just briefly

I'm feeling guilt.
Why? because I kept going in to be with my dad.
And getting abused again.
I traded sex for comfort.

People keep telling me that a terrified, traumatized 6 year old had to take what she could get.
This seems logical.
But I can't believe them!

a dying boy

I seem to be reading a lot of  child sexual abuse stories lately...and I read one of a young man who'd obviously been through really awful stuff...then I read the young man was very lonely.

Then I read that he was dying of cancer, only going to live a few more years at best.

This bothers me very much.

I actually started crying (like I don't do enough of that!) on the way home...and I realized something.

I'm really glad I have been able to heal.  I have the therapist, the supportive spouse , the friends, the websites, the meds that keep my distress levels low enough to do the horrific inner work I need to do to live.

I have been through hell itself.  But there has also been joy. I am struck by how grateful I am to have that, how tragic that he will not. How much it pains me that he will never take this journey.

And I'm going to correspond with him, as I can handle doing so...because if I were incredibly wounded and terminally ill...I'd want someone to do it for me.

Admittedly, my big heart may be fully complemented by my thick head for so doing.

To a friend who doesn't read this blog

I just deleted this post...I decided, that as indirect and undescriptive as it was about who I was talking about, and as careful as I was to make sure any identifying details got left out...
As it was, my friend might still take it as a breach of trust, and I should not have done it in the first place.

I will apologize to him and forward the original when he seems stable enough to handle the info.

I would never consciously hurt him, and now I'm worried that he WILL be hurt when I do tell him.

He...just told me something that made my heart break for him, and I vented here...and should not have. His business is not mine to discuss publicly.

My challenge: a weekly affirmation-#1

Why?
Because I was a human blow-up doll to several somebodies, to put it really bluntly.

When that's part of your early childhood learning concepts?
It tends to cause self-hatred that has to be kept shaved regularly.

So, affirmation #1:

Only you know the tortured road you have walked, the stones that tore your feet open, the cold that ripped your heart to shreds, the demons that sucked your bones empty at night, the monsters that feasted on your soul.
You have been through hell and came out the other side.  You are stronger than steel. Do not forget it.

I feel shattered: a repost

Well, at least I'm not beating on myself anymore...

Sunday's spectacular flashback (whee!) reminded me I've been profoundly broken, and I shouldn't judge myself so damn hard. The not-productive part of beating myself up I knew.
Now I really understand, finally, I don't deserve it.
I'm really broken inside, I'm doing good.

It took getting out of my wife's truck, walking into the woods and breaking into pieces there to remind me...I need to be gentle with myself.
I'm a broken person, and I may be able to heal, but right now I'm broken. I have to live with that.

Right now I feel that brokenness-I've been able to shove it down, but something has shifted. Probably getting this close emotionally to my wife. I trust her enough that it tripped yet another switch I didn't know I had. Joy.

An online buddy of mine has said that it's easier for people like us to give than to receive...I am going to try on this for size. Because recieving always has made me feel nervous and guilty.
Tonight I have to stop and buy a tarp/bungee cords for the lovely new lady in the driveway: a '78 Hondamatic 400cc motorcycle...and I think I shall buy my wife something as well, something little, because due to the Hondamatic, I'm a bit broke.

I told her if she *does* get this weekend off and feels okay enough, I'd like to go to a park. Parks don't involve people. I will not freak the hell out in a park...unless the situation really warrants it, in which case there WILL be damaged assailants.
Like the Hulk, you won't like me when I'm angry. You won't like my wife either. She goes freaking ballistic too. God I love her . She is awesomeness itself.

repost: it's that time again!

Oh yeah...it's flashback-time again! whee!

:Trigger:


This crap is a trigger fest, alright? if you will freak, steer clear.







I've been grappling with my self-hatred...and there's a bunch of reasons bubbling between my ears why it's so hard for me to let go:

I'm afraid to feel good-like someone will come along and hurt me for feeling good.
I feel like I MUST punish myself...because I didn't do everything right!
I believe I'm a failure, and to say I am doing my best is to accept mediocrity.

