#basically been on house arrest for months without respite

[natandacat]

Despite it all I am loved by incredible people. Horrific times but I will keep on trucking. Wish things would stop getting worse though.

[magicatnip]

my dumb story

My life is hidden in a shadow no one can see through, not even me.  

My childhood was so abusive I remember little.  Demon-spawn, I was, bitch, someone despised and faulty.  I came to see myself this way.  Even as I tidied the house to make it a little more peaceful, or made the boys birthday breakfasts, or dinner for mom and dad because I thought a date would help.  I took such care of my stuffed animals and prayed my sheepdog, Crystal, would come alive so I would not be so lonely.  I wanted something to cuddle, a friend to protect me.

I was not protected.  My innocence was taken from me and I learned to hate my body.  At 5 I looked in the mirror, noted my child pot-belly and considered myself disgusting.  At 1, I rocked back and forth violently, slamming my head into things until I wore a crown of bruises.  The doctor asked if there was abuse.  “There was none.”  Want to know a secret?  I rock back and forth every day, whenever I am alone.  I cannot stop.  I cringe from the memories, the feelings, the darkness in my heart and belly which I fight with all my spirit, all my being.  I want to live.  I crave the light, I crave goodness and truth and... why, oh why, does this pain still tear at me?  How can it remain a kind of torture?

I remember being crushed against the sliding door, unable to move, so I slid it open and ran.  It was snowing.  I was not wearing shoes.  I knew he would be after me, unable to hold back once he had decided to hurt me.  I was prey, and I scampered up a tree, so high.  So close.  I shook and wept and all I had were the needles to hide me.

He locked me in the bathroom with him and I was so uncomfortable as he shouted at me in the small, echoing room, backing me into a corner, spitting in my face.  Once, when I was 8, he held me against the mirror by my throat and I could not breathe, for too long.  I wondered if I would die.

He locked me in the car with him during school, when I misbehaved, and rage-drove around with me.  I remember fantasizing about throwing myself out, if only to make it stop.  I still cannot hold still in cars.  It took me a long time to be able to wear the chest strap of a seat belt, so trapped did I feel there.

I sassed him at the dinner table, and earned a slap so hard blood sprayed from my nose.  When I was 6, I was sent outside in the winter dusk without so much as a blanket, and told I was banished from the family.  I remember sitting there with such a feeling of isolation, my heart so broken it felt like it was full of rainwater, of tears, but I could not cry.  I knew they did not love me.  It was no surprise, really.  But who would have me?  Where would I go?

He threatened to give me away to mean neighbors, he squeezed my head til it cracked and I thought it would burst like a melon, he twisted my arms and he threw me to the ground and he struck me until I wept and he had his victory.  It became a matter of pride to resist tears.  For then I would lose.  I had nothing, nothing if not my will.  But every time, he broke me.  He told me with disgust that I was pathetic.  I was so sensitive.  I was angry, I tried to be tough, but Gods, I was tender.  I wrote him letters telling him I still loved him after he hurt me terribly.  And I did love him.  I loved both of my parents, so much that I prayed I would die before them.  While I responded with defiance outwardly, my closet and my cats heard many disconsolate tears while I hid to recover my strength and save face.  I hated my life and I hated myself, truly.

Oftentimes I would wake at night unable to sleep, filled with this hollow sorrow, and wander out in the indigo night, under the stars, and there were my trees dreaming in slow, dusty winds.  I would climb my pine, sit on a low, sturdy branch, press my face into the sweet-smelling bark, and cry.  I felt its cool presence, its awareness center on me.  I considered that tree my best friend, sad as it sounds, but it was always there, always calm. It soothed me. 

My friends were a respite.  I loved them as a puppy loves its people, eager to visit, eager to play, full of affections.  But we kept moving.  And my parents could not afford the gas money to drive across city or state to visit.  I lost them all.  We moved 13 times.  I came home to eviction notices on the door, or to dad having lost his job, so we are moving to Montana.  I cried so hard I could hardly breathe when we moved that far away from my best friend.  They told me to shut up and to stop making everything a negative experience. 

My friends were everything to me.  They treated me kindly, our times were fun and simple, a magical, shining place apart from my life, my misery.  They all went away.  Eventually I stopped making friends.  I decided to myself, people were not worth the heartbreak.  And so my PTSD swallowed me whole.

I waited for someone in my family to see.  I hoped a beloved uncle would see the tears of my cheek, sense, somehow, the pain I was being subjected to.  I hated them, that they didn’t see... how could they not see, if they loved me?  I failed school, first due to belligerence, then due to depression.  I did not bother to shower oftentimes.  I sat with my head on the desk, listless, or in a corner in the lobby, unable even to face class.  When I was in class I could not listen.  I looked out the windows and dreamed, dreamed of a place I had dreamed of since my youngest years... home... Great mountains and trees, fresh air, freedom, joy.  Where was I?  I looked around me and it was foreign.  School was another failure, another prison.  I waited to escape every day, so I could read or climb trees, find some sort of peace away from crushing expectations and angsty people.  

See, I was an “empath” as well, and I would absorb the emotions of other students. And when I went home I felt like a sponge full of soot, or a black cloud, and I would collapse on the floor of my bedroom without even bothering to remove my bag.  I wondered how I was alive.

