I smile politely at you
and let you assume I agree.
In reality I am fuming
at your words.
I hide behind good manners
never letting you see the discord.
I don’t know you anymore
-don’t think I ever did.
It’s all smoke & mirrors anyway
this thing called friendship.
I used to be a self-mutilator. I don’t know why that is so hard for me to admit to when I have no problem talking openly about my abuse… it seems silly to me that I can tell someone that I was abused and raped but ignore the effects it had on me. I had over 60 scars on my body from cutting at one time… many of which are completely healed over. I cut for many reasons… mostly to escape the pain that tormented me daily… sometimes to escape the utter numbness that was the only alternative I had to the pain.
Now I seek a healthier alternative… I allow myself to feel the pain and to process the anger. I allow myself to be broken and in that find surcease. I look at my scars now and do not feel shamed by them, rather, I feel honored. Honored that I survived this and I can survive still.
In a torrrid sea of faces
and voices
I cling to you.
Fighting violently
I resist the pull
of my old life…
of lies and pretending
of repression and unspoken violence.
I don’t want this anymore.
I crave peace,
unending.
So today I figtht
so that tomorrow
I may heal.
3-20-11
Talking to my mom today sent me into a tail-spin. I hate that I am so afraid of being “found out” like I am doing something wrong and have something to hide… I hate that just speaking to my family on the phone has the power to make me doubt my past and begin to see it through their eyes. I came from a family of “brush it under the rug”. They are great at pretending that everything is ok and we’re not really broken in the extreme. Most of my life my dad yelled and screamed and belittled all of us and my mom just took it and let us take it.
I remember one night when I was a little girl, my parents had put me to bed. I got up to get a teddy bear off my shelf to sleep with and had curled up in bed and was just drifting off to sleep when my dad burst into my room, angry. He asked me if I had gotten out of bed and I told him I had gotten up to get a bear to sleep with. He asked me if I had left the room and I hadn’t. He then accused me of sneaking out of my room to watch through the cracked door as my brother changed clothes. He was crazy angry and accused me of lieing when I denied this. He beat me with a belt so badly I had whelps from the backs of my knees to the small of my back. He was in a blind rage. My mother came in afterword to ask me if I had done this and I told her the same thing I told my father. She told me it would make things better if I apologized to my father and just said that I had done this thing he accused me of. So I did and my dad pulled me into his lap and hugged me and told me he loved me. I don’t even know why, to this day, he would think I would be watching my brother dress or undress or why it would have been a big deal as we were both very young… I was about 6 and my brother was about 9-10.
When I was a teenager I confronted my parents about this and they both denied the whole thing and told me I must have imagined it. My whole life they have managed to make me feel crazy… Now I just want to live in truth and not brush anything else under the rug. I am through pretending. I long to walk in the sunshine and feel the warmth on my skin. I long to live in truth. I may not be perky and happy all the time, but I am real and alive, and that is so much better to me.
I will spare only one tear for you. I dare not open the floodgates of my emotion lest the onslaught destroy me in a vortex of fear and self-loathing. You are naught but a ghost. I killed you that day. I watched you die. In desperation, I drove the knife home and I watched you writhe in agony with a bitter smile on my face. I strove to destroy you, dear child…but not without reason. I destroyed you to save you, that perhaps some small remnant of the girl you were could survive, pristine.
I was a fool to attempt this. I will never escape you. You are soiled and ugly. You are a protector of wrong, defender of evil. You cause hurt to come upon others. You have no pity. Stupid child. Pitiful creature. To know you is to loathe you. To despise your very existence. Whore that you are, finding joy in your torture, enlisting the pity of others to aid in your healing. You will never be free. You live only to suffer, die only to rot.
I did not bury you that day. I torment myself with the knowledge of my deed. My failure to eradicate you will haunt me forever. You are the ghost that haunts my dreams. You are the demon who terrorizes my waking hours. You are my hell, my prison I have created and I cannot break free. I hate you, unclean thing that you are. I am locked in here with you-my tormentor.
I shed only one tear for you. You will spend my whole life dyeing. I spare only one tear for you because you will rape my soul forever. You will rape my soul forever.
I was taking a shower today and staring at the shower head thinking about the time we had to change it. Then I suddenly remembered that there was a huge gaping hole on the other side of the wall. Changing this shower head was supposed to be simple… just unscrew the old one then screw the new one in place. Like most things in life it got complicated quickly. After trial and error we had to cut a large access hole into wall in the adjoining room to repair the problem. These repairs were taking place at about 9pm on a Sunday which meant we didn’t have much time to get the job properly done before we had to give up on it for the night and just rig it up and go to bed. Well now a month has passed and I had managed to completely forget that this huge hole existed. As long as the shower functioned properly and I didn’t have to look at the hole it was not a part of my reality. This became a metaphor for my life… I find that as long as I am functioning on a day to day level – as long as I can go to work, pay my bills, put dinner on the table, clean my kitchen, spend time with my husband – as long as I can do these things I fool myself into thinking that the gaping hole in my chest doesn’t exist. Then something horrible happens… something wonderful… my husband looks at me and says, “You don’t have to pretend here.” And I am suddenly aware of this wound. I feel it and allow myself to be broken for a moment. Just that small reminder that I am seen, that I don’t have to hide… It’s painful and wonderful at the same time. I usually don’t allow myself to feel this pain. I just gloss over it and pretend to be ok, to be happy. Something amazing happens in the middle of it all, though… Through the safe release of this pain… I find that under it I really am happy… that I really do believe everything will be ok eventually and I don’t have to rush through this healing process… I can give myself permission to be. There is so much grace in that realization.
