Tag-Archive for » self-loathing «

I don’t know how to grieve.

There aren’t many days left of this, are there?  The loss will subside sooner rather than later?  Because I think I’ve been through enough.  I think the molestation, and the rapes, and the abortion, and the years of emotional abuse, and the frequent panic attacks, and the palpitations, and the social ineptitude, and the  last half decade of trying, trying as hard as I can to keep it together and going, to improve myself has been enough.

How much longer can I endure?

Sam and I cleaned the house yesterday in hopes the grief would fleck off like the dust.  Maybe it worked for him; I still feel a fist reaching into my abdomen, up my chest cavity, grasping my bloody heart.  Nothing is stopping the crying these past two weeks.  I think of the day, if this keeps up, when I’ll become as adept at hiding my tears as I am at hiding my twitches.

It started around the same time I stayed home with the flu, two weeks ago.  Maybe it was the rare time to myself to think or one of my delirious fever dreams, but it occurred to me, just as Sam will never again be the person he was around Sang, I will never again be the person I was around Sang.

Even now, I’m crying uncontrollably, nervous I’ll be caught falling apart.  Two months later, the loss, formerly a seeming leech at my back, has begun to resemble an autoimmune disease cannibalizing me.  My palpitations are its gnashing at my heart between meals.

Sam is the only person with the patience to deal with me in this state.  It may be my ravaged self-esteem, but I haven’t felt I can trust anyone else for some time now, and no one’s pushed hard enough for me to feel they really want me to budge.  So, here I am, alone with my cat and Sam, and I’m comfortable, if nothing else.  I don’t think I have the strength to make it another day, but I don’t seem to have a choice.  That seems to be a theme in my life: I have no choice.  No one does, actually.

What’s all my crying worth in the end if I recognize everyone is suffering?  The agreement of existence is to keep enduring the suffering for the chance of reward, right?  It’s a blatantly Judeo-Christian approach to life, but what else do I have to focus on as I go forward?  Why else take this shit if I’m not going to stop hurting so goddam much one day?  Why do others?

Fuck fuck fuck.  I want to scream it, but I won’t.  I can’t.  Mom said that if I scream too loud, I’ll burst the little box inside my throat that holds my voice, and then I won’t be able to speak at all.  I’ll have to make noise with the stuff around me to call her attention, but there won’t always be things around, especially if I fall and can’t get up.  So, there will be times when I’ll need her, but she won’t know and I won’t be able to tell her, because I screamed, so I’ll die.  And then she’ll die from the grief.  So, I don’t scream. If I scream, I’ll cry, and then she’ll give me something to cry about.

There’s never enough to cry about.  The random circumstances that comprise existence demand more tears than the daily flashbacks, and the constant nausea, and the shaky hands, and the medication that never quite works, and the insomnia, and the sexual dysfunctions, and the self-loathing produce.  With every new strike, I become increasingly convinced, Life won’t stop until I’m dead.

For over a year, I haven’t had the guts to ask my boyfriend to role play raping me.

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.