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?