Lately, she makes me feel very weak.  Even Sam has commented it to me in front of her.  “She always acts strange when you’re over.  It’s a thing she has,” Sam lightly tells Clara.

I swallow the flash of anger toward Sam—and toward myself—and I isolate.  I’m frozen, thinking of what Clara will think of me now that she knows she makes me nervous.  Male sex symbols don’t get nervous.  I’m certain she’ll any minute realize I’m still madly in love with her.  Then, in a shoddily-executed plan, she’ll instantly cut off physical and virtual contact, thereby extracting herself from my life, all because she doesn’t want to “keep hurting” me with her continued presence.  At least, that’s what I’ve done to guys.

The Buddhist and the writer in me tell me it’d only be karma, poetry.

This is only one nightmare scenario flashing through my head as I hold my breath waiting for her reaction.

I’m still waiting for her response.  She sometimes surprises me.

Just not tonight.  My heart broke as we all three talked past Sam’s comment.  I noted she didn’t insist on talking about my feelings.

I know it wasn’t her responsibility to insist.  Nor should I have hoped so much from her.  They’re my feelings and my responsibility to defend.

I just hoped.

That hope represents a level of neediness I’m not comfortable feeling.

Actually, I retract that.  Feelings are never wrong; and while we’re wrong when we ignore them, we’re sometimes wrong to express them.  Instead, I’d better say, it’s a level of neediness I shouldn’t ever express, though I can’t go on without addressing it.

It’s why it wouldn’t work out.  It wouldn’t work.

And I don’t want her.  We’re too different.  I’m not like her.

I want to kiss you. “How are you?”

She smiles and says pretty things about her life.

I want to say pretty things, too.

I can’t think of any.

Related posts:

1. Fractured
2. Another Night.
3. Am I Really In That Much Pain?
4. Freewriting: Obsessive Thoughts
5. Freewriting Panic Attack: Waking Nightmares

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Otherwise, I need to close my eyes, remember there are walls and doors and locks and panes to keep the bad men out.

As I lay petrified, shaking in his arms last night, I heard him say words I can’t believe. “You’re safe.”  I repeated them like a Catholic prayer, under my breath.

I’m safe. I’m safe. I’m safe.

As I keep drafting resolutions here and in my journals, I can’t help asking myself, as I have so many times throughout my short years, what is it about this act, those moments while you’re struggling against them, and after, when you can’t anymore, that has put my safety and self-worth into so much doubt?  What did it take away, and what can I get back?  What can I reclaim?  And what do I need to learn to live with?  What do I still cry after so many years?  Why does it feel like it just happened?  What is this?  Why is that?

And a big question:

HOW DO I MAKE IT ALL STOP?

I know better than to think there’s an old me they destroyed and a new me that’s not as good as the old me.  I know better than to think the rapes were something I did to myself or that there’s something about me that made them do those things to me.  I know better—now.

But what happens after you realize all those things, but you’re still not okay?  Do you just work harder, faster, more efficiently?  Do you try to control more elements of your life to make sure you feel safe, protected, certain at all times?  To make sure no one ever victimizes you again?

Or do you let loose?  Do you accept your lack of control in this life and embrace yourself with understanding and kindness?  But this time, you don’t force it upon yourself.  You keep encouraging reminders all around you in the form of friends, family, and maybe not a few notes-to-self.  It’s what Buddhism suggests I do.  It’s what Sam and everyone I know tells me to do: be kind to yourself.  Be compassionate to yourself, above all others.  It seems so simple, so easy to put into action.

But I can only try.  Like I always do, I try the new thing.  I try the simple yet overwhelming suggestions I just don’t know if I’ll be able to accomplish, but I’ll try if it means stopping this pain and keeping back the hysteria.

Then again, maybe that’s the point of mettā, the loving kindness we show ourselves and others.  Maybe that’s the point everyone’s been trying to make to me, but I haven’t gotten it: stop trying, and just do.  Just live.  Just breathe.  Just love myself with the same kindness and patience I show others.

Right.  Okay.  I can do that.  I can do anything if I just—

And there it is, the problem: how do I go about this?  Is it a day by day thing?  Is it a minute by minute effort, the kind that’s usually more exhausting than effective?  My cultures are really good at extremism like commercialism, drinking, and arguing.  But loving?  Patience for my limitations?  How does one go about that?

