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

I don’t destroy everything I touch.

It’s surprising how difficult that is to accept.  In essence, I’m suggesting I’m not as worthless as I once thought myself to be.  I might even be—gasp—trustworthy?  As I look at my Christmas tree and the little buddha statues beneath it, as I comfort my cat with coos, as I express myself here openly and without shame, as I dedicate my time and my patience to myself, I submit to the evidence: I’ve already reached the goal I set out years ago to reach.

I’m stuttering, very nearly afraid it might not be true.  But there the words are, located somewhere between my breath and my mind:

I’m at peace.

It’s happening more and more often.  I woke this morning to feelings of anxiety and uncertainty, but a few hours later, I feel so normal.  There’s a whisper of bad thoughts somewhere near my ear, but I’m not listening.  Every hour or so, my heart strikes an arhythmic note, palpitates, then settles.  But panic attacks, ladies and gentlemen?  Count them with me: one.

I could laugh or cry or both, but it doesn’t matter, because I know it’ll pass.  I’m in my own head—and, on this rare occasion, that doesn’t feel like a life sentence.

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4. Freewriting: Madness
5. Another Night.

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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3. I Want to Stop Writing About What Happened to Me.
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My fears convince each other.  I’m exactly where I began: debating myself.  I just want an answer: what should I do?  No one can tell me.  They don’t seem to have the answer for themselves, but they aren’t sinking like I am.  They seem to have grasped onto self-denial.  I need an idea that’ll float better.  Or is self-denial really to be my saver?!  If it is, I have to wonder if I wouldn’t rather sink to the depths of this depression.

The problem—and this is where my psychiatrists and I have always differed until now—is I want do more than just survive, but I need help.  When I’m not on these drugs, I’m passionate and alive.  I make lousy choices, but at least I feel powerful.  I float.  I have fun.

For a time, I have fun.  An irony of being on medication for me, the reality of mania: I feel my best when I’m completely unmedicated—not even on Lexapro.  During those med-free days, I didn’t want anything to ease me.  I was indulging my mania, letting it kill me with anorexia and burn out.  My body had me pumped so full of adrenaline and seratonin, I was literally naturally high. I was doing so much, I would often break into a run to be late to the next responsibility on the list that day.  I had no time to do anything more than lie.  I seemed to be lying my way through my days, waiting, screaming silently, for someone to notice.

I felt myself crashing even as many told me I appeared to them to be a happy floater.  What they were actually seeing was my attempt to run from the screams inside my head.  I would dance ecstatically until I would literally near collapse.  I would feel myself dying inside.  I’d excuse myself to the bathroom, dry heave, and return to the bar and my acquaintances: sad, scared girls and horny boy-men laughing hysterically over lies.  I often danced by myself, leaving my friends to their devices, so some strange man could grope me and make me feel wanted.  I was a smart girl who did dumb things to distract myself from the insanity happening in my brain.  My bed became my enemy.  Sleep has never been the same.  My body aches and my head hurts from the deprivation.  It drives me to tears sometimes.  More often, it drives people away.  No one wants to be around a sad girl.

—Oh!  I guess I am in that much pain.

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5. Freewriting Panic Attack: Waking Nightmares

Because it isn’t. I know it isn’t. They can lie to me all they want, the doctors and the therapists. They bullshit me with stories about breathing through it and visualizing my way through this. There is no breathing that can stop this from killing me. There is no visual I can conjure, I can imagine, that will make this feeling okay. This is hell, and they think I’m just being dramatic.

The drama queen. That’s what my sister’s always called me. Fuck her. Fuck her for making me feel like this is something I do. The last time I cried in front of her, she told me flatly to cut it out. She intimated I was acting.

My friends used to say the same thing. “You just want attention.” Did they ever consider that I was socially awkward? That I didn’t understand their culture or their minds? I don’t watch MTV. I don’t listen to music—like you do. I read. I read books. I like being in my head, just like you do, but my thing is different: it’s words. Is that so bad? I feel okay when I’m surrounded by them. I’m in control.

It’s the only time I feel in control.

