It took me a very long time to embrace the title "survivor" that my therapist kept using when talking about me and all of the stories that I began piecing together over more than a year of counseling. Somehow that word had an implication that I couldn't quite embrace...it implied that I'd been through something terrible and somehow come out the other side in one comprehensible piece. Not only was I unable to completely accept that my experiences with John ascended to the label of sexual abuse, I was definitely not convinced that it was all over and that I was somehow going to be okay. As a matter of fact, the more that I began to flex my skills at self-reflection and piece together a narrative of my 28 years of life, I felt more and more broken and more and more convinced that I would never be normal. Who in the hell was I and whose life had I exactly been living? Which stories that I told my friends and family were true and which ones were lies I told so frequently that I actually believed them myself? I suddenly saw how I'd lived my entire life caught up in one emotional and behavioral defense or another seeking to numb out any intense feelings and unable to feel in control of my life or myself. My life felt like a sitcom without a laugh track. I no longer had my false self to cling to and had no fucking idea how discover my real self...and, well, I wasn't sure if I wanted to go through the hell of even trying. Of course, the painful irony was that I really had no other options. One you open some doors you cannot close them no matter how many ways you try.
I began to remember and I began to feel. The feeling was happening in unpredictable, inescapable cascades of sadness, anger, and loss. I kinda thought I was going crazy from time to time but kept pushing myself to trust my therapist to raise the red flag if I ever crossed the line into full blown madness. I was suicidal frequently without ever really wanting to die. The flashbacks were uncontrollable and I was afraid to sleep on my bed...the bed that I'd taken from my parents home...the bed in which I'd had my last goodbye with John. I didn't know who to tell or what to tell to anyone in my life about my undoing. How exactly do you go about telling your friends who have supposedly "known" your deepest inner life that you're just now realizing you were sexually abused for over 15 years without alienating, confusing, or simply pissing them off? I didn't think anyone would believe me or want to stick around to watch me continue my painful peeling away and rediscovery. How could they trust me? I was needy and hurt and wanted entirely too much from my friends...the same friends that I'd chosen because they didn't ask too much from me.
And, my family. Even that word feels a bit foreign to this day as a way to describe my parents and my brother. Family invokes a kind of warm, fuzzy connection that has never existed between any of us. I'd mostly accepted at that point in my life that my parents had insulated me from any kind of extended family connection beyond our nuclear family of four and that my brother would never really be a part of my life as he and his life choices had made it clear that his evangelical journey and his desire for geographical seperation his life path. I didn't exactly examine these dynamics. As with most things in my life until then I'd merely accepted it as reality and didn't allow myself to have any feelings associated with these relationships or lack thereof. The problem with the awakening of survivorship is that it gets harder and harder to not explore the why, when, how, and where terrible, painful things happen. And, who did or didn't see exactly what was going on.
No comments:
Post a Comment