It's cold and the sleeves of my coat are too short.

This is still my uncensored haven. I feel the need to remind myself of that.

I had to move in with a roommate. I was nervous for obvious reasons. She puts her own needs and wants aside for other people sometimes, I feel. And I think it makes her very angry. She reacts angrily to things, but does not realize it. She yelled at me for waking her up. I got so so angry and couldn't sleep in the room with her and then I cried and cried and cried because it had stabbed down into the darkest of all places that rears up whenever someone yells at me. I couldn't talk to her, I was scared and angry and guilty and sad. Someone made us talk it out, but I don't feel better about it. I never told her that I do not appreciate being ordered around.

The next day, I went to a nurse for my back pain. She made sense, she said that I have nerves in my back that are pinched and my spine is slightly twisted, all which leads to my back and arm pain. Then she massaged my back to try to get the kinks out of it. I felt weird, as I always do when someone massages my back, but mostly okay because I've been in dire need of a massage for a long time. I felt myself relaxing. She said I needed to "lose the weight" because extra weight on my frame can make pain worse. I stayed silent because I had no idea what to say to that. I spent the rest of the day glancing at my reflection in windows and wincing at what I saw. The 14-year-old in me was livid, so I guess I was livid. I hate that way of someone telling me to lose weight especially. More than one person has said it to me, though I haven't heard it in years. I'll never go back to her, because she looked at my body and felt the need to comment on it.

Then today the bus driver threatened me. I jaywalked to get to the bus. He told me that if I ever did that again and he was driving, I would pay for it with my life. I didn't react to it at first, I apologized, but then I slowly realized what he had said to me. My back started hurting really badly. I felt the intense need to get off the bus, and I did after a little while. I got myself lunch at a restaurant because I decided that I deserved it. The guy at the restaurant was very nice to me. I didn't know how to tip with a debit card, but he didn't seem to mind.

I don't see the point of all this. I don't see the point but something's telling me there is one. How can I connect and talk with people when it seems that each and every one of them is damaged and broken and spitting ickiness? I'm tired of people who take their sadness and anger and self-hatred out on other people, no matter how small it may seem. I don't want to talk to anyone. I want to cry but I can't because I'm in someone's room and she blasts horrible music. I watch cartoons I've seen a million times and doodle and sometimes I work through things, but mostly I escape. I've been working so hard lately to accomplish what I want, what I've decided to do, someone who's not a shithead told me that something will give soon, that I'll get that job I can enjoy, that I'll get what I need to finally get out on my own and become the person I want to be, the person I really am.

But if this is what I'll experience in the world, what the hell is the point?

I had a dream about my sister last night.

We were in a vast field, which was very dark because it was the weird time between daylight and full night. Her face was shadowed and I couldn't see it clearly. The sky was dusky and the grass was muted green, flat where we were standing and knee-high around us. I was so angry at her, we had been fighting. I don't remember what about. We were both very young, just kids. She said something that made me so damn mad, and I took out my gun and fired into the sky, in a somehow mopey way. I wanted to shoot her, but not really. That's why I fired into the sky. I watched as the bullet (which was about the width of a penny and flat on both ends) flew up in an arc, slowly, and landed in the right side of her head, breaking away a large piece of her skull. I saw her face finally, as it went dead. She fell to the ground. I had killed her. A moment passed, I could hear the breeze around me. And then I started screaming. I threw down my gun like it was poison and I screamed and screamed and screamed because I thought that if I screamed loudly enough, it would shake everything back into the way it had been, before I had killed her. My whole being was consumed with grief in an instant. I had killed her, she was dead and it was all my fault, and there was NOTHING I could do to take it back.

Then the dream switched, seeming to be an entirely different dream. I was a teenager, sitting with my mom and dad. They were married and we all lived together, a happy family. In the middle of breakfast with them, I had a flashback to killing my sister in the field. I thought It wasn't a dream. I actually killed her. I started to freak out. I tried to tell my parents what I had done all those years ago, but they wouldn't listen to me. They kept telling me to forget it, that it didn't really happen. But I knew it did, and I knew they were trying to make me forget so things wouldn't be difficult and sad. I kept pushing it, I kept telling them that I had to tell people what I did, but they kept dismissing me. I knew I would probably go to jail. I didn't want to, but it was better than silently living with what I had done.

Then I woke up.

I really was more eloquent at the bus stop.

I'm beginning to feel the pressure.

I was so eloquent at the bus stop. I never put myself first, ever. No matter how much I dislike someone, so matter how much I may get hurt, no matter how much someone abuses me, I'm just not as important as they are. I work very hard to keep everyone happy and things calm without even realizing it. I hate it. It makes me resent people who don't deserve it and it gives control to people who don't know their asshole from their eyeball. It makes me explode with anger and hate because I start to feel like everyone is telling me what to do and I don't have the spine to say "But I don't want to do that." I treat people close to me like I had to treat my family in order to survive. I make abusers out of people who really, honestly love me, because on some level I actually believe that I'm not good enough to deserve real, healthy love. I want to tell everyone to fuck off and crawl into a hole, where no one will look at me and I'll never do anything I don't want to ever again. I know I don't mean it; I know, deep inside somewhere that I love people and need their contact. But at this moment in time, it's hard to care about anyone, especially myself.

I feel like most of my life, if not all of it has been following everyone else and never creating my own path. Even a person whose job it is to help me come into my own is trying to get me going on things I'd rather not bother with. And I do those things, I listen to her opinions like I actually care, because I'm so terrified she's going to shove my head into the wall or scream at me or make me homeless or rape me. I know logically she won't do those things, but it doesn't make the fear go away. Even if I tell her my thoughts and what I'd really like to be doing, it doesn't do shit. She gets condescending and talks and talks and I think "Damn, why did I even bring it up?" I wonder if she does it specifically to deter people from speaking up.

I've never had a life that was truly my own. I've never lived without trying to meet someone else's expectations of me. I've never trusted myself as much as I forced myself to trust everyone else. In human relationships, there must be autonomy. There must be boundaries set, and all that other shit, or the relationship becomes suffocating. At least, in my experience. The self-destructive part of me believes that losing the people I love is imminent, and so I must push them all away before they have the chance to abandon me. Because being abandoned is heart-breaking, it's soul-killing, it's so damn painful that it makes me never want to trust anyone again. But the people I love now can't abandon me; they are autonomous beings themselves, not my mother or father. They didn't raise me, they don't have a natural obligation to help me survive. I don't want to depend on them for my survival; I want to rely on them for love and support, and I want to give them the same. But dependence, no. It's poison. It makes the world look the way it did when I was three. It makes me feel like someone is trying to shove something into my mouth and down my throat and telling me that they're doing so because they love me.

