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05.16.09
Janitorial Engineering
I’m doing some janitorial work on my life; cleaning up my affairs, if you will. I’m trying to make peace with incidents and people and to really work toward organizing things. Not putting things into neat little boxes – that always fails – but more or less trying to participate more instead of being the surly kid in the corner refusing to play.
There are some situations I could never fathom getting past or with which I could make peace. And maybe I never will. I’d like to reconnect with old friends and apologize for being MIA, but I don’t think I could even attempt to find my rapist and reach out to him. I made amends with my mother for the past, and I know in my heart and head that she did the very best she could do with what she had, but I cannot forgive the men who molested me. I’m not sure how to address these issues. I know my rapist’s name, I know who molested me. I could likely find each of them in a matter of minutes through the vast amount of search engines and social networking sites. But do I want to?
No.
Obviously I cannot pretend they didn’t happen. I did that already, I pushed away all that had happened and put it out of my head. I didn’t even deny it. I’d have had to accept that something wrong happened and I didn’t even get that far for too long. I was 20 when it occurred to me that what happened when I was 15 was, indeed, rape. And then my rickety filter collapsed completely and everything else pushed forth with a huge amount of pressure and urgency. It’s like water like that. The dam burst. And so I sit here, 31, and realize with just a twist of remorse that I lost 10 years of my life because life mandates that eventually everything will catch up with you. You can push it down for only so long, but it will take you by surprise one day and force you to feel those emotions. You can’t hide forever. I was living through my sexual abuse, experiencing the pain and guilt and subsequent “textbook” behavior. The behavior that resulted in bad, ill-thought decisions that took years to correct. The overwhelming feelings from the abuse liquefied and left me feeling guilty and bad for everything. And, as every self-fulfilling prophecy does, I just acquiesced and behaved the way I felt. This is what I am making peace with, this chasm in which I fell, broken, for so long. Not the abusers. What would be the point?
People do things to hurt you in different ways and they take a part, small or large, of you away with them. In the case of my sexual abuse, there are some things I will never get back, some things that will last forever. I don’t think of it every day, but it’s impossible not to be affected in some way or another at least every other day, maybe every third day. For me, that is. And it’s not mooning or crying over my heavy thoughts; to the contrary, it will just appear as though it needs to remind me lest I ever forget. And then it goes away as quickly as it popped up. Forgetting is impossible. But living through it is not.
But I’m trying to forget, at least in a positive way. I’m trying to reconcile what I can after all these years of feeling the wrong things. But the abusers? They’ve already taken enough from me. I cannot forget them, but I accept what happened and try not to blame those who were around for the aftermath. The “After.” I came across a picture of my mother’s ex-boyfriend, he who served as the artery of the abuse, a few months ago. Photographs capture one moment and freeze time. Looking at it brought forth smells and feelings of that time, way back when, and I put it away. I’m not throwing it away, though. I think I can handle things now. It happened. It happens to a lot of people. The important thing is not to allow self-destruction. And I did destruct in a lot of ways in my 20s. I know better now, though, and I can live with it. I don’t have to be alone, I don’t have to push people away. I don’t have to be a shadow of myself, to take up as little space as possible, to blend in with the wallpaper. And for what it’s worth, my brain is starting to catch up with me concerning those thoughts of self-worth. This, I think, is why I don’t want to contact them or feel a need to “resolve” those situations. I’m worth more than some of my past. I don’t need closure and they don’t deserve it. I’ve got the last say in the matter.
