I’ve changed the names of my parents, immediate family, the locations of events, and other identifiers so that I can remain hidden amongst the masses. I want to protect the innocent, and, if I’m honest, I’m still scared. My fear is oddly balanced by a desire to seek out some sort of vigilante justice. Since I’m not a physically violent person, I’ll go for the psychological variety. Think of this as a guerrilla-marketing-style ode to my perpetrators, whom I’d like to have the angst of sweating it out a bit as they age into frailty, living their well-respected lives and deluding themselves into believing they matter.
In my mind, there are three types of people in this world. Those who harm others, those who turn a blind eye and let it continue, or those who would take a bullet to stop it. Anyone that comprises the first two types of people are evil, and I don’t know which one is worse. As it relates to my life and of the people that occupy the first category, all but two have died.Those in the second grouping are too numerous to count, and many are still above ground. Unfortunately, I never met anyone willing to stand between me and my perpetrators.
Some of the guilty endeavor to contact me every few years or sneak a peek at my life by contacting friends of friends or leaving random posts on social media. I’m either paranoid or delusional, perhaps both, but it all feels directed at me. These people have bet on my silence, and it has worked for over four decades. It’s how abuse and predatory behavior work…instill fear to buy silence. Painting the victim as crazy also works. Bringing my story out of the shadows is as much a personal catharsis as well as a way to regain control. The fact that it will make certain people sweat is an added benefit. I’m simply not strong enough to face them in person, so my words will have to serve as my cleansing, my fuck you, my revenge.
My world has always felt like the real-life mirror to some crappy, B-grade horror flick, and I was the hapless woman stuck in the center of all the chaos.A constant fear of the unknown serves as the backdrop to my adult life, and always has. Danger lurked around every corner, and much like the movie victim, I was also drawn to people that harmed me the most. These individuals fit a certain profile I didn’t know existed, but that I had been groomed to welcome. They were my normal. Honestly, I didn’t know that all of them were harming me. Manipulation and emotional abuse are insidious and equally devastating as their physical counterparts, just in different ways.
Life has a way of providing opportunities if we only take time to watch for them; as a young but streetwise 21-year old, I saw an opportunity to leave. In a two-week time period,I moved 2,000 miles from the place I was born and built a new life for myself. I broke free…or so I thought.
The years that followed were defined by physical and intellectual freedom, never emotional or spiritual. I had time for the self realization that I was different. Off. Maybe broken. I constantly wondered what was wrong with me, and I existed in a persistent state of fear. When things settled down, which rarely happened, I felt naked. Without fear and worry, who was I? Why was I always so scared? I hated the fear, but without it my mind raced and took me down other rabbit holes far too deep. So, I focused my worry outward, on the people in my current life, trying to placate them and please them. It gave me a bizarre purpose, focusing on others.
I don’t know what I felt, exactly, I just know that it didn’t feel right. How a person is supposed to know what “right” feels like is beyond me. Deeply unsettled feelings were constant reminders that I wasn’t whatever or whomever I was supposed to be. Imposter syndrome kicked in whenever I looked at the world around me. People in my midst were seemingly living their best lives and I was faking it. I felt like a giant ball of tangled Christmas lights, unable to separate strands and fix broken bulbs.
Roommates, colleagues, and boyfriends were happy. At least they seemed so. They enjoyed going out on the weekends, pursuing careers and mates, buying homes, traveling, having kids, and all the things. They had trivial complaints of a father that wouldn’t pay for their vacations or siblings that stole their clothing. Meanwhile, I was busy trying to untangle strand upon strand of lights.
I walked into friendships, relationships, and marriage without any real expectation of what each should look like. Because I didn’t know myself, I barely knew how to be amongst others. I also lacked role models or examples from which I should have learned. My normal was deeply distorted.
My unraveling was slow. Discreet. Some of my decades-long friends still don’t know. I became a master of disguise, even in my own home. It began sometime during my first pregnancy. Waves of tears were written off by my husband, in-laws, friends, and doctors as pregnancy hormones. I knew they weren’t. This was not normal. There was some primal force, deep within, that was waking up as my son developed inside me. I was in my mid-30s. Whatever it was, it wanted out.
My pregnancy was horrible; preeclampsia moved in uncharacteristically early, and I would spend months in the hospital on bedrest. I felt safe there. By the grace of God, I gave birth to a healthy son who was, and remains to this day, utterly spectacular. I had a new-found purpose, a brightness and optimism I had never felt before. There were signs of a life that felt startlingly fresh, unburdened. Paradoxically, I also met with an increased sense of fear, only this fear included my son. Thoughts of someone hurting him preoccupied my waking mind and seeped into my dreams.
My sweet boy was mere months old when news of my mother’s passing made it to me. Her death washed over me and brought guilt, anger, and rekindled fear but I didn’t know why. It had been 22 years since I’d seen my mom. She was a widow, my step-father had passed, and, as her oldest, I had to go home to face the music. Nobody else was going to get her in the ground, so I had to.
In the years following her death, I remember a vacancy in my consciousness and a bizarre feeling of being orphaned. The hallmark of this period is the emergence of dreams. Vivid dreams. Unreal nighttime stories that were a horrific mashup of a Tim Burton film starring Mommy Dearest. It was during these years that I learned what it felt like to wake up and be unable to determine if I had dreamed or if the events really happened. Fixtures, items, places, and some people in my dreams were real but they were set within outlandish storylines and settings. Think of the clock sliding off a table in a Salvador Dali painting and that might get you somewhere near how warped these nighttime movies were.