Here’s the best question of all: how do you go about that?  Or don’t you?

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3. Another Night.
4. Freewriting Panic Attack: Waking Nightmares
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I’m comfortable with the fact that I’m never going to catch it, because there is no it.

It’s some very Buddhist thing Sam said to me today about something unrelated to me.  Despite that, I quietly argued with myself about the potential application of this phrase to my own life, all as I criticized a poem, breaking up its thoughts and words and lines to construct or discover pure meaning, moving things around as I saw fit to mark with my red pen.  By the time I had analyzed the poem, my eyes had grown tired.  I read Sam’s Buddhist sentence, typed across my laptop screen, “I’m comfortable with the fact that I’m never going to catch him.”  I stopped immediately, knowing I had made an error, fearing it was a Freudian slip.  I meant, “it.”

Sam was talking to me about something, and I hadn’t been paying attention, too self-involved again.  I struggled to pay attention before I finally asked him, nicely, to be quiet.  It’s sometimes better not to pretend.

“Alright,” he said, with a loving smile.  “But why don’t you write about something happy today?  Count your blessings kind of thing.”

Because I tend to take his suggestions seriously, here goes:

In 2009, I…

I graduated college.  My Dad talked to me respectfully, and everyone seemed less threatening.

I started a new job with healthcare benefits.

I finally brought home the pet I’ve wanted for as long as I can remember.

I solidified a life in which I feel absolutely confident and safe.

Wow.  I’m taking deep breaths, I feel so much better after writing that out.  It’s not always that easy to crawl up and out of those dark tunnels in my mind.  Even now, I’m very near to falling back in.  Down there, hope seems ridiculous, an unattainable and dangerous goal I’m not to think of if I want to keep my sanity.  There’s only the here and now.

I’m comfortable with the fact that I’m never going to catch it, because there is no it.

With that in mind, I can’t deny, I’m not comfortable with the fact I’m never going to catch him nor that there is no him.  Andy is an icon, a symbol.  Symbols can’t be destroyed, only forgotten or re-imagined.  I don’t know how to do either of those things to the memories in my head.  On a conscious level, I’m at peace with what happened to me.  Unconsciously, there’s a dark creature ravaging me at all hours of the day and night.  I can’t make him stop.  So often, it’s me, tearing at my own clothes, hurting myself.  How do I stop the it that’s him and me at once?

That’s always the question, isn’t it: how do I stop myself?

I can’t hold back.

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Last year, I would have been devastated at my apparent friendlessness.  This year, I’m enjoying the time I’ve had today to think about me and what I want.

I don’t want to spend the night of my birthday celebration catering to others with smiles and one-way emotional support.  This year, I have my adoring boyfriend, who hates Christmas but compromised his beliefs so I could put up a Christmas tree.  I have Clara, who knows how to be a true friend, even when she is struggling to be there for herself.  And I have Bodhisattva, my kitten.  He is my meowing symbol of stability, the one feature of my life I know, if I take care of him, will be here for the next twenty years.  Nothing else is certain but him.  Of Sam and Clara, I can only hope they symbolize the same.

But people are trickier than animals.  They have long mood swings.  They hold grudges over inanities.  They get depressed, like Nyte, and disappear.  Or, they change.  Wha/tever the case, the result is the same: I’m disappointed.

With Nyte, I’ve given her support, honesty, empathy, sympathy when I didn’t understand her actions, and love.  I’ve done the same for Sang.  But, for what?  Nyte is too caught up with men she doesn’t respect and whom don’t respect her.  And lately, Sang is preoccupied.

And then there’s Sam.

Sam  is different, but it’s difficult to explain.  Instead, let me show you what I see through an example:

Sam and I went to a bar last night, some too trendy place in Hoboken with loud music and backless chairs.  Sang wanted to flirt with a waitress there and meet up with a mutual friend of Sam and his.  An hour into the night, Sam and I were so irritated by various factors I won’t go into here, we started arguing about nonsense.  It was another of Sam’s panic attacks, a fear that became an anger he unleashed on me.  But I wasn’t in the mood to be understanding, so what should have been nothing escalated into something.

At some point, I thought, I should leave.  I shouldn’t be with a man who speaks to me like this.  I don’t want to be with a man who lashes out, even if it is out of fear.

True,  of late, he hasn’t been doing it more than once every few weeks.  It’s even true that his outbursts are always followed by some powerful self-revelation, a sincere apology to me, and a change in his attitude or actions.

