Related posts:

1. Torture and Time
2. Stop it! Shut up! It’s too ugly!
3. Fractured
4. Upswing: Just Keep Breathing
5. A Few Thoughts: Innocence, Sexuality, Feminism, Non-Rapists, Writing, and Comfort

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?

Related posts:

1. Fractured
2. Torture and Time
3. Another Night.
4. Freewriting Panic Attack: Waking Nightmares
5. Freewriting: Obsessive Thoughts

Doctors would never need to get involved—in my ideal world.  I wouldn’t have to take this medication.  I’d be normal.  Instead, a freak is what I feel like most days.

Most days, I can’t believe I have a job, a boyfriend, a cat, friends.  It all seems miraculous, like it has nothing to do with me.  In fact, it feels like all this has happened in spite of me.

I mean, think about everything this site talks about: the depression, the medication and self-medication, the emotional phenomena.  Who would keep that person employed?  And yet, I work for the biggest company in the industry.  Every day, I arrive at my job, open up Outlook, and think, as I wait for the server to download the emails, Oh, God, I’m going to get yelled out. The fear has made me religious about updating and answering my work email.  I’m always waiting for it: the revelation.

They’ll email me into the office one day and finally say it: “this is unacceptable.”  I’ll hear, “you’re unacceptable,” thank them for the opportunity to work with them, and quietly leave the company forever.  At that point, I’ll probably go into a deep depression before being carted off to a mental hospital.

Every morning, between the click of a little, orange desktop icon and the message that all emails have been downloaded from the server, I see this future.

On the meds, all of that still happens; the difference is how I feel about that vision.  Instead of assuming I’ll thereafter be carted off to a mental institution, I tell myself, “if that happens, and I get fired, I’ll figure something out.  I’m not alone in this world.  I have Sam and my family and my friends to support me emotionally while I look for a job.  And there’s always a job to do, right?”

In better economic times, that last statement wouldn’t be a question, but I’m not afraid anymore.  There’s always money to be made, somewhere, somehow, if I’m not too proud.  And in the US, what with Section 8, things would have to get abject for me not to be able to earn enough for Section 8 housing.

Sadly, that’s how my brain thinks.  I cover every eventuality; I think of every possible outcome.  I’m constantly searching for logic.  Before the meds, my fears seemed logical, too.  Reason looked suspicious.  ”But what if…?  What if…?” was my refrain.  It still is.  Only, I don’t doubt the logic of the reasonable answers, anymore.

So, I’m cured, right?  I’m calm.  I’m listening to logic.  I’m reasonable, for all intents and purposes, and I’m technically, arguably functioning, to say I have a job and a relationship.

Yet, it’s not all right.  I know better.  I don’t trust any of this.  Even as the pills alleviate my anxiety, they don’t cancel out the thoughts, only the feelings attached to them.  While this is nevertheless an arsenal against negativity—while I can see reality that much clearer while on these drugs—I still think awful things.

But I don’t think it gets easier than this.  This is the point doctors always tell me meds can take me to.  The rest is therapy, they say.

I didn’t think they were right about meds, and I didn’t think they were right about therapy, but with my cultural perceptions of medication thrown into doubt, their promises suddenly become that much more probable.

Then again, I’ve also been known to be too trusting.

Round and round I go.  How do I stop?

Related posts:

1. Self-Trust
2. I Want to Stop Writing About What Happened to Me.
3. The Sated Life
4. Am I Really In That Much Pain?
5. Freewriting: Obsessive Thoughts

So Hollywood gives us this action-packed film full of familiar things like salvation, duty to society; the empowerment of the poor, and watered-down lipstick feminism in the form of a hot young girl who took some kickboxing lessons.  It’s about everything the first decade of the twenty-first century has been about.

This movie is a reflective product of this culture, but I still don’t know whether Hollywood is trying to promote a revolution or if they’re giving me a controlling substance, a Media pill to render me passive by satisfying my impulse to rebel against the dominant party to the right of me.  Somehow, it’s hard to believe commercialists have my best interests at heart.

Then again, movies like The Women make me feel like a more assertive model for women is represented in mainstream media: we can have it all, but do we want it?  Is it even healthy?  And do we really want to reach our goals if it means betraying other women, and therefore ourselves?  The movie says “no” to all three questions.  Instead, it argues women need women friends to help them do what they cannot possibly do on their own: survive this life in one emotional piece.