But...I feel like I'm about to decant an abuse memory.

Considering the way it works, probably one where I was enjoying sex with my Dad.

Ultimately...I have to forgive the person who enjoyed having sex with Dad. Who went in there willingly and had sex with Dad. UCK!

It may have started off forced, although the memories are so fragmentary I can't tell. I do remember, have always remembered...standing in the hallway outside his door, crying in quiet terror, knowing that to go back to my bedroom was to be left alone...with all the terror that implied...
And to go in to him was...and memory blanks, but there are blurs, and what's in the blurs...well,now is the child's little body beneath his...and the fact that it hurt, this sort of ripping pain, and aroused me, and comforted me all at once. Oh god...

And that was the price of not sleeping terrified and alone: he got to do with me what he wanted. What I am sure I wanted eventually. Because I wasn't really touched enough anyway, because I came to be turned on also.

There's something that causes me to be revolted at myself for that. That is why I fear people now...because I needed him.

Yes, there's my trust issues...there they are:
I needed him because I was having horrible nightmares from already having been raped by my uncle and orally abused by an upstairs neighbor...I needed him to protect me from the horrors in my head.
He used my need for him...to have sex with me. He didn't need to force me. I needed him, so I paid that price. I let him have sex with me.
And having nerve endings, it felt erotically pleasurable.
I liked it. I wanted it. I was willing to have sex with him.
I find that revolting...that I was so weak.

That's why I feel this sense of helpless terror when I need anybody. I need people and I loathe that I need people...and agh. Because that weakness got used against me so horribly well.

Needing people makes me feel numb and terrified. Disgusted at myself too, for needing them, loving them, trusting them...

But...how do I forgive myself for needing? for being weak, imperfect?
If I were better, I wouldn't need people. If I were stronger, I could be all alone...then I could have pride in myself.
At least that's what part of me thinks.

I hate the part of myself that is human and vulnerable and imperfect. I do NOT want to be vulnerable, human and imperfect.
That person screwed their father out of terror at being left alone. That person was someone's thing because of need for safety, closeness and touch.
That person was weak, and I feel disgust because per is me now.

Tiredness, the weightloss thing, and big triggery stuff @ the end.

One wonderful thing for you:

My Egyptian friend told me that his uncle in Cairo got a call from Tunisia yesterday.

The Tunisian congratulated my friend's uncle on Mubarak's departure.

My friend's uncle said something like, "Um, why, thank you, but I don't know you."

The Tunisian replied "Oh, no, I just wanted to congratulate an Egyptian, so I called a number randomly and got you."

(GO EGYPT! ) (RA! RA! RA! ;) )
------

The rest of the post isn't fun or funny-in fact it's a very solemn one...keep checking back for the more upbeat ones... I imagine they will come along presently.


This tiredness worries me...Does it mean the sinus infection's returning? or just the result of a typical sleep-deprived week?

 I'm getting a bit more green stuff out.  And saving it in a jar for the county ENT doctors who think I'm making shit up.
I find this ridiculous, demeaning, makes me feel less valuable as a human being and it screws with my sense of reality.
My palate is itching...but of course they won't believe me when I tell them that.

Since they have two hospitals, both with ENT departments, I'm going to call on Monday and see what I have to do to get into the other ENT department.  Maybe the other ENT's will actually believe me when I report symptoms.
----

Over the week I managed to snag four-count'em, four good pallets.   Four pallets equals two planting beds.  What I'm doing is cut a little bit out of the center of the pallets, then pick which one has the more busted up or rotted bottom, and remove those boards.  After that, I nail them together at the top corners-it's a pretty straightforward procedure when you take the back off..  Then they get lined, first with cardboard, then with mulch. The cardboard will not only help retain moisture around the sides, I think...it's definitely going to kill the grass.

I'm too tired to do this today...I really am.  Tonight's a down night also.

