Thursday, July 28, 2005

My Scars


Picking blackberries with Elisabeth left countless scratches on my right forearm, puffed up and blush red. Seeing them by morning sunlight, I heard the echoes of an old familiar voice, as though it came from outside me.

My left arm is a color-faded comparison to my right one. It bears the scars of teenage years spent as a "cutter." I took inexplicable pleasure in the sensation of razor searing flesh, the red gush of my life blood, my low-riding baseball hat shading away sleepless nights, safe long sleeves covering up my telltale secret.

Sexual abuse is the top-most found factor in cutting

When I was young, pain was my choice, because when I was even younger, it was what I knew. From toddlerhood, my feelings and perceptions were stuffed down and stomped on because nobody in my life knew the better. My primary abuser abused my secondary abuser who in turn abused me...all but unknowingly.

I don't know when my abuse started, and I don't know when it stopped. In some ways, I guess it hasn't stopped yet. To my knowledge, I spent twenty one years ignorant as to the cause of my deepest pain, and the subsequent five reliving it. Now, suddenly, my journey feels close to complete.

Abuse is common. When I was coming into awareness of mine, it never really helped to hear that. It only caused me to compare myself to other survivors, which led to worry and self-doubt. How is cousin C--- married when I can't even keep a boyfriend? Why has A--- having dinner with her brother when I am sick to think of ----? I've reconciled this through realizing that yes, many are abused...but ONLY I experienced MY abuse, and ONLY I experienced MY LIFE in the wake of that abuse. I AM alone in MY OWN story. Once I granted myself the space to react and work through my grief, then I began to take some comfort in the knowledge that I'm not alone.

Perhaps we're all abused as children. It is nearly impossible to avoid boundary violations before one's boundaries have been set, and children have much to learn before knowing where to set theirs. Violations can happen in retrospect...what you did was not okay is valid even when primary rules were not set. Adults are to help children keep reasonable boundaries until their Beings become defined. Yet few adults have learned proper techniques for their own selves. Thus the cycle repeats without end...

My scars won't ever fade to non-existance...not the ones that I carved into my body, and not the ones inflicted on my psyche by some very sick individuals in my past. But I refuse to be identified soley by them. I have lost the need to tell my story to every ear that turns my way. I am indeed a survivor, but I am no longer a victim.

Meanwhile, my wish is for other friends to do the same: to realize that they are not defined by their experience. To take ownsership of their presents and futures. It's my challenge to wait patiently while others find their own healing path, and to realize that theirs is not mine.

Truisms I have heard that resonate now:
"I chose not to let myself be defined by the wrongs that have come to me. I decided I didn't want it to be my life."
-md, librarian, incest survivor

"Everytime you act out or abuse drugs, your abuser is winning. Its the same part of you that he hurt, which wants to keep you down now."
-uncle bf

"First things first."
-AA

"One day at a time."
-AA

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