I AM PISSED

I don't even know how to express the unbridled anger I feel right now.

I am so upset I'm not even sure how to react.

I was broadsided today with a consequence of breaking part of the contract A put together for me to stay safe over the weekend. I cut, which I told her I didn't think I was strong enough to keep from doing, but I signed the contract anyway.

Basically, if I cut myself again, I'm going to have to pursue alternative/more intensive avenues of therapy since she's obviously not meeting my needs enough with us meeting once a week and with the work we have been doing. Translation, if you cut yourself again, you are also cutting our relationship.

I don't even have words to describe what I am feeling right now. I never realized I could be so angry with her.

You Can't Hide

Some days I feel so care free, I wonder if I imagined the terror of the last 2 years, or the abuse itself.

I'm not really sure what God wants me to take from today.

A parent of one of my students sent me an e-mail asking me to call her. She had something she needed to get my advice on but didn't want to discuss it via e-mail. I've known this woman for 4 years, as I had her older son in 2006. She subs for me on occasion so we've built a pretty advanced relationship for a teacher/parent. I wasn't really sure what she wanted to talk to me about, but was surprised when she told me she was concerned about one of the teachers in our department. Her son has this teacher and has said throughout the year that this teacher makes him really uncomfortable. Last weekend while at church her son and a bunch of his friends (who also go to my school) were talking about how he's always rubbing their backs, and calling them by little pet names and how it creeps them out. She said that her older son said the same thing when he was there, too, but she didn't really think too much about it because she thought it was just her son being over-sensitive.

The whole time I was thinking "Everything she is saying sounds exactly like what M used to do to me."

I could tell she was struggling with how to handle it as a mom, to go directly to the teacher (awkward) or to the administration (awkward again, but how do you make it non-accusational since he hasn't done anything and ensure that her son isn't singled out). She was trying to convince herself that it wasn't anything, that she was the one overreacting...

"He's married right? Not that it matters, but maybe it does."

All the while I'm thinking "Yeah. M was married... and had kids... and was friends with my entire family. It doesn't matter at all. That's what most of them are good at."

"It just takes one vulnerable kid in the wrong place at the right time."

"Yeah, tell me about it."

"It's probably nothing, but it has really been bothering me and I needed to talk to someone about it and see how I should proceed."

"Man, I wish my mom would have listened to me when I told her how uncomfortable M made me feel when he was always touching me."

I was able to stay composed and (hopefully) helpful in the conversation and we came up with a solution. I will be talking to our male assistant principal Monday in order to maintain confidentiality (and keep her son safe from being singled out). This way, the conversation with this other teacher can be male-to-male and with as few people knowing as possible.

How in the world is this happening in now seeping into my professional life? Can I not hide from it ever? Do I constantly have to be reminded of the fact that I was vulnerable? That no one listened to me? I am upset. I am confused. I am not feeling care-free anymore.

I Can't Be Myself

It's your fault they found you.

It's your fault that you weren't careful enough.

Last night I sat down to work a bit on my homework. I just felt pulled to my computer to begin this letter to myself. I tried to remember what exactly the goal was and tried to logically think my way through the many aspects of my life that longed to be on the page in front of me. After going that route for a while, I erased it all. This letter is not supposed to be logical and precise. It is supposed to be from the heart. I was using the wrong organ (muscle? is the brain considered a muscle?). I thought of everything that hurt me, from birth to high school, all involving some aspect of my parents inaction/neglect as well as the abuse. I don't know how many times I wrote the phrase "I'm sorry" to myself. It's a lot. But still not as many times as I should have heard it from my parents. No, there aren't enough of those in the world.

Confusion

***Trigger Warning***

I've been thinking a lot lately about my abuse.

It started off just reflecting on my year, realizing how far I have come from this time last year. I hadn't even disclosed my abuse to A a year ago. I didn't even think I could talk about it. I was so afraid. The pain was so fresh. That pain has dulled a lot over the past 12 months, for which I am eternally grateful. I can't imagine being in that much pain all the time.

But with the dulling of the pain has brought forth some confusion. I can think about my abuse and be hurt that it happened, but the pain isn't there with it. I don't know how to think about my abuse without having that sharp pain of betrayal, anger, disgust, etc stabbing at me. I almost feel like I am past the point of being "allowed" to let it bother me anymore. Or more so, let it affect my life anymore.

I was reading through some of my fellow bloggers posts and it has become more and more apparent that these women were subjected to long-term sexual abuse and rape. I was not. I was abused once. In my readings, I came across an anonymous comment someone had left about not knowing what it was like to be sexually abused, except maybe if you counted being "genitally probed" by her neighbors son as a teenager, under a blanket while watching a movie with their families.

