I don’t know, and I’m not paralyzingly afraid to admit that.

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?