I remember lying to myself about my childhood. I remember looking back in retrospect and saying it was didn’t difficult and it didn’t hurt.
I remember the stimulus that prompted that lie. It was the opening lines to the book, Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. The line that read along the lines: “I had a difficult childhood. All worthwhile childhoods are.”
And I know why I needed to tell myself the lie at that time and in that space.
I remember the stimulus that started me on the journey towards accepting the fact that I was abused as a child. It was a lyric in one of the songs in the Evelyn Evelyn album by Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley. In fact it was that entire album that was the final catalyst that has begun this healing process.
To be honest, I have no idea what I am doing. Whether I am healing. I am doing my best to face the right direction. But sometimes I wonder. There is so much pain, so much hurt, so much emotional weight.
Sometimes I wonder if I am losing my mind. I have kept secrets about what went down in my childhood so efficiently, so dutifully, that I have even kept them secret from myself, but every now and then a secret comes out, memories resurface.
Those memories hurt and sting.
I wish that I could just lump a label on my abusers and what went on and dump all of the experience. But sadly they are too big a part of me and too much of my life has been about keeping score to be easily able to let go.
I sometimes wonder if I am desperately clinging onto things that hurt me on purpose. I don’t think so. I think it is a conditioned reflex. One that I am working at changing.
The thing is there is no easy label to say what happened, although I suppose there is: abuse. But of course, the word abuse is like the word love, it has too many different meanings to actually be meaningful. Everyone who has been abused has stories that are depressingly similiar and yet completely different – I suppose that is the human condition.
I am rambling, but I just am letting these things out. Releasing some of the demons from my past – confronting them. Recognizing them for what they are.
They do not have power over me. But they do hurt.
But time will hopefully form scabs if it does not heal these wounds, which part of me thinks will never happen.
I guess the thing that gets to me is when people tell me to let go of the abuse – that it is in the past. Because it is not actually, a number of the abusive patterns and behaviors are still in the present and they still hurt like hell when they are inflicted.
I think in some ways they hurt more now as an adult than as a child.
Rage Against The Black Dog 