I don't know what to do with that. It really hurt to read that comment because it was so brushed off... like, oh I don't even classify that as abuse, just something that I wish didn't happen but I'll survive. It really angered me and I only was abused once. I didn't incur daily or even weekly abuse. I didn't have to hide when I heard footsteps. So why is my view of this experience so much different than this anonymous poster?

I have spent the last two years of my life in freefall trying to recover from the acknowledgement of the abuse even happening, how it affected my life as I lived in denial, how to change my perceptions of men and start to trust people. Especially now that the pain has dulled, I feel like I made a huge deal out of something that wasn't. I mean, this person doesn't even view their experience as abuse. Is it different because the boy was her age? Is it different to me because my abuser was 40 years older than me?

I have been spending a lot of my time lately just trying to gain some perspective on everything and I am not getting anywhere. I am very confused.

Can I do this?

I am so afraid. The path I have traveled over the past two years has led me on all sorts of twists and turns, stops and starts, climbs and falls and I have ended up here. At the edge of a place I never thought I'd be, a place I never really planned on being, but yet my steps have lead me here.

I feel so alone. I'm on the edge of a confrontation that breaks all my rules. You can't possibly love and be faithful to God and have such anger towards Him. Or even if you do, you don't dare admit it. You become the fake person who pretends that everything is OK, but live in constant fear that your secret will be revealed.

Every ounce of me is trying to pull myself from the edge. It just seems too dangerous.

And so starts the crazy!

Work is picking up quickly. Lovely.

The weekend was full of some lingering anxiety of beginning a new year. Like I wrote before, the fall has been a very hard time for me in the past and I am worried of a repeat performance. My mind has been drawn to cutting a lot more than it has in the past, which just gives me one more thing to try and keep under wraps.

Today in session we talked more about what exactly my fears are of this fall season. My habit is to take my past experiences and use them as the foundation of future experiences without taking into account the fact that the situations might be completely different. In my case, I have been working HARD for about 9 months now on my healing, when before I was pushed so far back in denial. Basically it was just a forum for me to recognize the steps I have taken and the differences in myself now as opposed to a year ago. So often I forget about the actions I have taken to improve things in my life and focus so much on the things I cannot change. It just takes a little reminder sometimes.

I wanted to bring up the fact that I had noticed myself becoming angry with things that didn't nomally make me angry before. I felt like this was a subtle change in my personal balance with things, and I wasn't really sure what it meant, nor was I really sure how to react to it. We discussed a situation I gave her as an example, how I would have reacted before, and how I reacted in the present. We pulled apart the actions and thought processes in each time frame and talked about the hidden messages I was sending myself in how I chose to react. While anger may not be the right emotion for that situation, the anger is telling me something . Oddly enough, it's telling me that I am realizing that I want to be able to set boundaries with people. I'm not angry at that person for approaching me and expecting me to do what I always do, I'm angry at myself for not having the boundary to begin with.

Apparently that is a huge deal to reach this "step".

People who are sexually abused (especially as children) have a very skewed and misguided sense of boundaries. You are taught, shown, whatever verb fits that you have no personal boundaries; that someone can take from you whatever they want. A lot of the times, you don't even feel like you deserve to set boundaries. Either way, realizing that I just might have the right to want boundaries in my life is huge. I'm not sure how to set them, or what to do with them, but apparently I want them. Now all I have to do is learn how to set them.

Initially I didn't see the big deal in reacting in anger towards someone else. I saw it is a bad thing. Anger = bad. But as we were talking about the effect it has on me, I started to see that maybe I am changing for the better.

Angry

So, as I previously posted last week, I met with my boss to discuss my absences and was second guessing that choice because of her reaction. For purposes of self-preservation I made the choice to move as many appointments as possible so that I wouldn't miss work. In all honesty I scheduled a couple during work to allow me a break every 4 weeks or so. I told her I changed almost all of my appointments (with the exception of two that really couldn't be changed) and she was grateful that I did that.

Fast forward to today. She stopped me in the office and asked if I was going to a seminar after work (optional) that we have once every 10 weeks or so. I told her that I already talked to my department head about it, that Tuesday's won't ever work because I have other engagements that can't be changed. So she proceeds to ask me what I do during that time. I'm sorry.. it's my personal time and it's off-contract. I could be pole-dancing and you can have no say in it. Anyway, I told her that I have medical appointments (vague enough?) from 5:30-6:30 and rehearsal from 7-9. In a nutshell she basically told me that what was happening after work was important and that I needed to reschedule those appointments when something like this comes up. She then proceeded to tell me that I shouldn't ever respond that "I can't EVER do that" but that I should be open to possibly changing my schedule in order to be able to participate in something that will help me.

I was so pissed. That woman really has no clue.