Trigger. I have just written the following passage to try and get some of the anguish I'm going through out of my head. I haven't edited it or read it. I talk about suicidal ideation but I guarantee I will not do that. I have my child to stay here for. I apologise if it makes no sense.
I don't know where I am at the moment. So much has been going on and so many things have changed.
I can't tell how I feel, I feel everything and nothing.
I have returned to work after 5 years out doing hterapy, finally someone offered me a job and the sheer bliss of working with people who knew nothing about me and just took me for who I am has been unreal in such a positive way. It wasn't a perfect environment but it was an environment where I was just me, in my role. I did the work and chatted away, I was just me.
Roll on a few weeks and I don't know what's happened. Well that's a lie, I do know what's happened. Reality bit and she's bitten hard.
I know this is how my life is meant to be, I know when I live in a small town rural area and have a gagging order from a well known business person that this is how my life is meant to be.
I'm so sad and angry.
I spent five years doing therapy not to kill myself, I'm fighting an internal battle against all the conditioning of self hate and loathing I endured during my childhood, all the ghosts of the negativity I caused in the adults around. All the failures of not being good enough, of not being what they wanted me to be. Of being the wrong child, the personality, the one who could never get anything right, could never be right, could never give the adults around me what I thought they wanted.
I fought to beat that and when I reached out for help, no one connected, again. Like when I was a child. I open my mouth and tell my story and there's nothing there in the people whose ears I try to reach. I fail again, I fail to make you hear me. Something about me closes you to me and you don't see me, you don't hear what I'm telling you.
I didn't imagine this would happen. I didn't imagine when I told people that it would set me apart, the first time in my life I'm not running anymore and I want to build my life, to be accepted and I'm still outside.
I fight daily between what I what from life which I see other people achieving and what I actually get. I get that the majority of people are groomed to belive people like me are wrong and hateful. I get that.
But I want to scream I was a CHILD.
I was a child and I went through hell and you failed me.
You didn't see the abuse.
You told me off for not wearing a uniform and gave me detention when the reality was I wasn't given a uniform by my parents. I wasn't allowed a uniform and you you punished me for it. You held me back in school to care for my sibling and you punished me for not behaving properly, you denied me an education to care for my sibling and punished me when I found the work too easy. I wasn't a teacher, it wasn't my job to teach my sibling. It was yours and you left it to a CHILD.
Or how about the police, how about the nights I slept in the office in police station whilst you took photographs of the beatings my mother sustained whilst my step father screamed down the hallway how he was going to fucking kill her. Of the nights you would all turn up to take him away for breach of the peace and you'd look at me staring out of the window, you'd comment there was a child in there and you did NOTHING.
Or the judge, the judge who told my mother she had provoked my step father into hitting her, just another judge in line of judges from the south coast of england to the heart of scotland who told my mother and his wife before that the broken arms and broken faces they suffered were because they had provoked him.
All I can see now is the night I was in the kitchen with him and my step siblings and he flipped into a rage, smashing his own childs head into the oven.
That's what I'm fighting against, that level of violence, that the community and society around us told us was our fault.
Of nights running away and sleeping on strangers sofas because my mother was too scared to go.
Of the night I tried to escape by taking an overdose, of having a tube shoved down my throat, my stomach pumped and in the morning being taken back home.
I learnt from that. I learnt no one would help, no one sees, so I left myself. Mentally, physically I left myself. I woke up and I drank, I took pills, I slept where I fell and I overdosed more times than I care to remember but it never worked. I couldn't even do that properly.
I was a piece of meat, a thing for who ever to sleep with and I don't remember because I drank.
I had no out.
And now, now I'm older and people tell me that I was abused, that that was rape, sexual violence, trauma, wrong.
And you turn your back again, you blame me for being wrong, for not being of the right character, for being........... I don't know.
I don't know why other survivors are more succesful. I don't know why I keep meeting people who blame me for what happened.
Maybe I do know why but that thought scares me and isn't one I'm mentally in a place to process at the moment.
All I can do at the moment is try to stop my brain wigging out with escape plans and fantasy. Of dreams of living in world where people help and support survivors to bring the perpetrators to justice and stop more child being abused.
It isn't going to happen, we live in a country where children are raped and abused and the system still fails. The reality is grim.
I don't have an out.
And now, now I'm in a situation where I have told people before and they reacted badly, they bullied me then put a media gag on me and continued to harass me in my home through rumours and fear and their desire to make it with the celebrities.
But I took a pro active approach with my new job and told them. Telling strangers you are a CSA survivor is the hardest thing to do, especially when they have no experience of it but they know what you mean. Seeing two strangers one with tears in their eyes and the other closed off and thinking inwardly is tough. It's tough to look them in the eye. When they sit around chatting about their own kids and go inwardly quiet when they look at you, when they show their distress for you on their face.
When you know that you can't say too much for fear of ........... scaring them, one word too much and their brain will close off, they are not in a position where their life allows them to think of it.
But maybe I have on hope, one who does actually see me, who maybe won't close the door....
and I'm scared in case I'm wrong.