Obviously, there's a lot more to this than meets the eye. It's not really about the people in my life now at all. It's about THEM, it always comes back to THEM, because they forced themselves into my body and then left me to die on the inside. They wanted me to depend on them, but then refused to take care of me. They never protected me, they never taught me how to protect myself, and so I was stuck with them inside me, because it was my only means of survival. They're still there, and they're always shouting at me and dismissing me and hitting me and raping me and doing everything they can to remind me that I'm a worthless sack of shit who doesn't deserve clear boundaries or to be loved. And I believe them, because for the first chunk of my life, it was my only way of surviving.

I can't express how angry I am. I hate repeating myself, but the same shit just keeps coming up. I'm less afraid to say things, but I'll still take responsibility for them. I understand a little better where certain adults who have been in my life are coming from; when you've been told most of your life that you're wrong, that you don't know anything and don't deserve to think you do, it's so damn tempting to forget everyone else has emotions and do whatever the fuck you want. Yell, scream, hit. But unlike them, I don't think I'm anywhere near the end. I know under all the anger is a human being who loves people and doesn't want to hurt anyone. These two parts of me should get together and have a baby. Express your feelings unapologetically, but not abusively. Work through the abusive side, release it, and then become the person you really are. Because I don't believe anyone actually wants to hurt anyone, not really.

FEAR.

False
Evidence
Appearing
Real

Or

Fuck
Everything
And
Run?

In Fear of Fear (Ha ha I'm quoting Bauhaus)

I'm depressed again, and I have been for at least three weeks, though I didn't notice until yesterday.

I'm not eating right. I binge eat because there's something I don't want to look at. I turn my brain to mush by watching things on my DVD player because I don't want to think or be productive. I draw, but only if I'm watching something at the same time. I'm frustrated. I want to be DONE with this shit, all of it. The shelter, the control, the fear. I saw my mom at the store a few days ago. She and her partner were putting groceries into a bag. I froze. My heart stopped for a moment. They didn't see me. I turned around and nearly ran to the other side of the building and hid in the notebook section because I don't think my mom ever buys notebooks. Even when I was sure they were gone, I did my shopping too quickly and out of breath because so much had been dredged up in a split second. I forgot a lot of stuff and didn't have the guts to go back. I walked very quickly back to the shelter and I couldn't shake the fear that she was following me all ninja-like in the shadows. But my mom isn't ninja-like. She walks with a limp. I live in the same neighborhood as she does, mere blocks away. I must be insane. This isn't safe. It grinds against the inside of my head, the energy and the fear that she'll see me and break down and I won't be able to stand up against her because the guilt will wake up and eat me alive. I was scared that she was following me everywhere, either on foot or in her car. I was scared that she HAD seen me, but acted like she didn't for some reason. That night, I was so scared that she was going to break into my room and kidnap me. Part of me wanted to go to her apartment and knock on her door and say "I'm so sorry, I'm just making it all up because I'm mad at dad and projecting it onto you, like you always thought. I'm so sorry please forgive me please forgive me please forgive me I'm so sorry." Because the only way I can love her is through guilt and shame.

I doubt my memories and think "I'm not damaged enough for all that shit to have happened to me." But normal people with normal, loving, supportive parents don't have fears of their parents kidnapping them.

More fucked up shit that happened in the past

I wish I could just pick up the phone and call them.

"Oh, me?
I live in a domestic violence shelter because one of my best friends took advantage of me.
I'm consistently terrified of doing anything because I think somewhere in my mind that doing anything will get me raped or beaten.
I'm trying to get better, but I keep remembering all these horrible things you did to me and sometimes I can't sleep because of it and I feel like I'm fighting off a tidal wave with a cardboard sword and shield. Cardboard doesn't do so well in water, you know.
But other than that I'm fine. How are you?"

***

My dad used to pray after he raped me. After every time. He wanted god to cleanse him. He made me pray too, but more because he didn't want the devil to get me or something. He could be cleaned, but I couldn't. I just had to hope that god didn't notice how dirty I was. My dad blamed me for his actions. Of course he did; taking any sort of responsibility for them himself would be admitting that there was something horribly horribly wrong with him and that he needed help. I can't look at crosses. I can't enter a church without getting the molested sensation. I have a hard time being spiritual because I equate it too much with religion. I can't believe I'm outside right now. I'm in my dad's neighborhood. I don't know what I would do if he saw me.