I knew what kind of woman I wanted to be by watching my sister Maggie’s successes and failures, my mother’s philosophies at work, and my girl friends’ misconceptions revealed for what they are.  And all of them had one thing in common: they weren’t hot, young girls who had taken kickboxing lessons nor knew how to hotwire a car.  They were stupid when they were young, ignorant through most of their 20s, and sometime after they turn 30, they’re trying to fix the mess they’d made the last few years.  I want to see more movies about women going through all that, and being okay with it, even as they try to prevent it.  I want a heroine as barely in control as I am.  Except, this woman, unlike me at my worst, is trying to be okay with it all–the fuck-ups, the wrinkles, and the betrayal.  I want movies to be made about that kind of woman.  I want movies to be made about that kind of woman, because I don’t have any real life examples.

What I mean to say is, there’s also a crisis of womanhood.  Most of our mothers didn’t survive the war.  They’re victims of the patriarchy with Stockholm Syndrome.  Isn’t it worth considering whether it’s healthy to even engage with these women we call Mom , if only for those times when we are most vulnerable to judgment?  Maybe rather than fight an obstacle, we should sometimes focus on avoiding it, at least until we’re ready to confront it?

Of course, the risk is becoming addicted to avoiding.

I spend at least some time every day writing for self-improvement.  But last week, during therapy, I realized I’ve been avoiding  people.  I realized I’ve been avoiding interacting them because it’s painful, because I fear them looking at me and judging me.  I realized I’ve been avoiding my social anxiety.

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1. A Few Thoughts: Innocence, Sexuality, Feminism, Non-Rapists, Writing, and Comfort
2. I Want to Stop Writing About What Happened to Me.
3. Stop it! Shut up! It’s too ugly!
4. My Boyfriend Hates Women
5. Fractured

1.STOP THINKING ABOUT ANYTHING THAT IS NOT IN THE MOMENT AND 2. I’VE FOUND YOU ONLY GET DISAPPOINTED WHEN YOU HAVE AN EXPECTATION. 3. FIND SOME WAY TO CHANNEL YOUR ANGER (OTHER THAN A BLOG THAT PROMOTES THINKING AND INDULGING YOUR THOUGHTS-TRY SOMETHING KINESTHETIC).

When I read it, I couldn’t decide how to answer.  I was grateful for the comment and the food for thought.  I still am.  It has helped me arrive to one important conclusion:

I try to never dismiss others or their suggestions, so I’ve been wondering for days, is Negrita, the commenter’s suggestion a valid solution for me, as it appears to have been for her?  Soon after, I started questioning if I was a survivor at all.  And if not, how do I become a survivor, instead of a victim?  I thought I was.  I never considered the two ideas might be polar opposites.  The therapists say, remember.  The books say, remember.  The people around me insist otherwise, citing the seeming adage, “leave the past in the past.”

But where is the evidence such a thing is possible?  I consider myself a Buddhist, albeit a struggling one.  If the idea of living in the present, an idea that reverberates throughout this entire religion, were such an easy one to implement, then what need has there ever been to form a religion that aspires toward this very accomplishment?  Buddhist monks and nuns in the Himalayas spend their entire lives striving to live in the now.  If I ever achieve that level of enlightenment, I think then there would be no reason to look back on my life.  But I doubt I’ll achieve that in Jersey.

—which only brings up the lack of good instruction on the matter.  Negrita suggests I do something more kinesthetic.  Well, it’s always good to be moderately active, but choosing activity over words has never served me well.  I only have time to do so much, and words serve me better.  For instance, I used to workout at the gym several times a week.  I would run on the treadmill, staring at the mirrored wall watching me, remembering the mirrored wall in the room Andy raped me in, remembering who watched me then.  I knew I was working out to make sure I was strong enough to fight the next man off.  The heart palpitations from high anxiety levels were the only thing that ever made me slow down.  Finally, I stopped using exercise as a form of self-punishment.  I stopped running toward—and away—from my past, and I started going to therapy.  My therapists taught me I needed to have expectations, other than my then low expectations toward men.