Can you see by how much I write how out of control I feel? How many words must be on this site? How many more are there on my shelves and in my journals? Out of the corner of my eyes, everywhere, always, there’s books. I’m an editorial assistant at a textbook publishing company, for christ’s sake. I help make books. That’s my life. Do you see how stringless I feel? I’m a puppet, slumped on the floor. Everyone else seems to be dancing, safe on their strings. They dance along with the rest of the world. In turn, they all dance around me. They ask me, “why don’t you dance?” I tell them, “I have no strings to hold me up.” They tell me I’m lying. They have disdain for me because I’m not dancing. They tell me, in no uncertain terms, it’s my fault. But I want to dance. I would love to dance. I like music. I like moving. I just can’t. I’m watching the whole world move. I manage a few steps. But it’s still not good enough. “You’re so slow, Lucy.” “You’re todo alrebe.” My mother, telling me every day I’m “all backwards.” Abnormal. And not to trust men. My mother taught me to fear men. I wonder sometimes, what happened to her, that she had such a fear. She would tell my sisters and me, “Don’t let your father kiss you on the lips. It’s wrong. A father shouldn’t kiss his girls that way.” A common Hispanic custom, but my mother made it sound so dirty. I wondered for years if that was ever his intention. Now, I’m starting to think on the man I feared and the woman I adored and pitied. I fell deep into my mother’s manipulations even as I thought I was fighting against them. I survived my mother before I ever survived rape.

This is never going to go away. I know it because I’ve done all the right things. I’ve committed myself to healing. Even as I rage against it, I’m committed to get better, to improving through self-awareness and, thereby, self-respect and self-love. But this madness will always take me places in my head I don’t want to go. In my darkest moments, the entire human race, including myself, is disgusting vermin, locusts on the world and ourselves. Do you know what the acceptance of that idea, of the realization of my own worthlessness in light of the knowledge that the mind is designed to justify its own actions at all costs to protect itself, what that does to you? Every reason I think of to argue against my own worthlessness is just my mind trying to justify its sick ineptitude.

That can go on for hours, days, weeks. It once went on for about a year. I held myself together by sheer willpower. And I had no one to talk to. I had no one to depend on. My family? They only make me sicker, with their judgments and their third world mentality. They could drive a person to kill themselves. In fact, they almost have—on several occasions. And no, not me. People talk to me. Family members talk to me, always in secret, always in private, even as they disrespect me. But no one will admit it to themselves or the other. No. It’s all just normal. It’s all just Mom being nuts, and me being—what did my sister call me? Reina. On her wedding day, after she had hurt someone’s feelings, everyone knew it, and I spoke up about it to her. She called me a queen. The implications were that I was self-righteous and demanding. I laughed. What was I supposed to do?

I’m always speaking up to them. God. I don’t know why. It never helps. They never listen. I’m “banal,” Leo once wrote about me. I was cleaning our bedroom in the Garfield house, and I found a piece of paper. That was on the first line. I was young, so I had to look it up.

No, I was alone, but I held it together. I can at least say that for myself.

It doesn’t help. I’m alone, and I just want someone to lean on, to help.

But instead, nothing to be gotten from them. No help. They’re all sick. We’re all sick, but no one will admit it.

But me, among the six of us.

My entire life, I’ve felt so fucking alone. I know it’s not uncommon. I know everyone feels that way. There’s pop songs about it. But this is different. This isn’t a pop song. This is nothing anyone would put a voice to, except to scream. God, do I want to scream. I could cry, it’s so deep inside me.

And nothing, nothing will ever get this out.

I’m not strong enough. I’m not. I’m just a little girl. Don’t you see? I’m just pretending. I don’t want attention. I just want help. I just want someone to give me a hand, to tell me it’s going to be okay. Don’t you see? Don’t you see me? I know I’m small, but try. Try.

I do.

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5. Freewriting Panic Attack: A Masturbatory Act, A Big Step

The human mind can weave a lie too logical to be easily contested, including by its inventor. It’s why I’m always questioning, always searching. It’s why I’ll never run out of writing topics: I see myself as always already gone. A game of hide-and-seek with ghosts. I follow them all day. Here is where I try to catch them, on this page.

So I guess it isn’t enabling. I’m not the only one giving. You’re giving, too. When you read me, when you email me, when you tell me your problems in the secret ways that you do, you’re giving back to me. When you lean on me, trust me, you’re giving back to me. The symbiosis is spinning the love and empathy I easily have for you into the self-love I struggle to give myself.

Or like we’re twirling to the same rapid, jazzy tune. At some point, we’re each going to hold up the other.

So keep talking to me.

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