Mommy Time

I realized today that my mom never cared about me, or what I did, unless it pertained directly to her.
I was thinking about kids and thought that when raising a child, you HAVE to set boundaries with them, otherwise how will they know how to set boundaries for themselves and with other people? And then I thought "But maybe I'm just really really biased because my mom never paid any attention to me unless it was entirely negative and abusive and self-serving and something to know that she was watching over me in any way would have been wonderful."
I can remember one or two times when my mom set rules for me, mostly what time I was to be back by. If I didn't listen to it that one time, she yelled at me endlessly for a few hours and then it was never brought up again. I can remember the one time I got in trouble for ditching my curfew, and that's because it never occurred to me that I had to listen to anything she said. I wasn't being difficult or rebellious (consciously), rules were just so foreign that it never occurred to me to follow them. Most of the time she would set boundaries and absolutely nothing would happen when I ignored them. I mean nothing. NOTHING nothing. She didn't even notice. I don't think she even remembered setting them. And I think, "Well, she was mentally ill. There's probably a lot she didn't remember." And then I think of EVERY SINGLE TIME she perceived that I was being abusive, and how she would bring it up OVER and OVER again over YEARS, and never once forgot. A boundary or two would have been nice, something real, something to let me know that she was watching what I did and cared about my well being. But she didn't, unless I was in her periphery and doing something she thought was manipulative and mean and abusive. I didn't exist unless I filled a role she thought she needed, a horrible one that someone my age could never fill.
I remember when I did something "bad" and she said I couldn't take tennis lessons. She and my dad had hassled me and hassled me about my eating habits and absolute lack of exercise, and so tennis was what I chose as my healthy activity. And that was taken away. And she still hassled me about my eating habits and lack of exercise. The one productive thing I could have been doing. I remember waking her up and telling her that we were late, and she groggily told me that I couldn't take tennis because of what I was done. I froze for a second, the mental kind of freezing, and wordlessly left the room. It didn't make any sense. It angered me, but I didn't know why. I cried. I had been really excited about playing tennis. I don't remember what I had done that was bad, but I'm absolutely certain that I did it again with absolutely no punishment. The one thing that would have made sense.
She never cared about how my day went, not really. She would ask, but it was always really obvious that she was only half-listening to everything I said, especially as I got older. The older I got, the less she cared. The less she was able to control me, I guess is what it was really all about.
My mom made me out to be her. The things she constantly accused me of doing, the abuse that she was certain I was heaping on her, I recently realized it was all things she was constantly doing to me; putting me down, yelling at me. (Yes, she accused me of yelling at her while yelling at me.) She treated me like I was an idiot and yelled and cried and screamed when she perceived that I was doing the same thing to her. This was usually when I would say something funny and she would just whip out this meaning to what I had said that was NOT THERE WHATSOEVER. I could never get her to believe that I was JUST talking, that it wasn't about her. I try to tell myself that she had and still has borderline personality disorder, that there was something REALLY wrong with her, but it doesn't make it any better. It doesn't make the pain any less.
After an estranged relationship, we started talking again. I was in my early early 20's, so this was just about three years ago. We saw each other once a week for dinner and she always insisted that we go to a bar. Talking to her was like talking to a brick wall; she cared even less, but there was this weird energy about her, like she was trying really hard to pretend that she did. Something was there that hadn't been there before, but something even bigger was completely lost. I can't be anymore clearer than that. I felt like crap around her, but I was desperate for her love and attention. She got frustrated with me when I said I didn't want to eat in bars anymore because I was trying to quit smoking and drinking. She told me to "stop being difficult". I don't think she was ever okay with my trying to quit smoking. She never said anything directly of course, but she always got silent and grouchy when I would talk about it or having withdrawals or something. We didn't have a relationship, we had dinner where I talked and she barely responded except when I did something she thought was stupid. Then she gave me crap about it, smiling, but it felt horrible. Then on thanksgiving, I felt so depressed and edgy and upset that I couldn't imagine going to a party and being around a bunch of people I had never met, as were our plans. I called her to tell her. She exploded. She sounded just like she did when I lived with her and even gave me crap about the fact that my sister hadn't been calling her. Then she cut off and said the my mom equivalent of "Fine, I don't care. Fine." I was heartbroken. I tried to make it better, I apologized and apologized and told her I would see her next week. But her tone was still malicious and angry. She hung up without saying goodbye. I broke down completely and cried slept through the whole holiday. The most emotion she had shown me in a matter of months, and it was to yell at me like she used to. I realized that she hadn't changed, no matter how much she and I wanted to believe that. That was nearly two years ago, and I haven't spoken to her since.
I quit smoking cold turkey the following January.

Last night was weird. But then, every night has been at least a little weird recently. I was talking to someone in my head, someone I admire creatively. I do that a lot; if I have to talk to someone in my head, I'd rather it be someone I think is awesome. So anyway, I'm talking to this person and I was laying on the floor because my right leg has been killing me and I had been doing stretches. Suddenly, this person whose personality I had totally created rolled over and opened up my ribcage and looked inside. This also happens a lot, a pleasant conversation in my head ends with whomever I'm conversing with doing that, and it's always when things continue to go pleasant and don't devolve into a rape fantasy. It always catches me off guard because I'm not controlling it. I almost yelled out. The the person faded away and all this weird shit started happening. I tried to focus on the music I was listening to to make things safer, but I realized that all the music was doing was keeping things in a very uncomfortable position. So I turned it off and laid back down. I don't know if I was remembering things or releasing energy in picture form. My dad was hitting and beating me and throwing me and screaming at me while he did it. He was yelling "I HATE YOU I WISH YOU HAD DIED YOU'RE NOTHING YOU'RE NOT WORTH SHIT" as he hurt me. A couple of those had come up in dialogue in a short film I had written the day before, so it just made the question of whether it was real or not more confusing. Then he did the same thing to my sister while I watched. But I wasn't really watching it, I was just laying there and feeling her pain and my own fear while he hit and beat her and screamed at her too.

This probably doesn't make any sense to someone who has never experienced it before.

Meds

My doctor put me on two new medications, one for my asthma, and one for the pain in my mouth due to having a tooth pulled. Both cause mood swings, one causes hallucinations. Every time I am prescribed a medication that causes mood swings, I think "Oh, it will be okay this time." But it never is. I'm highly susceptible to the side effect of mood swings, I have found. Every single medication I have taken that could possibly cause them have...well, caused them. I took the asthma medication anyway because I'm sick of not having full use of my lungs. The night before my appointment, I was laying in bed trying to sleep. My lungs were tight, as they always are. I tried doing deep breathing to calm myself down as I was having trouble sleeping, but the inability to breathe with the full use of my lungs was making me feel very claustrophobic, especially since you can't just walk out of not being able to breathe. A trip to a different city showed me that this will not always be the case, but for now I am stuck here. I have no job and no money, and moving away from this place will take at least six months, probably more. The idea of another six months of not being able to breathe was making me panic. I don't remember how I finally fell asleep. So I got this new inhaler, low dose steroids. Every logical part of my mind was telling me not to take it, that i probably don't have asthma, that it's because of my constant state of low-grade panic that I can't breathe. But I was desperate. I had tasted regular breathing and fallen in love, and the idea of being in my normal state was making me panic. So I used it, and I took the pain meds because I was sick of the stabbing pain in my jaw every time I ate or drank.
As I was trying to fall asleep last night, I had something like a hallucination. (Which is a rare side effect of the pain meds.) I didn't think it was real, though the sensation and images that came along with it were hard to get out of, and I didn't. I felt like I was full of dead, rotting, maggot-infested meat and it was slightly viscous and spilling out of me. I felt disgustingly sexual, like I was being touched and every touch created more rotting meat. I don't think I can convey through words just how horrified and disgusting I felt. Then I had the sensation that cockroaches and flies were squirming their way out of the meat and crawling all over me because they were attracted to filth. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed that I was made of nothing but dead, rotting, insect-infested fleshmeat. I remembered that I didn't start having the scared sexual feeling noticably until I stopped living with my dad and started living with my mom full time at thirteen, because my mind felt safe to feel it without my dad constantly around, I think. That feeling, the dead rotting feeling, was with me constantly. I had and still sometimes have nightmares about finding corpses in such a state of decay in my house, in my mattress, under my bed. They are the scariest nightmares, and I can't explain why in a way that would make sense. I think this is why I suspected my mom of molesting me in my sleep when I was fifteen, because the horrible dead raped feeling didn't flow out of me until I was living with just her. (Not to say that she is entirely innocent, but that is a different post.) I remember waking up every morning with wet spots on my blanket. I would check to make sure it didn't come from me, and it didn't. Everything was dry except for these spots on my blanket every morning. I knew my mom came into my room and dug through my drawers sometimes looking for clothes, and I knew she usually did so after showering. (I had woken up to the noise she made a couple times.) She would sometimes touch me in weird ways, like the time when she was making me a dress and she touched my breast without warning, presumably to see how it fit. Or the times when she would cuddle me after screaming at me for hours and her hand would come to rest too closely to my chest. Or the few times when she would compliment whatever I was wearing by jokingly saying "It's looks good on your boobs" in a jokingly sexual tone. Imagining her coming into my room and molesting me wasn't too far of a stretch. I think that the dead rotting feeling comes directly from her also. She told me when I was seventeen that her older brother had molested her, and all that did was refire my suspicions that she had done the same to me.

