part 122, or "reality bites"

***TRIGGER ALERT***

I had a doctor’s appointment yesterday. It was just a routine thing, but it was with a new doctor.

I don’t like going to the doctor – any doctor - but one of the things I have been learning to do is take better care of myself, and that means going to the doctor for routine stuff.

Anyway, I was not at all expecting to experience a doctor’s appointment like the one I ended up having yesterday. I was expecting routine questions and routine answers and routine tests and routine results. But this wasn’t a routine doctor.

After she learned some of my history, she started asking questions I wasn’t really sure how to answer…wait, let me back it up. I was there for my routine checkup, but also for a consult about a tubal ligation. She asked me why I was afraid of becoming pregnant – not why I did not want to have any more kids, but why I was AFRAID OF BECOMING PREGNANT.

I told her about my dad, and the abortion when I was 15 that was the result of his raping me. I told her I hadn’t started remembering things about the rapes and abortion until after my second child was born, and that the idea of being pregnant again terrified me because I felt like I would have to remember how it felt to be pregnant with my father’s child.

She asked me what I had felt when my dad raped me. I literally did not understand the question. I kept trying to specify whether or not she was asking me how I felt psychologically or physically, and she kept saying she just wanted to know how it felt.

I hadn’t really thought of that in any cognitively processing kind of way before. How DID it feel when my dad was raping me? When he forced himself onto me and into me, and injected me with himself, and it mixed with myself, and a whole new entity that was the combination of me and my dad was created in my body?

I couldn’t answer the question – I still really couldn’t understand the question. Whenever I tried to think of how that felt, when he was doing that to me, I just shut down. My brain automatically threw up a line and designated it as the line to never cross, and when I faced the possibility of crossing it anyway, I just wanted to throw up or lie down on the floor and go to sleep or leave there and go to the nearest bar and get shit faced.

But she insisted I cross that line, even after I told her my brain shut down. She said that shutting down was not allowed.

And so I thought about it, what it felt like.

It felt awful. It felt heavy, and it felt like getting ripped open, and it stung. And it felt shocking – even though he had been doing it since before I could even really remember, every time he did it again, I was shocked that it was happening. I wouldn’t stay there – I would leave into my mind when he was doing it.

Sometimes he would talk to me when he was raping me, and it was harder for me to stay inside my mind. He would ask me questions about how it felt. He would tell me I was such a good daughter for going along with it – that it was the hardest part of being a daughter, but I was such a good daughter for doing it.

He would tell me what he was feeling, what he was doing – he would describe it to me, and say that was how men worked, it was what men did, and I couldn’t understand that unless he showed me because I would never be a man.

He was teaching me.

He was punishing me.

He was dominating me.

He was hurting me.

He was showing me the only thing my body would ever be worth, that the only reason I had a heart beating inside of me was to fuel that body for him to use, and that the only reason I had two legs was so that I could open them up for him.

He injected me with himself, and when I found out I was pregnant, I was horrified at what kind of monster I carried in my body – what kind of monster the combination of him and me made.

I knew he was a monster, and I knew that I was a monster, too – at my core, that was who I was. Just like him.

And no combination of monster and monster could be anything other than a super monstrous monster. Would this baby monster get born and grow up and hurt people and kill people and torture people? Would it hurt me and torture me and kill me?

I worried that he would not pay for an abortion, that he would not be willing to destroy such an opportunity – the opportunity of having a concentrated version of his flesh and blood walking around, made purer because I was also his flesh and blood walking around, and I was the other half of this new flesh and blood.

He didn’t try to stop me. He didn’t refuse to pay for the abortion and he did not refuse to take me there to have it done.

What he did refuse to do was acknowledge that he had done this to me. It seemed like it never actually hit his reality that I was pregnant with a monster that he had put inside of me – he told me I was a slut, and from that I knew he was saying to me that someone else got me pregnant – there was no acknowledgment whatsoever that he knew he did that to me. That is what got me mad- really mad.

I wanted to reach in a take that tiny monster out with my own hands, but I couldn’t do it –  I couldn’t reach, and I didn’t know how it worked, and I was so, so scared. I punched it over and over, but I knew that wouldn’t work, and I had to tell him because he was the only one who could help me get rid of it.

And he did.

When I was pregnant with my own children, my brain didn’t know what it had felt like that time I was pregnant with the monster. But my body did. When I was pregnant with my own kids, I started throwing up the moment I found out I was pregnant, and didn’t stop until my own little babies were out of me.

I am grateful that I was able to have my own babies growing inside me without having to remember what it felt like having that tiny monster growing inside of me.

But now this doctor asked me what it felt like. I couldn’t hardly find words. I cried. She cried, too. She hugged me over and over again, and told me that my uterus was a beautiful part of my body, and that she did not recommend a tubal ligation because I had a condition that could be treated with a hysterectomy.

I hadn’t known all of the pain there had been from anything other than my own body’s memories – learning that there is actually something wrong with my uterus – and that it can be fixed by taking it out – was not something I had at all expected.

I also did not expect for a doctor to tell me that it was not an urgent procedure at this time, and that she did not want to do the surgery while I believed that getting rid of my uterus would mean getting rid of something bad – I told her that if I had never had a uterus, I would not have been raped over and over and sold to men I had never met before, and sold to men I lived across the street from and next door to, and I never would have had to be a good daughter to my dad.

I realized I hate my uterus, I hate that I was a girl then, and not a boy, because I would not have been hurt that way if I had been a boy.

And I hadn’t realized all of this until that doctor tipped my brain over and asked me what I felt when my dad was raping me, and what I imagined I would feel if I were to get pregnant again today.