After years of therapy and psychopharmaceutical aids, I’ve replaced the voices telling me to stop indulging in these thoughts and memories.  Now, I struggle to replace others’ expectations with my own.  At once, I’ve learned to demand certain expectations of others—like respect.  I’ve learned to listen to my own voice, even when I’m screaming.

So I tell myself the things you read here.  Some of them are good.  Most of them aren’t.  At the end of the day, however, writing about all these terrifying thoughts and feelings makes me feel a little more normal, a little less terrified.

Perhaps all this writing is a bit indulgent, as Negrita suggested, but I can’t believe victims shouldn’t be proud of themselves for managing to respect their thoughts enough to seriously consider them, as many of us do by writing about our lives.  Nor can I believe that living in the now is something that can be done without first learning the lessons of the past.  At the risk of sounding overly-philosophical, I argue, there is no now to live in without the past that created it.

Then again, maybe all Negrita meant was that I think too much.  If so, there’s an irony to this post, to the amount of thought I’ve given her words.

It’s because she’s brought to light a fear I have.  I’m circling forward, but am I progressing too slowly?  How much time is enough time to recover?  What defines a survivor?  Who?

I’ve asked these questions before.  My thoughts feel like a widening gyre.  I’m writing toward my very center, hoping in doing so, I’m strengthening it.  Perhaps I’m bias, but the evidence seems to be in my favor.  Even direct criticisms don’t cause the damage to my self-esteem they once did.

Related posts:

1. Torture and Time
2. Freewriting: Madness
3. Another Night.
4. Freewriting Panic Attack: Waking Nightmares
5. I Want to Stop Writing About What Happened to Me.

And then, I ran out of excuses.  I can only watch so much TV before my mind starts screaming for something more interactive.

So here I am, writing again—somewhat reluctantly.  I don’t want to think about anything.  These are the times I wish I was stupid.  I wish I was an animal.  I wish things would just slow down.  Everything’s going too fast.  Money is driving the car.

A day, a few hours sometimes, I feel I’m going too fast; most days, I feel too slow.  I only recognize my failures and shortcomings.  I feel nothing but fear toward the future and horror and shame toward the past.  I want things to be simple, but when I’m like this, this—taut inside, I can’t think past the fear and the horror and the shame.

It’s a never-ending panic attack.  I’ve been in it for days, and climbing into it for who knows how much time!  I’m blind, and I’m deaf to the world.  I’m feeling for walls, but I can’t find any.

It feels like screaming might get it out of me, this feeling, but I know better from experience.  There’s no getting this out until I collapse.  I can only hope this is the kind of mental collapse that happens to release tension.  Those are quick.  They aren’t the nervous breakdown I feel I’m headed toward but know I’m probably not.

I think often lately that I’m just a dumb drama queen, whining my time away.  I fear that.  I think about that.  It’s another reason I haven’t written.  I’m losing faith that I have anything worth writing.

My mind is turning in on itself, betraying and consuming itself.  I feel I could touch madness, if I just reach my arms out.

I have to tell myself, I’m not a fuck-up.  I’m not a bad worker, friend, girlfriend, person.  I’m not sick or even damaged.  I’m just a person whose lived her life as well as she’s been able to.  I try very hard to always be good, to always do the right thing, to never do harm but instead to leave everyone I meet with a new perspective.  Bad people don’t do that.  Bad people don’t try so goddam hard.

Do they?

A voice whispers, what if you’re delusional?  What if you want to be that type of person, but you’re not?  What if you’re just a natural fuck-up who has your “friends” and boyfriend fooled?

Whining.  Whining.

—Then, I think of everyone who reads me, everyone who knows me in my life, and I recall their reassurances.  It amazes me how far their words go.  I didn’t grow up with emotional support.  The instability characterizing my childhood makes it very difficult for me, among other reasons, to believe in myself.  So, I have to start changing my way of perceiving, first by changing the way I talk to myself:

So, it’s not whining.  It’s me, remembering, telling, trying like hell to do more than survive this, because I know I deserve more.  I’m not unworthy of love.  I’m not disgusting or moronic.  I’m—somewhat pretty and not a little intelligent.