I have lost my point in all of this. I guess the whole point of the story is I'm not going to take either medication anymore.

Fat

Jeez, I see one person whom I find attractive, and it just sets off all this shit. Suddenly, my physical flaws are a billion times more obvious, and I wonder why I even bothered to leave my room. It was ten minutes ago that I saw this person, and I'm still sucking in my stomach and tensing when I notice it jutting out. I used to have moments at least where I liked the way I look, but those moments lessened until I don't seem to have them anymore. I'm back to feeling guilty every time I eat, and I hate that so much. I wonder if losing weight would even do anything or if I'd still stress and worry about my stomach and arms and thighs and feet(??). I don't think I know a woman who is completely okay with her body. I think that in this society, that's a little on the impossible side. There's a woman at the shelter who berates herself so violently on her looks that she gets near tears. In my view, she's tiny. Tiny. But all she sees when she looks in the mirror is...well, fill in horrible self-hating thought here. And it spreads, that's the worse part. She starts, then the woman next to her talks about how she hates her body, and so on and so on. I've tried to help, I tell them that I have no clue what they're talking about, fat is the last thing I see when I look at them, but they're so trained in self-hatred that I'm not sure they even heard me. For my own sake, I stopped getting involved. If I get too close, I start down the same path, double because all these women talking about how horrible their bodies are are all much smaller than I am. I feel like they're looking at me with that same hatred they give themselves. I start feeling disgusting and ugly, and no matter what good thoughts I try to feed myself, I'm as deaf to them as the other women are.

I wish it didn't matter so much. I wish I could just look how I look and there wouldn't be all this hate and disdain and comparison and---a sentence ran through my head the other day that I didn't expect. I can't remember the exact wording now, but it related to my sister and how our dad would always love her more because she was the skinny one and I would always be lesser than her and all of my cousins and all of my dad's coworkers' daughters and every young girl my dad came into contact with because I was fatter than all of them. I remember my back tensing whenever I noticed that I was the largest girl in the room. I would feel too exposed, and I would look in his eyes and know he was thinking...something bad about me. Maybe not bad, but it felt like he noticed too and somewhere in his mind was thinking negative thoughts directed at me for it.

I have to eat in front of everyone at the shelter. I wouldn't mind so much if I didn't constantly expect someone to comment on it or my size or something. It's never happened, not there at least, but I think part of me would break if it did. I'm not fat. I know that. But damn, somewhere in my head it feels like I am. Even if I was anorexic, I'm pretty sure I would feel fat. And it's not just fat, either; it's fat/ugly/stupid/dumb/idiot/ugly/dumb/fat/stupid etc etc, whatever runs through my head when I panic.

I'm done thinking about this for now. I'm going to go buy a notebook from the magic shop.

Emotional Freedom Techniques

Been doing EFT lately. I mostly can't tell if it works immediately like it's supposed to, but there's no denying that it's doing SOMETHING. It's a little easier to process stress, but again, I'm not entirely sure I'm processing it or using it to simply make ignoring things easier. Last night was weird. I'm getting very frustrated with the people around me and their ignorance. I'm sick of the way they assume they have the right to touch me and don't bother to ask first. I'm sick of the constant comment on my unshaven legs whenever I wear a skirt or shorts. One woman actually rubbed my leg when she saw the hair on it. I flipped and spouted "DON'T TOUCH ME" without meaning to, because the best way to deal with things is calmly and politely. Or so I'm told. So anyway. I did the statement, "Even though I'm frustrated with the people around me, I utterly and completely love and accept myself anyway." and repeated it three times while tapping that specific point on my hand. Then I did the tapping pattern three times, and it just opened a can of worms. I felt a fear that was complete, absorbing, unending. My hands were shaking. I drank some tea and then I was angry. I was so angry at myself that it was very difficult not to claw and scratch at my skin like I used to. I'm sure that had I been living alone, I wouldn't have been able to stop myself from doing some actual damage. I made myself breathe deep and then I was angry at Them, the people I'm related to, the people that beat and raped and molested and screamed at me and made the world seem twisted and scary and weird. I nearly tore my pillowcase in half. Then I was strangely detached. I was watching my dad rape me, I realized that the sensation is constantly there no matter what I'm doing, but it didn't seem right to put a stop to it. I was simply observing and accepting. Then my breathing got deep and rhythmic, and I was accepting and loving everything, because it was all my experience, and there was nothing to be ashamed of, because it was all a part of me. Then I felt wonderful. Then the normal amount of fear started to seep its way in because I had just had a good experience and that's usually when things go all scary again. Then at some point I fell asleep and had dreams in which I nearly moved back in with my best friend's parents but at the last moment ran away from the house, and my dad was watching me through a telescope and tracking my movements, but I could never seem to find where he was.

Frustration

I AM SO SICK OF THINKING ABOUT THIS.

Every time I reach that place of absolute sobriety, I attach myself to a rhythm. I'm less paranoid and shaky, unless something triggers me, but again that has less of a chance of happening. But every time I find that rhythm, every time my thoughts slow down to a normal pace (which is too damn slow if you ask me), IT'S ALL I FUCKING THINK ABOUT. His face, her face, the coat he wore, the way he smelled, the way her breath always stank of wine, the fact that I have no guarantee of safety, and part of life is that I never will. It never ends. There's always more, more, more to think about because I haven't remembered everything and therefore can't fully get all the awfulness out of my mind. I'm sick of writing in this blog about the same damn thing all the time. What else is there to write about? It all connects to my past at some point, and it will until I don't have PTSD anymore.

I want it to be two months from now so I can start school and have an ongoing distraction. A good distraction, not the kind that shuts off my brain. I don't think I mean this, but I wish I had a job. I'm tired of sitting around dwelling on everything, which is pretty much inevitable right now. But it's not dwelling, it's processing, there's just an assload of it and it seems like the deeper I dig the more there is to find. I'm scared to really rest or begin to feel safe because that's always when the memories start to push through. Though they seem to do that no matter what I do, just trying to block them out gives me more control over just how much I see...I think.