However, last night, I didn’t care about any of that.  “I’m leaving you, Sam.  I’m tired of it.  You’re just a scared little boy” I screamed at him in the middle of a busy Hoboken street.  If people walking by gawked at us, I didn’t notice.  I didn’t care.  I was disappointed.  We had spent so many weeks without his jealous outbreaks, this lapse felt like I would never have peace from his raging insecurities.

I walked away from him, informing him I would find my own way home.  And for once, I wasn’t bluffing.  I meant it.  It felt like what I had to do for my self-respect, so I followed through.  I didn’t want to, but I had to for my own health and sanity.  I would figure out the logistics of my living situation and money issues later.  Right then, I just knew I had to do what was best for me, which was leaving him.

When he chased me down the street with an apology, I demanded more than sweet words.  I demanded change and listed my grievances with a purposeful voice.

I could tell he meant it when he said he would change.  After having heard the promises from several Andys, I consider myself an expert at knowing when a man is lying.  Sam gave me a plan of action for dealing with his insecurities as he drove me home; he didn’t blame me for “making” him angry, as I’ve so often been accused of doing; and he admitted the reasons for his behavior were inadequate.  The triple-combo—apologizing for what he knows to have been bad behavior, taking responsibility for his actions, and mapping a course of action—convinced me to stay around long enough to at least see if the plan would be put into motion.

It’s only been a day, but I already know he won’t disappoint me.  He’s a good man, even if he doesn’t know it.  He’s never disappointed me.  I’ve never lost respect for him, though there have admittedly been times he neared the limits.

And when it matters, he gives me what I need.

True.  He didn’t get me the ice cream Oreo cake I wanted from Carvel.  He didn’t surprise me with flowers.  He didn’t do anything incredibly romantic for my birthday at all.  He’s not good at those gestures.

But he’s good nonetheless—always trying to give his best to others, and to me, even when it means he has to make a few sacrifices of his own; making sure I’m always comfortable, even when it means he’s not.

I  can’t say that about most people in my life.  Clara’s driving in the snow at 1 AM to make sure she sees me this weekend.  What have my other friends done for me lately?  What have they done for me at all?  I’m starting to realize how few people there are who deserve my respect, much less my time.

So on my birthday’s day of celebration, to the sad lot in my life who suck at being good people and good friends, I say, goodbye and good luck.  I have no bitterness, and I’ll hold no grudges.  I’m happy to reconnect with you when you’ve become a valuable person of some sort.  In the meantime, to borrow from a friend of mine, I’ve moved on.

Happy Birthday to me.

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I don’t know why I’ve been villifying men lately.  It isn’t fair to the good ones.

I don’t know why I’ve been perceiving them as threatening.

But then none of that is completely true.  I do know.  I know why I’ve been vilifying men.  I know why I’ve been interpreting their faces as threatening.  It’s not like any of it happens consciously—it’s always in retrospect when something suddenly triggers the memory—but it doesn’t change the fact that these thoughts are occurring to me.

Here, I can hear Sam telling me I need to stop taking my thoughts so seriously.

Unfortunately, that’s not really something I’m good at doing, nor do I know how to train myself to do that.

Bear with me while I try to break this idea down to something I can better understand:

I shouldn’t take my thoughts so seriously.  The “so” implies that I can take them seriously, but I shouldn’t take them as seriously as I do.  So I guess that means I should loosen up.  I shouldn’t take myself so seriously.  After all, I am my thoughts, aren’t I?

Yes, of course, I am.  But that doesn’t take into account the fact that we are, other than a series of chemical reactions, a compilation of experiences—engagements with the world.  That necessarily complicates the idea that I am my thoughts.  In the words of Chuck Palahniuk, “Nothing of me is original.  I am the combined effort of everybody I’ve ever known.”  If you break down what I am, given the information I’ve stated here, I am an effect of my experiences in the the world.  So, if I am my thoughts and I am an effect of the world, than my thoughts are just as I am.

Now, accepting that, and applying that belief to my efforts to comprehend how I can not take my thoughts seriously, that means I can’t take the effect my experiences have had on me seriously.

I can’t do that.  I can’t ignore my experiences.  Every day, every hour, I do something that was completely motivated by the sexual abuse and assaults I’ve survived.  How can I not take that seriously?!  That—that would be letting them win.  Yesterday, I wondered, have I been surviving to only know more pain?  I wondered whether men had already taken the best parts of me.  And I really felt that they had won.  I was dead.