If I keep saying it, will it come true?  I doubt it, but I have to try.  I have to try everything.  I’m going to take self-defense classes as soon as I get a car.  In the meantime, I’m going to start going back to therapy more steadily and taking my meds at the same time every day.  I’m going to build a routine, and I’m going to stop numbing out.

I keep saying this, don’t I?

No.  Just another doubt.  I can do it.  I just have to keep moving, keep pushing myself forward.  If I’m not pushing myself, I’m not learning.  If I’m not learning, I’m wasting time.  I can’t keep wasting time, or every day will continue to feel like the last few days have: like the bugs of madness are skittering on my brain, inside my skull.  I want to get them off, but I can’t get inside.

I hate talking about this.  Every moment I’m awake to this madness, engaging with my mind, tightens my throat and makes my foot tap harder on the floor.  The pain in my leg muscles will last for days.

So, I’m taking a different stance on myself.  I’m giving myself a break for tonight.  I’ve been a good girl.  I’ve written, and I’ve worked on myself here.  I’ll try not to feel guilty about going to watch more TV now.  I’ll try to tell myself, it’s healthy to unwind sometimes.  Tomorrow, there’s work.  Tonight, it’s me time.

I’ll try to believe myself.

Related posts:

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2. Fractured
3. Suffering Numbness
4. Torture and Time
5. Another Night.

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?

Related posts:

1. Torture and Time
2. Questions and Answers
3. Freewriting Panic Attack: Waking Nightmares
4. The War with Ourselves: I Hate Men
5. I Want to Stop Writing About What Happened to Me.

Don’t know anything about the drugs but I do know that I’ve been beaten, raped, punched and abused sexually, emotionally, financially by a variety of men from all walks of life. The last guy I dated tried to kill me. So I decided a few years back that they were more trouble than its worth. I decided that I was better off alone and couldn’t risk another relationship. Now men around me complain that I’m bitter, angry, psycho etc. etc. which I’m not. I just want to be left out of their picture, at least on the sexual/emotional side of life.

So my question is: Why don’t these men who do these terrible things take all of those calm-me-down drugs? Why are we forced to deal with their aggression and then have to medicate ourselves in order to face life? Why are we medicating ourselves so that we are all Nice and Calm and Submissive instead of just releasing our justifiable anger on to the perpetrators of these crimes?

I don’t know, but it’s another form of victimization our society makes us undergo.  These people rape us, we become “sick,” and they keep on living their lives—able to forget us, able to enjoy the things we only hope we’ll one day be able to endure.  How dare they, I scream.  How can they do this to us, as human beings?

Our lives are not just full of sadness.  They’re sad.  We’re sad.  And instead of receiving support, instead of our communities gathering around us, we get drugs and therapy.  We see people’s eyes shift, hear the timber of their voice rise.  They don’t want to know.  They don’t want to know us.  Our experiences define us.  Rapists’ actions seem to be something they once did, a sad reality we just have to deal with.  If we can’t cope—can’t suppress, rather—we’re wallowing, “bitter, angry, psycho etc. etc.,” or we can’t “leave the past where it belongs, get on with life.”

So society encourages “treatment.”  They tell us again and again that we’re sick and out of control.  We feel out of control, so we believe them.  We take their pills.  We undergo their therapy.  We drain our bank accounts, and we drain our energy, because the world doesn’t accommodate “broken” people.  We—we accommodate the rapists.

The rape never stops for us.

The rapists?  They’re free, the lot of them.  So many Andys, so many more victims.  Do you know of one who only hurt one of us, saw the error of his ways, and then stopped?  And yet the wise woman judge told me, “he sounded apologetic in the voicemail.”  All the restraining order asked was that he stay away from me and that he be forced to undergo a psychological evaluation.  Instead, I was denied the restraining order and told, “I hope you get some help.”

Why don’t our societies tell them the same?  Because our social structure is built by the same people who are committing these heinous acts?  Because people don’t like to think about the sick things people do?  Because people are afraid to face their own experiences as victims?  Because of ignorance or just plain stupidity?  All of the above, and so much more.

I want to make it stop—as badly as I wanted Andy to stop.

But the therapist and the drugs and so many, too many people tell us to stop thinking about these things and these reasons.  They scream, Stop it!  Shut up!  It’s too ugly!  Why would you want people to know this about you?

