SIDENOTE: my siblings also experienced a lot of these things along with me, but I do not feel so comfortable airing their laundry on a public blog – that’s very much something they can do themselves if they ever get that inkling.

Looking back, the phone/sledgehammer thing was pretty fucked up. I could analyze my dad’s motivations behind that particular punishment for days, but I will just sum it up by saying that it was a very deliberate and sadistic form of psychological abuse.

At the time, though, it was a story I could tell my friends the next day at school. My friends were often outraged and shocked at the stories I told them about my dad. Rather than share that feeling of shock and outrage, the act of telling other people what happened made it all much smaller in my mind. In other words, I minimized it.

It wasn’t that difficult to do, especially after learning about kids who were beaten by their parents. For some reason, that form of child abuse was always worse than anything my dad did to me. I had a close friend who would show up at school with a black eye, and I would ask what happened, and he would say something like, “I got hit with a boot.”

He could have meant that his dad had hit him with a boot, or it could have meant that his dad had kicked him in the face, but no matter what it meant, my friend had a black eye that the whole world could see. Considering that he lived in a neighborhood where everybody knew everything about each other and each other’s kids, such blatant evidence of abuse was immediately learned and circulated over telephone wires and on front porch steps.

Everybody knew. Everybody knew his dad was a bad guy – not just a guy who was bad, but a bad guy, like the villains in cartoons and movies. Everyone judged them, and regardless of any existence of empathy or support, they were the family that was featured when a sitcom took a turn for the serious in order to take a stand against violence.

They were the family that made-for-television movies were based on. They were the family that everyone could see had something wrong with it. Not just anything wrong with it, but something wrong that had been deemed unacceptable by society at large.

Anytime my dad would execute one of his clever and carefully crafted punishments, I would think about my friend and wish my dad left bruises that other people could see.

But he didn’t. He didn’t leave bruises. The marks he left on my body were in places very easily hidden by clothing, and I couldn’t imagine going out in public and exposing myself and saying, “Look! My dad did this! Do something about it!”

And so those marks and incidents and whatever you want to call them became minimized. “At least he didn’t kick me in the face.” And there was the bright side, warm and inviting and willing to carry me through another day.

I really do appreciate my ability to see the cup half full. It makes for a much more fulfilling life. But I wonder if people hear my story and think that what they experienced was not nearly as bad as what I experienced, and thereby minimize the abuse.

I tell my story because it empowers me, and because other people have told me they have felt less alone knowing it.

I do not want my story to be an example of something “worse” that has happened to somebody else. I mean the shit I experienced was unimaginable to most people, but what happened to me does not make whatever happened to you okay, regardless of how much more or less valid you might conclude by comparing your experiences next to mine.

I’m not on a separate boat, alone and out at sea, to be pitied and with only sticks to serve as paddles. Sometimes that is what it feels like to me, but that it is not where I am.

Where I am is on a gigantic and powerful ship that cannot be broken, no matter how hard people try. I am on this ship with anyone else who has ever been hurt – by being hit, even with an open hand and only once; by being burned, even if it was only the tip of a lit cigarette and it only happened one time; by being molested, even if it was on top of your clothes and left no marks on your body and only happened once.

Abuse is abuse. The law can categorize different types of abuse into different levels of severity. I may do the same thing in my own head. But I know how little it takes to hurt a child, how easy it is to mark a little girl’s or little boy’s lifeline with a deep, dark smudge, and how hard it is to clear that smudge away.

I also know how little it takes to keep an abused person quiet, even into adulthood, regardless of whether or not there is still abuse occurring, and regardless of whether or not it has not always been the same person doing the abusing, and regardless of whether or not any moral or religious or other excuse has been put forward to justify whatever it was that someone did to hurt you.

Getting hurt hurts. Someone who has smashed their thumb with a hammer may not be able to relate to someone whose leg is broken. Smashing your thumb with a hammer might not hurt as much as breaking a leg, but it still hurts. The pain is still there. It is real. And it matters.

For me, the reason that pain matters is not because of what should happen to someone else, or if someone should be confronted or charged or deemed bad by anyone. It doesn’t even matter if I view the pain as something I deserved, or put myself in the path of. The reason is because it hurts me, and I am tired of being hurting.