Today, I can say, with perhaps a clearer mind, that if I stop giving my thoughts the attention and respect they deserve, I’ll once more become a victim.  The Andys each convinced me very thoroughly that my thoughts were not worth attention nor respect, that I wasn’t worth those things .  So, if I don’t give that notice to myself, then I’m internalizing their abuse, thereby hurting myself in deeper ways than they ever could.  I would be setting myself up for another abusive situation.

Like I’ve been doing by acting so irresponsibly lately.  I can now see the last two to three weeks have been as emotionally hectic as they have been because I’ve been hurting myself.  That forces me to consider why I’m trying to hurt myself, but the reasons are so numerous—

No.  It all condenses into one cause: the abuses I’ve endured.  People have hurt me.  How can I not take that seriously?

—That makes me feel a little less afraid right now: I take myself seriously.  It implies I have a sense of self-worth, no?

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Every day, I struggle to see men as fellow victims. Intellectually, I know they are. I know the patriarchy has claimed them as it’s claimed us.

But then the two men I respect most in the world tease me for the aches and pains my constant anxiety have caused. “It was all harmless kidding,” I tell myself, “and it is kind of comical. I’m always whining.”

A long list of self-deprecations are proven true by their laughter.

I—I hate to admit it, but I feel very much like you do. I still sometimes think, “aw, look at that guy with his kid.” That, however, is quickly subsumed by images of him molesting her.

I’m probably naive, but I just can’t embrace that image, yet. I can’t think of all men that way. I feel that, for me, and I only speak for myself, I would be giving into the trauma and condemning myself to this fractured reality.

I know. I’m a fool for hoping. They keep beating me, and I keep licking their hand. But, as I see it, if I give up on men, I give up on women, too. It’s the nature of a binary. To that point, I’ve dated women. Their good intentions are equally worthless. Even the ones you don’t so much as kiss will caress your soul as they lead you toward their parapet.

No. Forget what I said. My argument is flawed. None of those women damaged me for years: stole into my mind, ripped apart my anatomy, and irrevocably harmed my sexuality.

You caught me, bradamant. I’m having some difficulty accepting my feelings against men. I know it doesn’t end. I want to say there are exceptions, but every man I’ve thought was an exception has proven to actually be damaging in a way so subtle, his damage is more perverse than the last one’s.

But I’m afraid to hate men, bradamant. I’m afraid to leave them forever. I fear I would be letting the Andys win.

Not letting them win is the only thing that drives me.

Oh, God! That’s an ugly realization! They’re at the essence of my every motivation. They define me.

Have they already won?

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I know.  It’s fucked up, as a rape victim, to want that.  Your potential judgments against me pale in comparison to the judgments I make against myself because of this desire.

Most days, I still blame myself for my sexual assaults—even for the one that happened when I was about eleven.  I remember their hands on me, and I remember their manipulations and my hesitations and screams, but I still can’t forgive myself.

I shouldn’t have allowed myself to be in such vulnerable situations.  I should have known what those men were.

Logic says, I was trained to be a victim and I was manipulated by those purring lions.

Logic has nothing to do with trauma.

I’m a sick woman.  I know that, and I fight it every day by being constantly self-aware.  Yet, I let a stranger give me a ride the other day, and I don’t know why.  I was stuck at a train station.  Sam was at work, I don’t have a car, and the taxi company wanted to charge me $35.  Then, a man I had been talking to for ten minutes, a friend of a man I had been talking to for fifteen minutes, offered me a ride for $10.  I liked the price and accepted.  It wasn’t smart.  It wasn’t me.  I don’t know what got into me.  Those men could have done to me horrible things I have yet to experience, and I thought of that before I accepted the ride.  But I was numb to the possibility of danger.

It had been so many years since I had done something so reckless, I didn’t think I was capable of it anymore.  But something in me felt no fear.  I was completely trusting, when I shouldn’t have been.

Is that part of the mania or some other aspect of my mental illness?  It seems probable, but I refuse to let the label of mental illness excuse my behavior.  Why did I get into that car?

Why am I horny all the time lately?  Why do I continue to have sex after it starts to hurt?  Why do I hurt myself with sex when it doesn’t turn me on?  Why was I excited when my boyfriend asked me if I wanted to role play rape?  What about forced objectification appeals to me?