Oh jesus fuck my sister emailed me back.

I don't know what to do with this. I was beginning to believe she'd never respond, I was beginning to be okay with that, but now...I haven't read it. I swear my heart skipped like five beats when I saw it. The subject is "Yay!", though experience has taught me that that could be totally misleading. My mind's on fire. I totally didn't expect this. This is a really bad time for this. Well, bad isn't the right word. My curiousity is piqued. This is a stressful time for this. This is making my back hurt. I need to stop thinking about it for a little while because something's gonna break gonna break.

Stress makes me link to random things. Actually this one is more fitting.

Tense Back

I emailed my sister yesterday. I told her why I wasn't talking to her, why I would never again talk to anyone in the family, that I was going to sue our dad at sometime in the future, and that she too could get away and heal. I went home in a haze, I wasn't thinking properly. At first I felt a weight off my shoulders. But I was tired, distracted, disconnected. A few hours later, I was sitting on my bed. I don't remember what I was doing. My heart swelled painfully and I began to cry. It's entirely over now, all of it. I've said goodbye to my family once and for all. I don't care about the rest of them. The only one I continued to give a shit about was my sister. She was there for all of it, though I know she doesn't like to think so. She used to be angry. Now she defends them and her eyes go dead and she tells me that they were both going through some shit and blah blah blah. I've gone through shit too, but I never raped or hit or screamed at a child. And only shitheads with no soul try to excuse that by saying they were "going through things". Or so I tell myself.
No matter what they did, they're still human. Kind of. I get upset whenever I realize that. I feel less validated in my anger and the hatred I direct at them. They're human, they were abused too, horribly if my suspicions are correct. But they never grew up. They never took responsibility and healed themselves to ensure that they never did the same horrifying things to anyone else. Even after they did those things, they didn't do shit to fix it. They probably guilted themselves and everything got worse and worse and worse because guilt doesn't do shit besides make everything bigger than it needs to be.
I loved my sister until I would see her. She was so dead, so subservient, so desperate to change herself for other people and do whatever she could to earn their love, even if it meant putting herself in emotional danger. I hated it. I hated being around her. I wanted to shake her and say "Don't you see what you're doing? Don't you see what THEY'RE doing to YOU? WHY DO YOU INSIST ON FORGETTING HOW HORRIBLE THEY ARE?!" but I didn't. I did the only thing I knew how to do. I left. I stopped going to her house, I stopped answering her emails, I acted like she didn't exist. I apologized for that at the beginning of my email. I didn't like that I had done that. I had wanted the guts to speak to her and tell her everything. But whenever I started to, she would talk over me and keep defending them and throw whatever feelings her and I might have about being abused out the window. We didn't matter, but they did. That's what she was really saying.
I couldn't do that. I was done. I was finished thinking that I was so low on the ladder that anyone could touch me or tell me that my plans wouldn't work for whatever reason or thinking that people had the right to tell me what to do with my life.
I'm done with this shit. I haven't checked my email because I'm not at all ready to read her response.

Sometimes I think I'm fucking losing it.

I was so young when my dad raped me that it became part of my reality. I was young and learning, a sponge, and I soaked it all right up. When he wasn't around so much, I created someone in my head that fulfilled what I had learned to need, someone to be terrified of, yet love. A man, specifically. I learned that the world is a terrifying place that that people, especially people I loved, were dangerous and not to be trusted. A book my therapist is having me read talks all about the trauma of incest. It says that it's the most traumatic kind of sexual abuse. It backs up all these theories I've had but minimized because I thought I was the only person thinking them and my vision of the world is skewed.
The danger I created for myself is slowly breaking apart as I get better, but sometimes it overwhelms me. I get scared or distracted or something and I want to plunge head-first into a rape fantasy. I used to never try to stop it. Now that I do, I realize that a part of my brain was always giving in, that I never really wanted to fantasize about rape. Now that I'm actively saying no, it's more difficult. I feel like something is trying to rape me with energy. Yes, I am in control, but this behavior is so learned and embedded that I'm saying no to a part of myself that manifested my dad. I push it down and tell the man in my head "No" but he's like my dad and he doesn't listen. I push and push and push and sometimes it goes away, but more often than not I get sick of having to push and just let it overtake my brain. I get lost again and I can finally fall asleep.
Insomnia keeps me up because an illogical part of my mind is terrified that my mom is going to kick in the door and start screaming at me. She used to hit me too, I remembered, though she always implied that she didn't and it was just my dad. But I remembered a couple nights ago. I used to run away from her and scream and cry and she would hit me with all of her strength. I remembered her molesting me, like actually molesting me, but I'm trying not to admit that it's true. A part of me keeps screaming "It is true! She did that to you!" but I can't always listen. If that were true, then I'm not safe at all. But. I don't see them anymore. But I'm still not safe from them. I dream about them and think I see them on the street and they're fucking EVERYWHERE and nowhere is safe, and it never has been. I can't sleep until I let myself admit that and get lost in it.
I have moments where it seems I revert completely. A couple nights ago, I was sitting on my bed. Without thinking about it, I got up and turned off the light. I had been talking to the man in my head, trying to figure out details of who he was, and he had just agreed to stop morphing into my dad. I turned off the light and laid face down on my bed. I felt like I was in danger. Sensations, but I couldn't identify what they were. I had the sudden urge to crawl into a dark corner of my room and hide, but I didn't. I'm an adult. I don't need to do that. A funny thought temporarily distracted me, and before I knew it, I was on the floor crawling under my desk. I didn't have control of my body, and I began to lose it even more. I started whispering things to myself, and shaking, and crying. I remembered that when I was a really little kid, I would do just that, crawl around in the darkness of my room for a hiding place. I never understood how they were able to find me. A dark room is a jungle in the eyes of a toddler. So I was shaking and whispering and crying and I wasn't the me I am today anymore, and I wasn't in my current room, I was two or three and I was in my room in our old house when my parents were still married. When I had finally had enough, when I felt like I was going crazy, I attempted to crawl out from under the desk. Instead, I curled up into a little ball on the floor and whispered repeatedly "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry..." I couldn't help myself. I don't remember how long it lasted. I felt like my mom was above me screaming at me or my dad was above me being lecherous. Finally, I jumped up and turned on the light. I still minimized everything.
I remember my mom angrily grabbing my vagina and screaming in my face. I try to tell myself it's a manifestation, but I believe that less every time I think it. My manifestations are more creative.

