In aftermath of resurfaced memories, I feel a flood of emotions. I feel like the abuse is happening all the time, or like he is about to spring out from behind a couch and rape me. I feel like everyone secretly wants to hurt me. I am trying to learn how to remind myself that I am in the present, not the past, that I am no longer within his reach. At the same time, periods like this are important opportunities for me to discover what my hidden emotional realities as a child were like.
Here are some pieces I have found. I watched my father all the time, analyzing his every facial expression, body movement and tone of voice, attempting to discern when he would next rape me. There were certainly clues–he would touch me more and more around other people, in apparently innocent ways, but each hand on my shoulder hit me like the tremors that precede an enormous earthquake, like a secret code written in burning poison, like a flag planted in soil, announcing to everyone around that I would soon be shamed, conquered and broken.
I felt like we were continuously fighting a secret war. I could not acknowledge the violence–because he threatened to kill me, but more importantly because my primary way of keeping myself safe was by denying that it was happening. If I would have remembered as a child, I would have lost my mind. I would probably not be alive today. But part of me knew; part of me has always known. That part of me watched, and tried to keep myself safe. In our secret war, I was always trying to subtly influence and control my family, to avoid being alone with him, to avoid the situations that would result in him raping me yet again.
Of course, I couldn’t always be successful. And sometimes I surrendered. Sometimes the waiting, the anxious anticipation got so intense that it felt better to just get it over with. Then I would approach him and ask him to abuse me and in a way it would be a relief. At least I would be in control of when it happened; at least I no longer had to maintain a constant vigilance.
Another strategy that I attempted to use to keep myself safe was pretending that I wanted to have sex with my father. I pretended that he loved me; I pretended that I was in love with him. He encouraged this, at least sometimes or in some ways–telling me he loved me during the abuse, cuddling me or kissing me or touching me in romantic ways–but it was also impossible for me to maintain the illusion that we were a loving romantic couple because he would suddenly change. He would become angry, violent and intensely control, yelling and swearing and hitting me. The creeping corrosion, the poisonous flower of his love would instantly transform into a flurry of cutting blades, an unpredictable storm of anger like an enraged monkey in human skin.
Last night, I realized that all of this hidden history was happening at the same time as the life I have always been able to remember. It happened from the time I was five to when I was seventeen. From grade school all the way up through high school. Of course this is obvious in a way. But they have never seemed very connected to me; as I wrote in my last post, they felt like different worlds. There was always some overlap, some clues, some pollution. By the time, I was eight or nine, I knew that I did not want to be like my father when I grew up. I tried to be as little like him as possible. I had strange anxieties about sex.
But last night I really thought about it for the first time. All of these intense dynamics and impossible to navigate emotional dangers were happening at the same time as I was going to school and getting all As. They were happening at the same time that I was writing and sending off science fiction stories to magazine as a 7th grader. And at the same time that I wrote a novel in 8th grade (which is rather terrible, but I’m impressed that I just did it). They were happening at the same time that I took bike rides and built snow forts and played Genesis and looked under rocks for bugs. They were happening at the same time that I started dressing in black. They were happening at the same time that I acted in plays in high school (and I’m sure part of the reason I did so was to avoid being at home as much as possible). They were happening at the same time that I took the SAT and the ACT, at the same time that I started therapy because my mom found a drawing of a schoolchild writing “I hate myself” over and over on a blackboard. They were happening at the same time that I came out.
I managed to do all of that while being terrorized and tortured and lied to and manipulated and raped. This is tragic and painful and sad, but more than anything it makes me realize how intensely strong I am. How powerful my mind and soul and heart are. He tried to break me and he failed. Even the fact that I kept all of this hidden from everyone–from my teachers, from my friends, from my cousins and aunts and uncles, from my therapist, from myself–is evidence of a deep and intense power. That power might have been misguided, turned in a way opposite from the direction I need to grow now, but the intention behind it was to protect me, to keep me safe. The more I can learn how to be safe in other ways, the more I can turn that enormous strength in new directions and unleash my will and my love in the service of magickal healing transformation. So mote it be.
Tags: memory