It makes absolute sense.  My first sexual experience was violent, and my father is a violent man, too.  And this culture prizes the violent man, adores him, tells women, “he’s just sick.”  The result is what I call the Lost Puppy Syndrome.  Women pick up these sad or broken men.  We try to repair them, love them, give them the attention no one has ever given them, the attention and love that will fix them.  We think, I’m the only one who can help him.

Except it doesn’t work that way.  The slew of psychological explanations for this behavior ranges from projection to masochism.

I’m afraid to think the latter might be right about me.  What if the answer to all this is an intense self-loathing that leads to self-imposed punishments?  Do I hate myself that much?  Am I that repulsed by myself?

I want answers.  I’m smart enough to know I’m the only one who has them, but I think, amidst the other ironies of my mental illness, they’re trapped in my head.  Ugly memories too sick to fully fathom guard the way to them.

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I’ve always been sick.  For as long as I can remember, I’ve had to go to doctors several times a year, hospitals, specialists.  Mine has been a life of sanitation and medication.

I’ve been chronically nauseous since before I knew there was a word for it.  I remember Maggie taught me the word so I could tell it to my school nurse whenever necessary.

I also suffer from chronic bronchitis, which means I get it several times a year.

I have twisted ankles.

I get migraines several times a week.

I have a knee that pops out of place all the time, and I never even played a sport!

I suffer from back spasms all day, every day.  I can’t remember the last time nothing hurt.

I can’t even remember.  I’d laugh, if it wasn’t so sad.  My neurotic need to write everything down is the only thing keeping me functional because I literally cannot remember most of the things that happen to me in a day.

These are just some of the symptoms medication seems unable to address.  I hope that once the anxiety is completely gone, the psychosomatic symptoms will go with it.  But I think of Sam’s compulsion to crack his neck, even though it hurts him to do so.  His 30 mg of Lexapro steady him somewhat, but they aren’t a cure-all.

So, once I’m over this upper respiratory infection, I’ll go to the organic grocers and to the gym.  Despite the psychopharmaceuticals overflowing from my medicine box, I maintain my preference for homeopathic remedies—another belief I had to throw away early on in the fight against this monster in my head.

I want to submit to this crying spell, but I’m not going to.  I can do that: dissociate at will.  That’s not something to be proud of, but it’s what I’ve got right now.  I’m looping like a sound effect what Sam yelled at me from the kitchen Saturday morning.  Amidst another conversation about something, he shouts from the kitchen, “Depression is anger turned inward.”

The idea is so widely accepted, it’s become cliché, but this was the first time I was really considering it in terms of my own life.  I’ve heard the phrase a million times, read it a million times that, and I’ve participated in debates about the idea.  Yet, when he said it yesterday, I suddenly considered, “if that’s true, at whom am I angry?  If I’m not angry at the Andys and I’m not angry at myself, who is left?

For a few moments on Friday night, my anger turned on Sang, but my fear of expressing true anger made the outburst ridiculous.  Sang and Sam laughed.  I pouted; I shouted, “I mean it!”  I might as well have stomped my foot, because the effect was that I looked like a child throwing a tantrum.  I was a six year old girl again, frustrated I couldn’t stop my parents’ abuses.

—Fuck.  I was a sad kid.  It’s the one command I heard again and again from strangers’ mouths: smile!  Pocarisa, my aunt called me.  My family encouraged the use of the nickname.  Rarelylaughs.  No one ever gets why I tell that story, as if to prove its point.

—Shit.  These are the words of a depressive.  I don’t know what’s going through my head right now.

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And now, I’m really proud of the work I’ve done.  I have a warm apartment, honorable friends, a sweet kitten, a job, and a boyfriend who would do anything for me.

I’m giddy with excitement.  Those words above are not a depressive’s in the throws of it.  Could it be, I’m getting better?  I mean, I feel better.  I’m interested in going out, and I’m once more vocalizing my needs to Sam.  The winter’s coming, but I’m not minding that today.  I’m not minding anything.  Things feel good.  The world feels right.  I want to cry, and for once, it’s not out of grief.  I feel the desire to celebrate.

A little voice whispers, don’t trust it.  Today, I’m not listening.  The days are passing, and I’m maintaining stability.  I have to trust it, trust myself, trust my doctors.  This time might be different.

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