I've Got To Be Entertained Pt. II

If the adult content warning didn't fuck up my blog, it would still be there. This is very intense.
I'm not drinking coffee. I'm not constantly eating or binging. I haven't smoked a cigarette in a year, a month, and eight days, I haven't smoked pot for a little over two months. My ipod is sadly still very dead. I feel like I'm being pulled in two separate directions, misery and happiness. They're both scary, but one is familiar and the other could possibly lead to worse misery, though I know logically that doesn't make any sense. My brain seems to be wired where happiness is even more terrifying because standards are built upon and there's tons more to lose. The misery afterward is greater. But if that's true, then there wasn't really any happiness to begin with. I think. The song just ended so I'm having a harder time staying on track. True happiness is the ability to not be miserable in any situation. Letting yourself be sad and get everything out so it doesn't follow you around like some pathetic rabies-infected animal. I don't fucking know. At this point all I'm going off of is ideas.
When I walk around, I'm filled with more fear than I thought I had, mostly at night. I walk past a car at a stop light and in my mind the car hits me and the guy driving gets out and shuts me in and drives away. It's how I express my real fears, the ones that could immediately happen. No words, just movies. Two guys step out of a bar and walk to their car and I tense because the worry that they'll grab me and rape me is just too real. I don't walk under fire escapes because the ladder could come loose and crush my skull. I don't have distractions anymore, so the way I view the world is becoming more apparent. It's so scary, more scary than I realized. I feel like I'm constantly at risk, and I act that way, but I didn't always know that.
I keep remembering all these small moments, moments that wouldn't be so bad on their own. (Though of course, I do tend to minimize.) My dad invalidating what I say or my mom projecting her shit onto me in an incestuous way or my sister acting ever so slightly sexual toward me, or anyone I'm related to telling me that my feelings didn't matter but my dad's did and I should call him. It's amazing I have any trust at all. I've had to tell a lot of people what happened to me. I wish I could skip over it, I wish I could say "I was abused" and that would be that. But they always want to know what kind it was, who, when. And that always makes my mind explode with pictures of it. I always want to cry and freak out, but I don't know them.
I had a flashback yesterday in a moment of extreme stress. I tried to get it out of my head but it wouldn't leave, that's how I knew it was a flashback. I'm starting to remember details of the rape, how it actually felt. It's so scary, I don't think I can adequately describe it. I feel trapped and betrayed and like I'm invisible but too visible and like my very soul, the essence of what I am, is being violated. Violated isn't a harsh enough word, if you ask me. It's soul-shattering. It's nightmarish, it's being trapped in a tiny area and all the scary little monsters with glowing eyes and sharp wet teeth are closing in fast and they're going to take my skin one slice at a time. It's enough to make me want to die. And it didn't stop there. It didn't stop until nearly nineteen years later.
I screamed when it happened. I didn't remember that. I thought I had simply shut off when my dad got on top of me and forced himself inside of me. I did, but I was still there. I felt extreme physical pain and it made me scream with it. I remembered the pain, and it was the worst I could possibly ever feel. I don't think anything has even come close, I don't think anything ever will. My world, my life, it all caved in and crushed me and it fucking hurt. I can't believe I'm still human, I can't believe I ever was. I have to poke myself to remember that I'm real. I never got to be a happy little girl. I never got to explore and discover my body, I never got to come up with my own ideas. This shit happens in movies, but not in real life. But it happened to me. Am I real? Of course I am, I'm here at the library, I'm typing this. But it doesn't feel like it. I need something to feel alive or I'm just nothing. I'm nothing I'm nothing I'm nothing.
There's something lodged in my heart chakra. It's keeping it open and vulnerable like it shouldn't be. It's been there a long time. It's raising itself to eye level and saying "LOOK AT ME!! I'm here! I exist! I need you to look at me!" but I can't, not yet. It's scary and gushing something bad and I don't want to look at it right now. It's the full memory, and I'm not ready to look at all of it.
Despite all this, I don't feel all that bad.

I've Got To Be Entertained

Withdrawing again, but now it's twofold: Coffee made me crazy, though I really didn't want to admit it. It made me sick too. I can't count the number of times I've tried to quit drinking it in the last month, but I keep trying until it works. The second: My ipod breaking had a greater affect on me than I anticipated. I never realized that i was using constant music to shut part of my brain off, a sad part. I knew I got really inot the music I was listening to, I knew I got obsessive when I discovered a new band or song that I liked, but I didn't know the extent. (Or did, but just didn't want to admit it.) Coffee isn't as much fun without music. It used to be that I would chug some and put on my headphones and dance around because my brain was shut off and for a few moments, i wouldn't have anything to worry about. But then the panic attacks would start, and the cracked out fear that never got smaller until I came down, but then I never really came down because I would keep drinking it. Strange, it actually helped my insomnia. It got me so worked up that I was exhausted by the end of the day. I'm back to struggling to relax and being kept up by unpleasant thoughts. I'm back to feeling like no matter what I do, it will be mediocre and I'll fail no matter what I try.

Lack of music has awoken an old obsession, so I spend a lot of my time on youtube looking up videos of my favoritest band evar. It tickles the addictive part of my brain, but I make it all better by saying that it's not physically bad for me. And it's an hour a day, two tops. It feels like someone's opening up my chest and touching something, though not in a bad way, strangley. Something is being looked at that's been locked away for the longest time. It's scary, but only in the "I've never been here before" way. It keeps me up at night, because it wakes up all these other feelings and fears that I forgot I had.

I'm getting my own room on Friday. I hope this will make my brain feel better.

Oingo Boingo yodeling in my ear is a little distracting.

In the space of two days, the following happened:

I had a flashback as I was trying to fall asleep. At first I reacted in the usual manner, beginning to panic and feeling like I was living in a nightmare. Then slowly I remembered all the things I learned in therapy along with what I had recently read about flashbacks. I sat up and mentally distanced myself so I was just watching instead of experiencing it. I remembered that my dad had made me do things, gross nasty innapropriate things, and if I ever said no, he would pressure or threaten me. The lights were always off when this happened, or my mind made it dark. i didn't remember any specific instances, but I remembered the sensation of being told to do something horrible, saying I didn't want to, and the sensation of fear and being pressured. I remembered my dad and his hands, I also remembered my mom's hands, but I don't remember what they were doing or if it was sexual. There's something involving my mom that I'm running away from, something just or nearly as horrible as what my dad did to me, but it's so stuck away that it's clear I'm not ready to face it. The focus was on my dad anyway. I remembered that as a small child, i was convinced that I had been raped by the devil. Of course, I didn't know a word for it. I mostly thought in pictures those days, and the image of it would pop in and out of my mind so quickly that I wasn't even aware of it at the time. I thought that I had done something horribly wrong to make the devil rape me, and that it was somehow justified. My parents are christian and I was surrounded by christians growing up. When threatened with the idea of hell, I would panic, as much as I could panic as a small repressed child. I always seemed to be doing things that would send me to hell, and no matter what I did to fix it, I always ended up doing something sinful. I desperately wanted to be good and pure and jesus-y, but my mind was so fractured that the moment I wasn't in church anymore I would stop thinking about it, except at night when the terror of hell would keep me awake. That's how my mind worked, I never took anything with me place to place.

