Tonight, I'm sitting here listening to an Alanis Morissette song that I always thought summed up my college relationship pretty damn well (the rest of the lyrics also fit quite solidly).
If it weren't for your maturity, none of this would've happened
If you weren't so wise beyond your years, I would've been able to control myself
If it weren't for my attention, you wouldn't have been successful
If it weren't for me you would never have amounted to very much.
The problem with that is how much it extends beyond just him. How many men, in how many settings, have told me that lie precisely, or a slim variation on any of those four lines in particular.
And maybe it's time for a response.
Don't blame me for your lack of impulse control. If it weren't for my maturity and its concomitant pathologic sense of hyper-responsibility, this could've gone down a lot worse for you. Meanwhile, I just internalize it in the interest of conflict avoidance. This is very fucking useful for my mental health.
If you had been able to control yourselves - ever - I might have had a shot at a normal life and growing up whole and less neurotic and dodged a whole lotta crazy.
Don't think for a minute that I've gotten to anywhere I am or become anything I am because you gave me those skills. I may well have used what bits you left me with to reassemble into the best skill set I could. If that produces any measure of success, it's mine, not yours. All you gave me was miles of barriers to overcome.
And those barriers, those hot buttons, those neurotic sore spots, that's what I have to fight with every day. This is life in my skewed reality. It makes me better at what I do, and particularly what I want to do professionally in the long run, but it also kicks my ass. Again. Every single day. With every single breath. Because aside from just the running negativity and awfulness that goes on in my own head, I run into the scary would-be stalker patients, the acting out and inappropriate ones, and even the ones that just try to mentally manipulate and screw with my head and make me feel inconsequential, unworthy, and inept. Not to mention non-patients who should be patients I have to work with and the general personality dysfunction in people I meet in the day-to-day.
Usually, my concentrated time among those who most activate me isn't quite so bad, and hell, I want to go into Forensics, which is, frankly, the belly of the beast...but last night, into this morning...was just fraught with this sort of shit. It was a hard, hard day.
But I survived. I didn't actually take anyone out (I'll be honest...I've never come so close to stepping over that professional line and physically defending myself from a person instead of diverting a patient) I didn't fall apart. I got through. And I'll get through again. It's all part of the work (and this time, I don't mean the work I get paid for). That work is in large part why I chose my professional path.
But that work? It's a grueling, draining, exhausting, on planes so much more than physical. It's difficult to fight with yourself all the time. It's difficult to want to be something that more closely approximates "normal" and realize that your "normal", your "reality," is way too far away for it to happen. And not because, like I, and so many like me, are tempted to think, because we, ourselves are intrinsically flawed. But because someone set us up for this. Someone else imposed this on us; all we could do was ride it out and learn how to deal.
It reminds me a little of that "Welcome to Holland" poem for mothers of disabled children. Except somehow I landed in Chernobyl. There are no windmills or pretty tulips here. And what's worse, there are no 10K walks to show support, no pride parades, no mass-merchandising covered in pink for months at a time. Maybe, maybe, if someone rapes you, once, at knifepoint in an alley, someone will knit you a scarf.
But when it happens over and over and over again, when the people involved are people you're supposed to trust, when unspeakable things go on, they just aren't spoken of. You don't get a parade or a T-shirt or a bag of colorful M&Ms. There's no TV show on TLC documenting your ability to adapt and survive. You don't even get a guidebook. Hell, there isn't even really a psych diagnosis that covers it (one of my complaints with PTSD is that it applies so much more to single critical event trauma than to repeated trauma). You just get a lot of pain and confusion and you think you're completely alone and you hope to God that there's a way out. You, and only you, can find the path you need to take from "victim" to "survivor."
So my name's Kate, and I'm a sexual abuse and assault survivor.
I'm on that path, yo. But it's long and it's fraught with new and inventive ways to test me. Like the groping, disgusting patient and the one who pointedly says my first name when he asks why I'm leaving. Like the patient who fired me this morning (you know, after I saved his life yesterday) after saying hideous, horrible things to me. But also problematic? The (non-patient) guy at work who seems to have taken at least a mild interest in me. The people around me who seem to genuinely like me and find me interesting. The fact that everyone, wherever I go, doesn't actually seem to hate me the way expect them to or judge me as harshly as I judge myself.
It sucks. And it's not fair. And I hate, hate, hate that this is my reality. Because I've finally figured out that it just isn't my fault. Nothing about me, my precociousness, my early mature coping abilities (including the one that isn't so healthy, but, it works), nothing about that led me down the path I ended up on. In fact, it ultimately led me out. But, dude. It still really, really sucks.
I think I'm done. But it's my blog, so, occasionally you have to wade through crap like this. Sorry.
4 comments:
You go, girl. And you'll get through it. And wait until you have kids - their love is so redeeming, it helps with stuff like what you have gone through. I know I complain about them a lot in my blog (because those are the funny parts of life with kids, all those things that go wrong); but what I don't say is how their love and my love for them has made me the whole person that I am today. Oh, yeah, old issues come up, but I'm a stronger, more self-confident, more centered person now who is able to deal with them better.
And are you sure you want to follow your current career path? Is it healing, or is it just punishing?
It's your blog, and it's your life, and it isn't crap. Well, it is, in a sense, but it isn't. Do what you need to do.
Dude, rock on. People have got to speak out. I did recently see two shows on this, so maybe some of this is starting to get more attention. And I'll totally knit you a scarf.
Sarah beat me to it on the scarf knitting.
But Kate? You ARE a survivor and you've achieved huge things, all on your own, not because of your past but in spite of it. What really sucks is that you don't get to be finished with the abuse and assault, anymore than people who come home from wars get to be done with war. It's the most unfair thing of all, in my opinion, that the bastards who hurt you get to set up little outposts in your head. And you know, you build this carefully constructed world far away from your abuser and you surround yourself with friends who love and admire you and then the chance remark of a mental patient can bring it all back.
It's almost thirty years since I was assaulted and every time my daughter goes off to spend the night, no matter how much I trust the people and how well I know them --I get to relive it. I can trace every bad choice and every psychological oddity of my life to that one moment in time. I don't know what the answer is.
Except in talking and examining and getting through those nights. I'm so proud to call you my friend. So proud OF you. You are stronger than you know.
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