Now that I am aware…now that I am awake, I am trying not to be hyper-aware of everything I do I am trying not to over-analyze my thoughts and actions. I want to be alive in my world, not just drifting slowly through it, but I also want to relax and enjoy the journey. I want to drink in life and stop being a passive character in my own life story. I want to be able to recognize and admit to a lifetime of abuse without drowning in this grief. I want to realize my own self-worth without becoming self-involved. I want to admit that I need to do things for me that make me happy without alienating the people I love. I want to give myself permission to be happy without seeking the approval of others. I want to be comfortable in my own skin. I want to stop hiding behind the “everything is ok” mentality when things are so obviously broken. I want to be able to admit to this pain that threatens to overwhelm me without making the people around me uncomfortable. I am so tired. So afraid. So broken. I am ready to shake off this cloak and lie in the sun. I am ready… just so afraid…
There’s so much I don’t understand. I long to life a life of transparent honesty, but that’s just not practical in our superficial polite society. It’s all about what’s easy and politically correct instead of what’s real. When someone ask, “How are you doing?” they expect a positive answer. If you tell them the truth they are uncomfortable and don’t know what to say. No one knows what to do with the pain. As a culture we are not given any tools with which to deal with pain – there’s no etiquette for this. There’s no precedence for this transparency. This seems universally true – in work, play, school, church… there’s no room for pain. No one really wants to know about your pain and no one wants to honestly share their pain. Everyone wants to pretend to be ok – well-adjusted – happy – but most of us are dealing with some kind of brokenness, some kind of pain, even if we don’t quite have a name for it.
How do we break this habit? Is that even possible? Will we always be a society of isolation? We have more methods of connecting now more than ever before – yet we have never been more alone. All communication have become trivial and the art of sharing reality has been lost. Gone are the days of love letters… we are in an era of romance via hallmark. We depend on someone else to communicate our affections or not at all. If a card or e-mail forward does not contain the feeling we wish to convey we founder – having no words of our own. Why? Because we are a society of observers… always watching, reading, listening – not thinking, feeling, sharing. We surround ourselves with media in lieu of nature, we seek triviality rather than solitude – we spend our energy on status rather than investing it in another.
Where does this leave us? It leaves us all lost and lonely. It leaves us in a home crowded by TV, radio, internet, video games – where two lonely people live who have forgotten how to share what is most important – themselves.
My grandmother is fiercely loyal to her favorite son. For reasons no one really knows she worships the ground he walks on. It is not unlike a cult, with Eddie the proclaimed prophet or savior. I will never understand where this unhealthy devotion comes from. Growing up in this family of 8 children, Eddie was the one who could do no wrong. He molested some and possibly all of his 5 sisters. When they came and told their mother, she told all of the children to keep it a secret and not tell their father. She was worried that if her husband found out he would kick Eddie out of the house. She was more willing to sacrifice all 5 of her daughters to this man than to save her daughters and put him away where he belonged.
Later, after the children grew up and some had girls of their own, the entire family gladly left their daughters alone with this man knowing full well what he was capable of. It was more important to save this “good man” this “man of God” than to be sure their children were safe. It was more important to preserve a reputation than any of the girl’s innocence. We were all disposable. Just something to be sacrificed at the Altar of Eddie.
If I live to be a hundred years old, I will never know where all of the contempt came from. Why were the girls in my family so despised? Why were we so worthless to so many people? Why were our lives not more important than the reputation and freedom of one man? Why was it ok for Eddie to molest and rape us?
I know it’s impossible to ever get answers to these questions, but I long to understand. There’s a part of me that believes if I could just understand this, my life would suddenly make sence. I know this is pure fantasy and will never happen, but I just long to categorize these experiences and make them fit into some form of sanity. I want to have simple explanations, even if they are painful ones. Instead I am stuck with this horrible feeling of worthless-ness. Of being a disposable object… a thing of contempt. I feel like I must be truly broken for an entire family to want to toss me to a monster, then protect the monster.
I know one day I will be beyond this in my healing and the quest for answers will not matter so much. I know that one day I will learn to accept that my family is just profoundly broken and twisted and wrong and completely unaware of what love actually is or what it means. But between now and then I have this gaping hole in my heart and a pain that permeates all I touch and a sadness that lingers behind my smile.
captivatingbitter 
Thoughts on Honest Communication
I think we underestimate the value and the ease of honesty. We over-think things and give simplistic answers because that is what we assume other people want from us. When I ask a question I expect an honest answer – and because of this I only ask questions that I am interested in the answer to. I prefer a life of honesty. I don’t want someone to try to anticipate what they think will be best for me or easier for me to take… I do not believe in “white lies”. I just want to know what is, not what someone thinks should be. I want straight honest answers and honest feed-back. I am so tired of avoiding issues for the sake of not hurting feelings… it is usually more painful in the long run to avoid the immediate pain for the sake of what’s easy.