part 51

I am very tired. I haven’t felt quite like this in a long time. I feel like I’m filled with sand and need to be still, but at the same time my mind is very wound up.

It is THE feeling. The one I spent most of my life trying to avoid. It is the feeling of PROCESSING TRAUMA. It sucks. It sucks to feel the pain. Because it hurts.

The latest revelations about my past have tossed me back to what it felt like to be me as a child. There was nowhere to go – nowhere safe. I was literally surrounded by people who had hurt me or would be hurting me at some time.

I feel very naïve. I was a small child, but it took four or five times of being molested before I would not return to that neighbor’s house anymore, and I think I should have figured it out sooner. I don’t know why I always hoped and believed that it wouldn’t happen again. I think I just needed someplace safe to go, and before this guy got to me, it was a safe place. I wanted it to still be a safe place.

But it wasn’t. Neither were the houses of the other neighbors. There were two pedophiles and two sadistic rapists living within a hundred yard radius, with me being in the middle. One of each still live there, but I am not in the middle anymore.

I have been quite shocked at how I have been flung back to that time, back to when I was terrified and filled up with lead every second of every day and every night. Remembering that I am here now, though, is almost instantaneous relief of the tight, sharp pains in my chest. Not complete relief, but it loosens up some.

I am really feeling a lot of disgust toward myself right now, too. I can remind myself that I am here now, and then the disgust lightens up, too, but it is so strange to be straddling these two times of my life. Back then, I would fantasize about having someplace like I have now, someplace that is mine and safe, and if I want to hide in it, I can do that at any time, and if I want to get out of it, I can do that at any time too. I can also just be here without feeling the need to run or to hide. It is a pretty good place to have.

But these emotional and physical memories of what it felt like back then, when I had no such safe place, are really shitty. Compounding all of it is the realization that I never stood a chance. There was no way I was going to get out of my childhood with my innocence intact.

I remember how these men treated me when I was growing up back then. Of course, one of them is my father, but the two who still live there were very cruel to me, too. I don’t really remember having much interaction with the fourth one.

Anyway, these two men, the ones still alive and still in my life, were very mean. One of them was mean in a taunting kind of way – like he could make me do whatever he wanted, and the other was mean in a very cruel kind of way – like he could kill me any time he wanted. I don’t recall having much of an idea about why they treated me like that at that time.

I am very angry right now, in my safe place and my safe time, remembering the shame and hate and worthlessness and hopelessness and pure rage that compiled almost the entire range of emotions I was capable of as a child. It was hell being me living there, and those men really exacerbated the pain and the harm.

And it was all because they were too disgusted with themselves to acknowledge that I could be anything more than an object to be used and abused.

I think about hurting them – they are old men now. It would be easy to hurt them. It is nice to think about, but I have no interest in making my own situation worse.

The people who love me and who know about all of this are outraged and also fantasizing about revenge. I cannot help but think, though, that there is nothing any of us could do to them that would hurt them more than they have hurt themselves.

Evil is a living, breathing entity, and if you allow it to, it will eat you from the inside out. From the outside, it may not appear that you are suffering, but you are. People who do things like those men did to me are being eaten alive from the inside.

I believe this is how my father died. He allowed evil to cripple and kill him rather than acknowledge any wrongdoing on his part.

I wonder if that feeling of being devoured from the inside by evil is painful enough to qualify as just retribution for the pain they caused. I don’t know. I can’t really measure how much pain they caused me – I don’t know anything else to compare it to. It has been my life.

What I do know is that I am able to feel love, and smell the air, and speak softly, and most importantly, to rest. I can be still and be okay with it. I really believe it is the key to true happiness – to just be able to sit and be still and have peace all at the same time.

I know none of those men have ever known what that is like. Maybe their punishment isn’t the pain of anything bad happening to them, but the loss of experiencing anything beautiful. I know what it means to experience beauty, and the idea of none of those men even being capable of knowing what real beauty is makes me feel a little better.

Suffering is what happens when I am not able to know that peace and beauty, and if it is the same for those men, they will never know anything other than suffering. And I don’t have to do anything at all to them to make them suffer more.

 I’m okay with that – for right now, anyway.