I am faced with the unusual possibility of confronting several of my abusers. I had written before that my dad pimped me out when I was really little. This is still true, but I have since had a lot more memories about being sold to people – people who are still alive and still very prevalent in my life.
I have processed a lot of images and smells and feelings and thoughts in the past week. It has been exhausting. These latest memories are not easily questionable in my head, meaning that they are too real and concrete to even begin to try and convolute them into something that never happened. I mean, they happened.
One problem I’m having with these latest memories, though, is that it is another shocking and disgusting – unbelievable -component of everything else that happened to me. How many shocking and disgusting things could I have experienced? What’s the cap on that kind of thing, because I am pretty sure I am way past it.
I feel like it would be difficult for someone else to believe me time and again after remembering more stuff. One of my dad’s ways of discrediting me was by telling everyone in my family and in our lives that I was a liar. I guess that was a pretty effective maneuver on his part, since people believed I lied a lot, and I am still experiencing fear connected to it 20 years later.
I told Jonny and my mom about these people who paid my dad in order to rape me when I was younger. Jonny and my mom both know these people, and have known them for years. Jonny’s initial reaction when I told him who it was (I remembered what happened before I remembered who it was) was one of those faces people make after they have been puzzled about something they did not really even know was puzzling them, but then out of left field it all clicks together.
After Jonny made that face, he said: “That makes sense.”
It was surreal to hear him say that. I am not accustomed to other people catching on so quickly to the things that have happened to me and then connecting them somehow to their own reality, but that is what Jonny did. Based on his knowledge of me and who I am, and one of these abusers and who they are, and thinking back on the years and years of knowing us both, it made sense to him that what I was saying could be true.
Another reason it was surreal was because of the way the reality of it all stayed very consistent with me. Instead of experiencing any kind of dissociation, it felt like I was much more present in that moment and knowledge and feeling. I suppose that is the opposite of “surreal,” but my regular “real” has never been this real, and so it is unusual for me = “surreal.”
When I begin to get scared that other people might think I am beginning to make shit up (I haven’t figured out what anyone might think my motivation behind that would be), it lasts for just a whisper and then is gone. Because it is real. It doesn’t really matter if anyone else believes me or not. I don’t need any backup or evidence or corroborating events or documentation to prove that it is real, because I already know how real it is.
It doesn’t make a single bit of difference to me if anyone believes me or not. Actually, that is not true – it has been tremendously helpful having Jonny by my side, not only believing that this happened, but being able to comprehend how it happened, too. I would have had a very difficult time if he had not reacted this way, but I would still know it was real.
It’s just that it feels good to have someone so close to me so tightly in my corner. I might even venture to say that it feels EASIER having him here next to me.
It is all still really shitty. It’s another one of those things that has required a rearrangement of my past and of who I believed I was. It has been very disruptive this way, almost like when I first remembered my dad sexually abused me.
The difference, though, is that remembering that my dad sexually abused me completely destroyed all concepts I had of myself, of my life, and of other people. The new thing has only destroyed who I thought I was at certain times in the past.
Actually, I know who I was – I guess what I mean to say is that it destroys who I thought other people were at certain times in the past.
It makes me so sad. People I loved fiercely and I thought loved me, too – I don’t know who those people are now. I only know who I thought they were, and how I felt about them before I remembered the latest abuses.
It is true that the way I thought of them then, and of how I believed I could trust them to love me back, is not something that can be taken from me. Those feelings about them are still there, albeit in the past, and I did specifically get through a lot of things believing completely in those feelings.
I guess it doesn’t matter what I believe about those people now – they were who I needed when I needed them.
Still, it is just very sad.
But I still know who I was then (in hindsight, of course), and I know who I am now. I suppose if they contributed to me getting to this place of strength in my life (which they certainly did), regardless of how I thought it happened, I can appreciate and be grateful for that. There are no life-long guaranties about people. What I know about them now does not nullify what I got from them then.
When I first began my process of recovery, I met a man who was able to answer questions for me that no one else could answer. I asked other people these questions, and I kept getting referred to other people until this man finally answered my questions. I was very grateful – I still am.
Since then, that man has been investigated, charged, convicted and sentenced – he is now in prison for child molestation. Once I discovered how disgusting he is, I did not want to acknowledge that he was able to do anything good for me at all. But that is not the truth.
Sigh.
The truth can really be a bitch. I don’t think there are many things more valuable in life than the truth, though.
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