August 21, 2010

• The Scars You Can’t See

  **Warning: this post may be hard to read**

  Everyone who’s older than me by more than a few years constantly tell me that I’m just a baby because I’m so young. I strongly disagree with that sentiment.

  I have scars that you can’t see. I have scars that you CAN see. These scars on my skin remind me of my life. A daily reminder of everything I’ve endured. The ones that you can’t see are the ones on my heart. Those are the ones that hurt the most. My metaphorical heart is so jabbed and torn and shredded and pieced together it’s hard to tell that it’s a heart. That does not mean that it’s a cold heart.

  Everyone’s had their heart broken a few times. But a whole lifetime of it? That’s something else entirely. It’s something that’s hard to come away from whole. Impossible, actually.

  I was 1 when my parents separated. 3 when the divorce was finalized. I lived with my father. My mother moved all the time, a literal gypsy. She moved more than we did. She lived with various men, who supported her. Cocaine was her favorite drug. She would tell me she would pick me up. She promised. I waited by the window. Watching for her. Waited for hours. She never came. Ever. How many times does a promise need to be broken until the hope dies? Still, I cried every time.

  My dad and my mom’s former best friend started dating. They did heroin. I was largely forgotten, left to my own devices. Shady people were over all the time. They had parties that would last all night. It was these times that I was molested. I grew up wary and afraid of people. How many times did we move? I don’t remember. A new apartment, a new school. Not many friends. What was the point? We were moving again anyway. Half the time, my dad didn’t know where my mother was living. I don’t remember my childhood very well. What I do remember, most of it wasn’t good, and my mother was a scant memory, flitting across my subconscious. Broken promises and half hearted attempts.

  When I was in second grade, I got in trouble for hitting another girl. I saw my dad hitting other people all the time, why wasn’t it okay for me to do it? My dad got into fights all the time with his girlfriend, and sometimes other people. The people around me were physically violent, I thought it was normal and okay. After I got detention, however, my dad was so mad at me, and I didn’t understand. He told me that hitting people was never okay, and all I could do was cry, because I was only doing what he had done.

  I grew up ashamed of my body because I was molested. I thought it was a dirty thing, and I hated touching myself in any way. I still do. When I masturbate, I can’t ever bring myself to touch myself. I gained weight because I never wanted anyone to look at me sexually. I don’t like it when people touch me to this day, even if the person doesn’t mean it to be offensive. I hate penises. I hate them because of what that man made me do to him. A 5 year shouldn’t know how to give a blow job.

  When my mom gets drunk, she apologizes for not being a good mother. She cries because she feels guilty. Maybe then, she should make herself into a good mother, because she still isn’t. She still hurts me and my sisters. She still makes us cry. She still breaks promises. She still lies. “People can only hurt you if you let them” doesn’t apply to family members. The only way my mother couldn’t ever hurt me again is if I no longer cared for her and loved her.

  These last six years I’ve changed. I’ve gone through the darkest period of my life, one where I even thought about putting myself into a psych ward. Then, it was like a veil lifted and I changed my outlook on life. I can’t go through my thought processes about it, but I turned myself around. I fought my demons. I fought them long and hard, and they are not gone yet. See, even though I’m a different person, I folded into myself in a way. I stopped making friends so freely. I stopped letting people in. I don’t let myself get too close to anyone. I can’t bear the thought of people I see every day knowing my demons. I don’t go places very often, and I don’t have many friends IRL. I’ve done this to myself. I am terrified of getting hurt. The final step in beating my demons, is letting myself go. I have to let myself open up to friendships and relationships.

  The hardest demon to fight of all of them is the one of my body image and sex. I am attracted to men, and I need to get past my fear of being sexually intimate with them. I need to learn to love my body, and not think it’s a disgusting thing to be hated and loathed. That’s the hardest part.

  So the next time somebody judges me and calls me a “baby” because I am still young, they better think twice. Age doesn’t have anything to do with life experiences.

  Someone told me on my post about my molestation that those kinds of posts are better left “private.” I wholeheartedly disagree.

  • 11:07 pm
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