Oh...I should explain my wacky ways of eating, and how that came about:

You see, I am now weighing about 152-157 at 5'9".

About a year and a half ago I weighed 275.

Before that I'd eaten my way up to 320 in high school...managed to diet down to 270...got stuck there until I went "pretty-much" vegan, dropped to 190 mainly through exercise, but a little through diet, shacked up with the wife, let myself go, back to 220, then got sick and ballooned due to stress and repeat courses of prednisone.

When I hit 275, my allergist(then about as frustrated as I was at my case) asked if I would consider stomach stapling. Said it would dramatically improve my condition.

I want my life back.  Badly.  So began a year-and a half diet-a-thon.

Well...when I got to 220, I got stuck.  I was eating 1200 calories a day, was ravenous, and stuck hard.

Enter the Johnson Up Day Down Day Diet.

I started doing it.  Actually, being the perfectionist I am, I started doing an even tighter restriction than called for, but pretty much the Johnson diet.

The weight melted off me so fast that my coworkers expressed concern.
This was full of unfun...when I first started down days going up stairs made me dizzy.  Working out made my heart pound.

Now I don't seem to really even get that hungry on down days.

BUT
I want to weigh 140.
Why?
155 is too close to 164-the threshold for me being overweight.  Having yoyoed all over the place, my body can store it like nobody's business. 155 is close enough that one good case of the fuckits can propel me into the overweight range.

That's not cool.   I want to be firmly of normal weight, because I want to guarantee I will never be obese again.

Half of the reason I wanted to kill myself in high school was my binge eating disorder...
---------

And that brings me to the last thing:

It occurred to me last night that the entirety of my adult life...I never anticipated happening.  Which hasn't helped matters as far as doing things in a planned, coherent fashion.


(BTW...You want to click away now if you're easily upset or triggered...Don't blame me if you flip out, you've been warned.)







By ninth grade I hated myself for failure to kill myself. I didn't work in high school or take college prep classes-because I was just doing things to make the parents not yell at me and-or hit me until I worked up the nerve to kill myself.  I self-denigrated every day in an active attempt to make myself do it, convince myself to slice my wrists open.
I so wanted to die that I regularly called myself a coward and beat myself up for failure to have the courage to wipe the stain that was me from the earth.

This was all before I decanted my sexual abuse memories.   This is where the shame and the self-loathing came from...but I didn't know that then.

Some of the sexual abuse was forced on me-the oral rape at four by the neighbor and the vaginal rape by my uncle when I was six.

My Dad, though, I don't believe he had to force me, or keep doing so...because being alone with my nightmares-the terror-was worse than the physical pain of his adult penis in me combined with the comfort of being touched, of not being alone, abandoned.

And there was arousal as well. Not that I wanted that arousal, was ready for it, knew what it was.
I think I may have thought I was dying, because I always thought my father could kill me-that's what I thought when he hit me.
His physical abuse was never extreme-certainly never bad enough to leave a mark.
I'd categorize his physical abusiveness as usually mild occasionally escalating to moderate...but I was afraid he'd kill me nonetheless when he went off.
His verbal abusiveness actually probably did me as much damage-perfectionism is a 50-pound millstone around my neck, and it comes from both parents.
Anyway...
I needed something from him...well, he decided he needed something from me in return. So I paid that price at age six, seven and eight.  The memories are still very blurry, but I think several times a week he chose to have sex with me.  I remember waking up in my parents' bedroom and having no idea how I got in there the night before repeatedly, so I was dissociating a lot.
------
Nowadays, we've come to an understanding.  He doesn't get around me, I don't try to kill him.

Because if I see him, a cloud of red, red rage just descends over my eyes.  I cannot see straight.  I cannot think straight.  All I see is someone who took advantage of my desperation, who was entrusted with my care, and who damaged me for life because he felt like it.

There is no one else in this world I can say I truly hate with the profound depth that I hate this man who is half my genetic makeup.