The following is what I wrote in my notebook during and after the flashbacks. It's pretty intense. The italic is my inner child speaking. It was strange how closely my handwriting resembled mine as a kid the more I let her speak.

Please don't do that again, daddy.I'll do whatever you ask, I'll do everything I can to impress you, just PLEASE don't do that again. I'll get good grades, I'll get skinny, I'll try to be quiet, I'll be less like my mom, I'll be more like [sister], I'll stop eating so much, I'll let you look at me like that I'll let you hit me, I'll fight you because it reminds you of yourself, I'll fight you so you can laugh at me, I'll let you laugh at me, I'll let you touch me, because you scare me. You made me do things and if I didn't do them you wod hurt me again. Ill do whatever you ask because i love you and youre my daddy. I can feel you behind me. your hands are on my shoulders.

[name], it's okay, I'm here with you.

Is this what you've been scared to talk about?
Yes Daddy is touching me he is always touching me. I make him feel good.

How are you feeling?
gross dirty sinner going to hell my daddy hit my head the devil is hurting me daddy wont stop but i love him im dirty hes clean daddy is clean and Im bad Im so bad i did this daddy is rite and i did this

You didn't do anything wrong. Your dad violated you! He's in the wrong! You are a victim, you did nothing to bring this about, he did.

What do you need me to do?
GO AWAY

I can't do that. This isn't right. You deserve to be free and warm and safe.
i love daddy and you dont go away go away go away BURY ME BECAUSE IM bad

You're not bad. You're anything but bad. You're good and wonderful and smart and beautiful and kind and funny and compassionate and creative and worth everything and you deserve to be happy and safe. Daddy doesn't love you. I'm so, so sorry. All he wants to do is hurt you. I'm here to get you out of this. I'm going to take you somewhere warm and safe where you can feel wonderful like you are and do whatever makes you happy.


A blue metal box. They're locked in together and the horrible things never end. The door isn't locked, per se. It's held shut tight by will and terror and a vacuum of energy. There aren't any lights, but he glows with evil angry blue hot red fire. He has no eyes, just holes that resemble fiery chasms. He spits fire out of his mouth and glows blue and purple. She is blue until I look her in the eyes, and then she glows brightly white. It's easy for her to get caught up on his colors again unless I focus on her. I glow white too. I hold out my hand and tell her to take it. I tell her that I will keep her safe and that she won't be afraid anymore. Together, we hold the fire and darkness at bay and she takes my hand. I pull her out of the box and away from him and he begins to scream and roar with anger. I get her behind me and look directly into the chasms of his eyes. "You are no longer welcome here. It's time for you to leave." I say, staring at him intensly. He reaches out and tries to pull me in by my wrists. I fight and kick and twist until my arms are free from him again. He reaches for me once more and I slam the door, crushing his hands. I send the box far, far away from me, away from her. It flies out into the great space void and is crushed by the atmosphere. He is gone and so are all the horrible things he tried to leave behind.
She is naked so I take off my hoodie and wrap it around her. I pick her up and carry her out of the dark dank tunnel to the world above, where it's green and warm and safe. There are white and pink flowers growing, and the grass and trees are a lush healthy green. The sky is a beautiful blue with wisps of clouds once in a while. There is a slight pleasant breeze. There are friendly birds all around, and they all seem to be singing to us. She wants to feel the silky grass between her toes so I set her down. She's dwarfed in my hoodie, which nearly reaches her feet. We start to walk through the forest. She walks ahead of me, skipping sometimes, picking white flowers and putting them in her hair. They fall out instantly, but she doesn't seem to mind. She just puts more in. Sometimes she runs back and takes my hand. I ask her how she's feeling, she says fine, but scared and sad too. I tell her that that makes sense, but I'll help her feel less scared and less sad, and that I'll always be there to protect her. She looks up at me and smiles a smile so wonderful and beautiful and genuine and happy that it's hard to believe I ever made myself hate her.
We reach our cabin in a deep part of the forest. Inside is our pony, who is happy we are back and tells us so. He asks her how she is and she tells him it's bathtime. He says that afterward we'll all go on a wonderful ride and a picnic. She yells and hops up and down with delight and scurries off to the bathroom.
A bath is run with pleasantly warm water and pink bubbles and we scrub away the nasty black muck that seems to cover her. At the beginning it keeps growing back, but we work at it and laugh and sing and throw bubbles and soon it all goes away completely. I help her dry off with a gigantic towel that blankets her and when this is done, she runs off and gets her favortie pink and purple dress and puts it on. I help her lace her sneakers and we pack a lunch. "The pony doesn't need any because he eats grass," she tells me straight-forwardly. I tell her she's right and congratulate her on being so smart. She smiles, proud of herself. Soon we're ready to go. Our pony trots outside and I help her climb onto his back. I haul myself up as well, and our pony starts off, knowing the way. Before we're out of sight of the cabin, we hear a yell from behind us. Our kitty gallops after us and the pony stops. The kitty jumps up to her usual spot on the pony's rump and we're off again. Our kitty chides us for almost leaving her behind, and we laugh and apologize.
Soon we reach our destination, a beautiful meadow circled by trees. We set up our picnic. We spend the rest of the day playing tag, blowing bubbles, drawing pictures, picking flowers, swinging on the swing set, having races, whatever we feel like doing. The sun begins to set and I lie on the blanket. the kitty curled up in the crook of my neck. She walks over and tosses another bunch of flowers onto the blanket and lies down next to me. I put my arm around her and she cuddles into my side. The pony munches grass nearby, but he's feeling tired too. We all fall asleep.
-------



The next day my sister called the homeless shelter I'm staying at looking for me. My sister lives with my mom. She speaks to my dad and was always telling me last summer that I need to call them and forgive them and it was a different time and they were both dealing with shit. Her eyes always went dead when she said these things so it was easier to say no. She knew the area of town I'm staying in. I know my mom lives a matter of blacks away, but up until now I felt no danger. I worried, but I knew it wouldn't happen. My bubble of safety, that I've only had a little while, was totally popped. I panicked and found a bathroom and paced back and forth, sobbing and swearing and hitting the wall and hitting myself. Finally, I gathered the courage to go get help. I ranted and raved to a staff member and felt better. I rode the streetcar for two hours, looping back and forth through the city. I felt a little better, but not much.