She said she wanted me to work out that I didn’t need to have my uterus removed because it would make it easier for me to not have it in my body. If I needed to have it removed only because of a physical condition, then it could be done. But she didn’t want to do it when it was still a part of my body that I hated.

A lot to think about…and I wasn’t expecting any of that at all.

part 121, or "getting my nails done is not crazy"

Wanting to violently hurt someone else, to me, is pretty crazy. Not “weird” or “astounding” crazy, but CRAZY crazy, and I have always been terrified of being that kind of crazy.

I’ve lived my entire life not knowing if I was crazy or not. Its just in the past couple of years that I’ve gotten firm footing when it comes to how I view my mental state. I have done so many tests on myself, studying my own behavior and thoughts in reference to whatever is (or is not) going on around me at any given time. I’ve researched my sanity exhaustively, and it’s getting boring, because I’m not crazy.

Well, maybe a little bit crazy. I guess it depends on how I define “crazy.”

Here is what I think a crazy person looks like:

Wild hair, no make-up, eyes that are always seeing something terrifying (real or imagined), wearing jammies all day (even in public), and wandering helplessly lost through the library or grocery store or on the street, even when they have lived there for the past thirty years.

Crazy looks like someone who knows something, but can’t remember that they know it. Confused, bitchy, unpredictable, and inappropriate. If someone is standing in a store staring at the same thing without moving for ten minutes, that looks like crazy. If that someone is wearing jammies and has greasy, unwashed hair, and bits of polish on their nails left after they picked the rest of it off, then that person looks certifiably insane.

All of my ideas about what crazy looks like are rooted in my own behavior – I don’t know if I think I’m crazy because I have looked and acted that way, or if looking and acting that way is what defines me as crazy. Regardless, I cannot deny at least the appearance of what I feel defines crazy, at least some of the time, in my life. In fact, I go around picking my nail polish off all the time, even though when I see someone who is obviously mentally ill, and they have mostly-picked-off nail polish, I say, “note to self: stop picking off nail polish; it makes you look crazy.”

I guess recognizing the crazy in other people has allowed me to be more accepting of myself, and of my illness, and of what it means to be ill this way. The other day I walked out of a store with all of my newly purchased items falling out through a hole in the bottom of the bag, and I was completely oblivious to it, and another customer had to run out after me to stop me, and the girl who worked there picked up all of my stuff after me and brought it to me at my car, and I smiled and said, “thank you,” and she said, “there’s a hole in the bag, do you want me to get you another,” and I said, “no, that’s okay, I will just carry it holding the bottom instead of by the handles,” and she stared at me strangely, and for some (crazy) reason I thought she meant that the bag was ABOUT to break, and the items she picked up after me were things accidentally left out of the bag at checkout, and I didn’t put it all together until after I started unpacking the bag when I got home and saw there was a big hole in the bottom.

And then I thought to myself, “wow – I was acting really crazy in that store.” And then I though to myself, “eh, don’t be so hard on yourself – if you were acting crazy, it was because you kind of are a little bit, but only the kind of crazy that comes from what you’ve been through, and not the scary kind of crazy.”

Scary crazy is when someone knows what is going to happen in the future, who believes they have special powers, and who has unfailing confidence in everything they do, because they already know they are going to end up the victor at the end of it all. That was who my dad was, and his dad, and probably my brother. That’s the crazy I am terrified of being – it’s the crazy I’ve been battling all along.

I get confused between what hope feels like, and believing I absolutely know everything will turn out well in the end because I am a superior being. I guess it’s the difference between taking care of myself and waiting for myself to get taken care of.

Even by my own admission – and something I have been saying for years - I was always waiting for men in white jackets to come and take me away. I would say, “I’ve always been expecting men in white jackets to come and take me away, but they never did, so I finally had to send myself to the mental hospital, ha ha ha” (for some reason, I always found this funny, but now I’m not remembering why…).

Anyway!

 Seeing and accepting the damage that has been done to me has helped me learn to take care of myself instead of waiting to be taken care of. It’s kind of paradoxical, because it would seem that seeing and accepting the damage to my mind and body would reinforce that I am a victim. But I am figuring out that the difference between being a victim and being a survivor lies in my ability to stop looking around for people to come make things better so I wouldn’t have to deal with the pain myself.

What happened to me was not fair; it was not right; it was not okay; it was not my fault. And it HURTS – beyond what I imagine the depths of hell feel like, even if I don’t believe there is a hell (not outside of life on earth, anyway).

But not accepting the pain, and staving it off until someone comes along and makes it go away (aka, “denial”), means that it is impossible to be anything other than a victim. I can’t accept help from other people if I can’t acknowledge what I need help with.

But I have spent my entire life building a façade that says I am brilliant, I am beautiful, I am special, and I am thereby entitled to have my pain taken from me so that I can be left to bask unfettered in the glory that is me. I have stood by that façade, and sworn that it was real, and fought to defend it at all cost. I have put a lot of time and energy and effort and pride into maintaining that façade.

But it is still a façade.

I mean, yeah, I’m smart, but I’m not Einstein, and yeah, I’m pretty, but I’m not a super model. And yeah, I have a lot of really nice qualities that are valued by society, but not to the extent that I outshine everyone else and am entitled to have effortlessly what everyone else must work for.

A huge part of my struggles have concerned the fact that I haven’t ever gotten what I believed I was entitled to. My greatness has never been cosmically acknowledged by money or power or fame, and those are the essential components to proving my greatness to the world. Closing in on 40 years old, not having that proof really sucks – I mean, if I am not powerful and famous and rich by now, wouldn’t that mean that my greatness isn’t so great?

Um…yeah, probably.

But now I am falling in love with humanity, and with being human, and it feels so much better than fruitlessly touting greatness I do not possess. It feels sane. It feels real, and it feels safe. It’s really a pretty nice way to feel.