In retrospect, I can see my agitation and anxiety levels clearly but gradually escalating. Over the course of days or weeks the increase was inconsequential, unseen by those close to me. I began having horrible bouts of insomnia, struggled with eating, and gradually lost interest in the things that once made me happy. The social butterfly, the girl that once sought the approval of everyone, was slowly becoming interested in no one. My friend circle tightened up, and I gradually crawled into myself. I deliberately cut people off for minor infractions in my life and my actions felt justified but I couldn’t explain why.
The birth of my daughter brought renewed joy and hope, and introduced next-level worry. Worry beyond that of any of the women in my mommy groups. While they were concerned with whether or not their child was eating enough veggies, I was worried about someone kidnapping my daughter and raping her, when she was 6 months old. The things I worried about were sadistic. And I couldn’t tell anyone. I also couldn’t stop it. No amount of prayer, meditation, yoga, or wine stopped my racing thoughts. My brain went into hyper-vigilant overdrive. It was all consuming. While I was also worried for my son, I was obsessed with protecting my daughter…at all costs. Worry gradually, but eventually, gave way to paranoia.
Scrolling through my social media feed, I stumbled upon news that my father was ill. His wife, I’ll affectionately refer to her as Number 3 because she doesn’t deserve the humanity or recognition that comes with a name, refused to tell me he had fallen ill with COVID during the peak of the pandemic. What did I expect from her, though? She was my mother’s best friend, and, incidentally, the same woman whom I caught in her undergarments with my very married father when my mom was institutionalized. They were “doing the laundry.” But, I digress. I had the chance to call the VA, facetime him, and say goodbye. He looked me square in the face and refused to say he loved me. The funny thing is, I didn’t want or need him to say it. I wanted him to look at me and know that I no longer needed him, his approval, or love. That I had broken free. He died the next day. Number 3 blocked me from everything and deliberately had cameras shut off during his funeral services so I couldn’t watch from 2,000 miles away. Twat. In a fun spin on events, Number 3 refuses to give a copy of my father’s will to my sister or me. While legally considered heirs, I want nothing of his. But my sister is entitled to it. She is also obligated to provide a copy of these documents, to which she refuses. Small mind.
My gradual unraveling sped up, quite significantly. In the year following my father’s passing, I was hospitalized for mental health related issues three times. His death added kerosene to the fire that had been slowly burning within me for decades. As my chosen family matured, I noticed the emergence of odd behaviors. I never knew they were patterns at the time. Everything felt familiar, but I didn’t know why. I started having compulsive urges and I wasn’t sure of their origins. Strange things like checking door locks, turning knives a certain way in the block, and checking for dust on top of the household thermostat or picture frames. Deja vu was a constant occurrence for me.The endless loop of what-ifs, watching exit doors, and listening for sounds in the night became my existence. These events, four decades in the making, played on repeat until I eventually snapped from reality.
Imagine an overfilled water balloon carried around by the flimsy knot at the top. A very small hole lets water slowly drip out, and always has, but the bulk of the water inside is contained by the balloon. It’s a delicate balance of internal pressure and external forces that hold it all together; any mishandling pops the balloon. The balloon becomes inefficient as it ages, further sagging under its own weight; the passage of more time erodes structural integrity and the ability to hold all of the liquid inside is no longer possible. Small holes begin appearing everywhere and liquid is consistently dripping out, creating chaos for the person who owns the balloon, nearby people, and places. Then, one hole appears, larger than the rest, and gone are the little droplets of water everywhere; in their place is a constant stream that won’t stop. It floods the floors, gets those nearby wet, and damages the integrity of the balloon itself. Because each clean-up task requires full effort, the balloon owner cannot focus on one task and is instead jigsawed back and forth between patching it and cleaning up its mess. By some cruel twist of fate, the balloon keeps filling back up. Just when one mess is cleaned up, another is on the way. That balloon is my mind, that first hole represents the fact that a person can never truly hide or escape their history; it always finds a way out. The emergence of more holes are the constant reminders of my life popping up because of life’s peccadillos, specifically when something or someone sparks a recollection from my past. The water…my memories. The big hole…it represents the deaths of my mother and father.
This story is about how I came to be. Today. I am not the person I was before I broke down. The person I am now is consciously taxed by memories that were previously stored only in the recesses of my mind. My body, it seems, has always been burdened by them and all of it is now seeping out of me. My brain is in a time lapse and I’ve been forced to relive the entirety of my childhood in 2 excruciating years. Just when I think it’s done, a new reel starts.There’s a famous book, The Body Keeps the Score, that explains it perfectly. I’d highly recommend reading it if you or someone you know has experienced trauma.
Looking back, and as I read through my life in chapters on paper, it’s a wonder I’m even here. So much went wrong, and too many close calls. As a warning, this story involves triggers of nearly every type: childhood trauma, sexual abuse, physical abuse, animal abuse and pet death, loss of pregnancy, death of parents, severe mental illness, use of illicit substances, emotional abuse and torture, homelessness, hunger, death of friends, and abandonment. I know, it’s a lot.
Childhood trauma has a way of hiding in the recesses of your brain and altering your perception of life. I’m slowly realizing that there was, in fact, nothing wrong with me, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been left unscathed. The people around me were sadistic, manipulative, and two-faced. Some were harbingers of generational trauma, some of them evil and willfully repeating experiences from their past and inflicting pain as they went. Others are victims who had horrible examples to model their lives by and unwittingly repeated the process.
The life I thought was mine, wasn’t. The person I thought I was, wasn’t. The person I could have been will never be known; her life began unraveling when she was barely 2, before it had really started. Nobody tells you how to handle such a rude awakening, and these installments represent my deliberate steps towards self-realization and some level of peace. I call them installments because they aren’t chapters. Some memories are disjointed and short; they do not belong lumped with others simply for the ease of reading. Other’s are long and extraordinarily detailed; they, too, are deserving of their own time and space.