Then when I got home, my ipod died. This by itself may not seem like a big deal. I have not left the house once since I bought it over a year ago. I don't have access to my computer right now, so I have no music. I use music to put a shield between me and the world when I go out in it. People don't talk to me as much when I've got headphones on, and I like it that way. When I was certain it didn't work, I found a bathroom (different one) and had a complete breakdown. It wasn't just my ipod that I was upset about, it was everything, my lack of personal space and alone time, my mom, my dad, my sister, my friends being so far away, school, finanial aid, having no money, doing the same damn thing every damn day for a month, forced into a small space with emotionally unstable people, need I go on.

The world sucks at the moment. I know it will get better, but the urge to shove that knowledge away and dwell on all the shit is strong.

What the crap is wrong with my blog?

He hasn't been offered the burden yet

My dreams are weird and thick and on the surface are just abstract craziness. When I wake up, I remember where I am. That's how invloved they have become, they're the way my life is until I wake up. I'm always dissapointed. The other night, Captain Jack was leaving in September and I was telling him how boring life was going to be without him. When I woke up, I realized that three Captain Jacks had already left and life already was boring without them. The night before that, I was Captain Jack in a spaceship chasing the Master around space. Every time I caught up with him, he beat the living shit out of me, but I always crawled back into my spaceship and continued the chase. Last night, I dreamed that I was watching a very cool cartoon movie where this happy goofy brown-haired girl hopped through dimentions and had an adventure. At one point she referenced Doctor Who and popped up wearing one of his suits with a spiked belt in her hair like a headband. I went out and bought the action figure of it. Something funny should be said, but I can't think of it.
I feel like I'm constantly shoving people away from me. In the shelter, a lot of people are trying to be my friend, but I don't want to be theirs because there's something about each of them that sets off my alarms. I don't feel like I'm in danger anymore. I sit on my bed and read or draw all with my ear plugs in, so it kind of feels like my bed is my room. If I'm accepted, I won't move into transitional housing for another three weeks, but it seems like it will be a breeze. I do wish there was something else to do besides hang out at the library. I might start writing a little fiction every day so I don't go crazy with monotony. I did the other night and it felt good. In it, I killed my dad. I've been on the verge of writing that out for quite a while, but I never actually did because I didn't want to spoil the feeling. I wanted to feed off of the idea before writing it down made it a little more real, and sucked all the energy out of the image and spit it out on paper. It was disturbing and my therapist was very happy that I had written it. She asked how I did it and I awkwardly told her. I always worry people will misunderstand and think that I'm a blood-crazed psychopath about to murder everyone and call the whitecoats on me. Really, I'm just pissed off.
Having Framklin helps a lot. Her presence has been integrated into my therapy. My therapist was impressed when I told her that I had basically been treating Framklin like a child and taking care of her and comforting her. I felt like a total lunatic, but my therapist told me that I was on the right track and to continue it. Inner child work and such. I have to admit, it feels really good to say in my mind, "What do you want to do today, Framklin?"
I've decided to avoid the One Big Emotional Trigger group. It doesn't seem like a very good idea to be in a room full of people who have had similar experiences describing how their parents raped them, at least for now. My curiosity with it was morbid, at best. Even as I type, I'm still not sure. I might check it out and leave if it gets to be too much.

The internet wants me gone, so I will be gone.

Reckoner

Four days in a women's shelter, and I don't know how many more to come. I sleep on a top bunk in a room with eight other women, all traumatized, all dealing with their shit. In the next room over there's a few rooms containing mothers and their children. I have moments alone, but my mind is in this weird state where that doesn't seem to do anything. I have to sleep with ear plugs in otherwise the snoring and whispering and arguing and YELLING would keep me up all night. I'm sick of hearing women make their children cry, I'm sick of the fighting that seems right out of ninth grade between women in their thirties and forties. People keep deciding I'm their new special friend, and I don't know how to tell them that they annoy the hell out of me. I won't, at least for the time being. Sharing a room again is hard enough, I wouldn't want to add tension especially with people who don't seem to know how to deal with their shit. I feel like the smartest person in the room sometimes, or the least dumb. I've had the urge over the past couple days to break things and rip them to shreds and scream obscenities in people's faces while I hurt them.
But I don't. I clench my jaw or chew my lip and dig my nails into my pants. I make up fantasy worlds where I'm crazy enough to hurt someone horribly and not even care. When I was a teenager, I used to actively try to make myself crazy enough to do that. I wanted to kill people in horrible, violent ways where they would be in excruciating pain until they finally died. I didn't want to care. Oh god I tried so hard not to. I tried to think of them as things and take away all their humanity, or tell myself that they were nasty enough to deserve it. But it just didn't fucking work. When it comes right down to it, I care. I care a fuck of a lot. I don't want anyone to be in pain or unhappy. It breaks my heart to see them hurt so badly. Maybe that's why I get so mad.
My dad keeps finding his way into my dreams, in disgusting, stomach-churning ways. Though the dreams themselves aren't nearly as bad as they used to be. He isn't tackling me out of nowhere and forcing me to fuck him or grinding his dick into me anymore. He's just there, and we're talking, or I'm defending him against something, but I always feel gross and wrong and it's always my fault that I feel that way. I find that I need to trust myself more and more because the dreams aren't as bad. I no longer have an active reminder of how terrible he was to me, so I have to remind myself. It's difficult. I have the urge to just write all of it off as something I created to make myself unhappy or get attention from people. The old stuff.
Recently, I made what I view to be a huge mistake, but when I really look at it, there was no other way I would have reacted. I got in bed with someone and we touched. Things happened. The first time, it edged on great, but I was on drugs and part of me wasn't getting through to the rest. The second time I was fully sober, and the knot of fear and disgust never left my stomach. It just grew and grew to the point that I was frozen again. I couldn't say "stop". I tried, I tried so hard to enjoy myself and forget that I was terrified, but that soon changed into just trying to survive. It traumatized me. I would think about his hands on me and want so badly to throw up. I would think about it and it would make me shake and berate myself for letting it happen. I felt so disgusting all the time, it never went away, not even when I slept. It felt like I was being raped but instigating things and involving myself. For days afterward, his hands never left my body. There were now two people in my mind, touching me and hurting me. Soon, the feeling faded. I still feel bad for letting it happen. I don't know if I'll ever be able to even look at the person again. It's getting hard to think. My mind is getting clogged with guilt. Oh my fucking god it's all my fault.