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?
I’ve been thinking about this, a suggestion a commenter made a few days ago.
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.