8 Days (Warning - darkness ahead.)

I am going to start by saying something I rarely say. I am angry. Anger is not usually my response to life. Anger was never allowed. My mother was the angry one in the family. She had legitimate reasons to be angry, and she often expressed her anger openly and loudly. I was the good quiet gifted obedient child. My older brother got in trouble a lot. He was average. He disobeyed. I was the good quiet gifted obedient child. My father was the jolly one. He was gregarious and a leader at work and at church. He was also a fundmentalist Christianity obsessed pedophile and my pimp. I was the good quiet gifted obedient child. Anger was not allowed. Expressing anything but acceptance made bad stuff worse. Above all, anger was a huge failure to be the good quiet gifted obedient child.

I am angry. I have felt sadness, grief, loss, terror, and despair over the years. I have felt broken and faulty and insane. I have doubted, denied, disguised, and disavowed my own truth… and my own worth. In all of this, there has been extraordinarily little room for rage. I have whacked the obligatory cushions with a tennis racquet in gestalt therapy — hurled metal folding chairs against a wall in psychodrama — sobbed and roared in controlled settings. But overall, anger had not been my baseline. Anger terrifies me. Expressing it aloud seems dangerous, and fixes nothing. Raging about something just makes it scarier and more disturbing… and drags everyone within earshot into the slimy goo.

I am angry. For some reason, awareness is coming to me in waves right now — not really flashbacks, but more like enhanced memories. I am getting progressively more agoraphobic (COVID19 did not help) and am having a more difficult time being patient with and nice to people. My aha moment a while back was that maybe it is because I was forced to be nice to so many people who were giving me pain. I was forced to be good — to be quiet — to be obedient. I don’t want to be nice anymore. I don’t want to be good. I don’t want to be quiet. I want to speak — and I really have no place to go with it. The fact I am writing things this intimate for strangers bears witness to the fact I have no appropriate outlet for telling my story. The story is too ugly — too repulsive — too graphic — to talk about. It is just too much shit to share.

 

 I am angry. I am more than angry. I am furious, irate, and bitter… enraged and outraged. I once watched a movie called “8 Days,” and it was dreadful in every way. It was not a movie I would have even considered watching under normal circumstances. The writing, acting and directing were atrocious. It was based on a true story about a sweet naive 16-year-old girl who was kidnapped and used as a sex slave for 8 days. In that time, she was drugged and forced to have sex with over 50 men. There was nothing redeeming in this movie except that in the end — she was rescued and went on to become an advocate for those trapped in the nightmare of sex slavery. As I viewed this horrible film, I kept saying “This sucks — why do you keep watching?” It was like a house fire or a car wreck that you just can’t pull your eyes away from. It started with young children being abducted — children the age I was when the incest and rapes started. I’m not going to give details — other than to say NEVER watch this movie. It did not explicitly show things happening, but it was explicit, nevertheless. There was no missing the message. And in the middle of watching — I was hit with the appalling realization that what happened to me was a lot like being sex trafficked. I don’t think there was money involved — I think it was more about my father currying favor from family, church leaders, and colleagues in the business world, as well as his own perverse pleasure. I will never know for sure — at least not in this lifetime. I only know that it was not orchestrated by strangers making a financial transaction, but by someone who was supposed to love and care for me. The girl in the movie had parents and people in the community that moved heaven and hell to rescue her. I had no one… no one at all. It is hard to imagine a worse kind of betrayal.

A friend of mine whose wisdom I highly value once compared what happened to me with what happened to Jews in Auschwitz. It was a shocking statement. I would never have made that analogy — particularly not with someone like my friend; a Jew with grandparents and other family who died in concentration camps. My kneejerk reaction was no — it was nothing like that. I had a roof over my head, food, clothing, much more than the basic needs of life. It was not nearly that bad. But the truth is, his words, as outrageous as they seemed, were some of the most affirming I have ever heard about the nightmare that was my life. I think that might be part of why my painstakingly constructed cocoon is bursting open….

Now part of me just wants to shout, “I was tortured for more than 15 years. Not 8 horrifying days, but 15 YEARS. My self-esteem was devastated. My belief in a loving Father God was shattered; my concept of Divinity poisoned and twisted. Any childlike hope for the future was obliterated. Any thought that the world would ever be a safe place for me was destroyed. I was violently robbed of the ability to fully trust anyone ever again.

I AM ANGRY! I want to tell my story in detail — something I have never really done. I want to write a book — make a movie — write a play — share it on my blog and on Facebook and let the whole world know who my father was — what I survived — why I am the way I am. And of course — I will do none of these things because I no longer live in a psychiatric facility, and this is the real world. I have a family and friends and responsibilities, and it just can’t be like that. I am never going to have a safe and appropriate place to puke this all out. I have to keep the secrets… and move on.

I talked a little bit to another friend after watching “8 Days” because I thought my head was going to explode. I didn’t give her much detail — but I did tell her I was angry. She knows bits and pieces of my story and has suffered her own abuse. Her thought was that maybe the anger was good — maybe it would help me move through things and let go. I don’t know. Right now it just seems like another hurdle to normalcy (like I have any idea what normalcy is…). I just want to keep my head above water and to not let the rage make me into a person who walks carelessly in the world.

I am a survivor. I am still here. I have been strong, despite everything. It’s not easy for me to say those words. I can’t stop hearing the voice in my head that says, “If you’re so fucking strong, why haven’t you done more with your life?” And yet there is a part of me that knows there was a little girl who kept breathing when she just wanted to stop — who kept being kind when kindness was not modeled to her. She managed to not be annihilated by so many years of violence. She somehow managed to grow into a gentle, loving and compassionate adult. Maybe, just maybe, this is enough. Maybe this is what being a successful survivor looks like. Maybe it’s time to take a breath — and just be.