So, again, why?  What do all the collective reasons reduce to?

Society is more scared of the rape victim than it is of the rapist.

Related posts:

1. I Want to Stop Writing About What Happened to Me.
2. Torture and Time
3. Rape and Mothers and Altruism — Oh My!
4. Fractured
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*You know what’s sick is, I know better than that.  Of course I know mere penetration of that region qualifies as sodomy, but I just—I just need to minimize it, sometimes.  I told myself for so many years that what he did to me was no big deal, that now, I have a hard time believing it has any significance at all.  Can you see how convoluted my thinking is?!  How am I ever going to undo this Gordian knot?!  I’m not good enough.

God.  This is all because I didn’t want to break my mother’s heart.  I didn’t want her to know I had done this disgusting thing with a cousin.  Parentification reared its ugly head once more.  This time, it cost me my self-esteem.

My mother is the reason parents should be licensed.  I recently realized she should have never been allowed to raise children.  The ignorance made her endearing and dangerous all at once.  Even now, her explanations of reality to this little girl have constructed for me a crumbling foundation.  I’m only now beginning to realize just how fucked up my mother is.

I have to say, I’m frightened by what I’m finding.  Her cuts were subtle yet effective.  Speaking from experience, it’s been far easier to deal with the sexual assault I’ve endured than it has been to even broach the potential damage my mother has caused.  What do you get when you combine mother’s guilt trips with “all men are rapists” and “you must be a good daughter and wife”?  How do I begin to process the horror of what I’m suggesting?  My mother taught me to be a victim.

Oh, god, I feel disgusting.  I don’t want to get out of bed.  I feel so wrong.  I’m all wrong.  Who made me this way?  Who did this to me?  I’m trying to track it all back, but it just doesn’t end.  I am a culmination of every moment past and present.  Where do I trace it back to, when it’s tied to everything?  Everything that’s wrong led to me being like this: broken and disgusting.  I just happened to experience these exact turn of events, and each turn contributed to the mindset and environment that led me into the path of four rapists—four fucked up little boys.  God, I could die.  How do I get everybody to do the right thing?  I can’t.  So I just have to keep living knowing that there’s an enormous amount of suffering outside of me that is affecting me in ways of which I’m not even fully conscious.

When I think of it like that, I still don’t feel better.  In fact, I feel worse.  It means, nothing will ever be better, and I will never feel better, until something is done to make the suffering in this world a little less.  I can’t do that by myself.  Although, I suppose, I could still help.

I have to pause to laugh at myself.  Is there such a thing as a superwoman complex?  If there is—and I’m sure there must be something like it—I’ve got it.  The very idea that I could help save the world!  Jeez, I have to figure out whether that’s a good thing!  Sam says it isn’t, but I beg to differ.  Am I not seeing this clearly?  It’s so easy to argue that I want to save people because I wish I had been saved.

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Of course, that’s strictly going against doctor’s orders. She said she wanted me to taking a full milligram a day, every day, as long as I could stay awake on that much. But the minimum, she insisted, must be .5 mg. I can divide it up any way I want, but not taking it is not a choice.

So, I usually take .5 at night and spread two doses of .25 throughout the day. Today, I only took the .5. That was about twenty hours ago. I just hate medication. I wish I didn’t have to take any of it.

Ugh. I’m such a fool. I’m like a diabetic who won’t take her insulin, except instead of dying, I collapse.

I’m going to bed as soon as I post this, and I’m taking the .5 mg. This behavior, born of fear, is my enemy, an agent of the vicious depression that’s gripped my mind and won’t let go. The Clonazepam will circumvent all that, knock me out, and—most importantly—I won’t dream. That’s the good part. That’s the part I forgot until just now. I won’t dream. Oh, God! There’s nothing to be afraid of tonight! I’ll take the pill, and tomorrow, when I’ve slept, I’ll see how important it is to take my medication.

Or not, but I can’t deny, there’s something to be said for a pill.

Does my attitude and my need make me a pill-popper or a survivalist? I can’t tell. Can you?

Related posts:

1. Another Night.
2. Trying Too Hard
3. Torture and Time
4. Am I Really In That Much Pain?
5. The War with Yourself: Medication Fears