Yes, he was raped as a child.  I don't care. He's still responsible for his actions.

Yet at the same time part of me wishes...that he'd try to make amends for what he did.   There's a part of me that aches for a real father.

But he's not a real father, he's a 60-something adolescent who can't apologize for the damage he's done to everyone in his life-and I think I'm the prizewinner of that contest.
I couldn't  have a decent relationship with him even if I could get past my own fury.

I don't know how I'm going to feel when he dies. Probably both sad and relieved.

repost: daddy issues

(This is honest. Which means it's got triggers in it. You've been warned.)

So...since I seem to be androgyne, at first I was all like "wheeee! so that's why I never felt right being a girl!"
And I felt all happy about it.

Now...details are not important about this, I guess, but I found out from an old friend of my Dad's that my Dad had indeed been raped as a child, and didn't know how to deal with it. Big surprise there, considering what he decided was okay to do to me...

(and now for the obligatory trip down memory lane...)
You see, I was having nightmares in part because of being orally raped at age four by a neighbor in the projects where we lived;also, in the same year, having another male neighbor there try to force me into his downstairs first-floor window at gunpoint and not being believed when I told my Mom. Gotta love the projects...
But what really gave me nightmares was when my uncle raped me in the bathroom of the house we had just moved into when I was six. I repressed it, yeah, so it wasn't in my conscious memory. But I was not okay mentally by that point. Damage was accumulating. Besides that, my dad would hit me-not to the point of bruising, but he was physically abusive.
So, when Mom went out and got a night job, I was afraid to sleep alone, because of the extreme nightmares. So I went to sleep with my Dad...and my Dad had sex with me. That became the tradeoff: I had sex with him, I was not forced to be alone with my nightmares. I dissociated the sex part; and a lot of other things as well-I have clear memories before and after, but those two years are almost a black hole-as in I can remember my kindergarten teacher, but I can't remember first, second, or third grade.
My maternal, widowed grandmother moved in when I was eight, and I think had suspicions of what was happening, because she generally wouldn't leave me alone with him. The sex stopped. He still slapped me around a lot though, punched on rare occasions.
(Okay, now back to the present.)

Well, confirmation my Dad had been abused triggered me-I freaked, and have just now calmed down.

I guess figuring out part of me is male, well, does that mean male like him? THAT'S a truly revolting thought.
I've thought of my male side as bright, noble and a little heroic in a scruffy everyman sort of way...honest, truthful, makes amends when he's wrong, not boastful, not arrogant, gentle and protective to those weaker than him, perhaps a little mischevious, but good-hearted...that's what I strive to embody, y'know...and I don't always succeed, but I think I certainly ought to try.
When I read novels, and I find a scruffy male rascal-hero, something in me has always responded very deeply to that...and I'm thinking now it's because I am looking at a funhouse mirror showing my ideal male self.

I am not ever, even if I figure out I am FtM, going to be like him. I will not stand for it!

My father has perhaps been a great negative role model for me-as in what NOT to do to be a good human being. Useful in that, despite his sorry self.
But feeling pity for him was very uncomfortable, because I survived recalling what he did to me, and the emotions involved, on a platform of hatred.
Apparently I still need to put that hatred and disgust onto him. I'm not ready to let go of it yet.

I'd like him to mean nothing to me anymore, one way or the other, and then I would know I was truly over this...although there's a matter of potential shaved off and years lost...and they will never come back. I will always be more physiologically vulnerable to stress because of the age the abuse started and the severity it built to(if you don't believe me, do a few searches on neurological effects of chronic abuse on children). I'd like to work on an ambulance crew, for instance, but I'd start dissociating when stuff was really bad.

Bottom line-I don't want to want or need anything from him. Right now he's still an object of hate, and I still need him to be that. He can be that, even absent(which he is, because if he shows up here, there's a serious chance I would kill him)or dead.
But I want to let go of that need. Forgive? not unless he works as hard at earning it as I have getting my sanity back.