For I did not eat but for a few hundred calories. I had little appetite and I was anorexic also. I did not sleep but for literally 2-4 hours.  I had nightmares at night, and a waking nightmare during the day.  I was utterly alone.  Never had I felt human, but I felt more alien than ever, in a most negative way.  Something was innately wrong with me.  I was unlovable.  And I began to define myself this way.  To punish myself mentally, when dad was not there to, as it goes.  I still hear, “You would not have any friends if anyone really knew you,” in my head sometimes.  And it feels all too true. 

And the worst things I will never, ever remember, if I can help it... or maybe I will have to in order to heal.  I do not know.  I made a bid for freedom as soon as I was 18, but 3 days after, and meant to go to the forest if only to get away.  It meant little to me whether I made it out there.  Anywhere, anywhere else.  And nature was the only place I felt safe.  The only place that wanted me unquestionably.  I was rubbish, a waste, a loss, and no one would miss me anyway.

Mom got me a place for a little while and then I got my own with S, who I was with due to his kindness alone.  So traumatized was I that I fell for the first to speak to me with a gentle word, to offer a gentle touch.  But we brought out the worst in each other.  I became darker.... He mocked my homelands, did not believe in spirits or anything that meant so much to me.  He was very cynical for all his niceness, and quick to shoot down any dreamy ideas of mine.  It was unintentionally cruel and it made things a lot worse for me.  But he looked after me.  It was a bad relationship, basically.  I was losing myself more and more.... Where had my easy laughter gone, that sunlight I could summon not matter what opposed me?  Gone.  What was this anger, this desire to watch the world burn?  My dreams grew darker... no more adventures, no more beautiful lands, only memories of abuse, every damn night, and I told nobody, not even S, because I was so shamed.... How weak was I, 20-something years old, and here my past was haunting me?  Why bother being away if it all... came to devour me.... I was failing my friends, I rarely visited my family, I was a crappy wife, I hardly worked... what was there left?  My present was so dark mentally and emotionally, my past ink-black, and I could see no future.  I wished to die.

I self-harmed mindlessly, not intending to die or to live but merely to harm myself. That’s the plain truth of it.  I regret it of course.  And I ended up in the ER, and then a behavioral place, where somehow I felt free from S.  I decided never to go back.  After those 8 days, meeting so many wounded, big-hearted people, making friends, I don’t know... it felt like a new lease on life.  I stayed with friends from the behavioral place, and mom, and divorced S.  I was attacked by the husband of a friend with a knife, he was looking for his gun, I had to call the police (he was arrested and they eventually broke up, apparently he’d been abusing her for awhile so thank the Gods).  And a month later, I was raped, but two months out of the behavioral place.

I met C and we had a passionate relationship for a couple of months, and then the darkness took me once more. I woke from nightmares of rape, torture, abuse, in tears, and instant panic.  I was hysterical all day from then on.  I would be soaked, soaked in sweat and tears, flinching and reliving every abuse done to me since childhood days.  I wept and begged no one to stop.  I kicked to escape, though no one was there.  I was tortured, tortured every damn day for months, until I pulled myself out of it through sheer force of will because I could not stand to put C through my insanity anymore.

Since then it has been like holding the heaviest weight of my life off of me.  Whenever it starts sinking down, my thoughts swirl and become... oh, cruel, telling me my deepest fears, all who I will lose, all I am doing wrong....  A cold floods me, like a chilled poison, burning my insides and making me sick.  Pain pulls my back and shoulders down, and I am on my knees, suffering more than I have a right to be.  I cannot function like that!  I cannot live broken.  So I hold myself together through sheer force of will.  I repent for every stupid, cursed thing I’ve ever done, and I try so hard to be perfect.  I’m sorry, everyone I let down.  I no longer let the pain take me, the madness take me.  I’ve gotten so strong.  And you know what has motivated me?  To grow strong instead of give up?

My little brothers, who are like children to me.  I must be there for them, and for Christmas and birthdays... my Fi, my cub who is curled around my heart completely, and C, my mate whose back I am determined to have, who I am determined to care for and make feel safe the way he did for me for so long.  I no longer wish to be the weak one, the insane one, the lost cause, the friendless, the trash that needs to be thrown away.

I wish to be the best of companions, one whose spirit is dauntless, one who can find laughter and cheer in the world despite everything.  I want to fight injustice.  I want to protect the women, the children, the animals.  I understand the pain here, and it is too much, too harsh.  I want to intervene however I may.  Any soul I can enliven, any spirit I can spark to remembering itself and its passions, is enough reason to live.  And I want to visit all of the beautiful nature here.  It is so different everywhere you go, the soil smells different and is a different color, the native plants vary, the trees... hundreds, thousands of little worlds and infinite priceless moments of beauty.  I want to draw my homelands, and paint them, and I want to write stories with deep, humorous characters and epic adventure, mystical places...  I... I don’t know how I still have so much will to live, but I do.  Maybe there is a part of me that holds that pain, which would fantasize about death still if I left it, but that part is broken and unreal.  It was made that way.  I remember who I am, who I was since I was small.  I am an Elf and I will do my best to bring my world here and to set as many of us free as I may

As I defeat my demons, I hope to help others fight theirs also.  We need to remember who we are and what we love.  And I am here to help, I hope.  Each day I watch my words, my gestures, my choices and actions to ascertain they are in alignment with the greater good.  Long ago I realized my reactions are unsound, and so I contain them and react as I should alternatively.  It spares those around me.  I internalize much, but I think I process it also, and that I am strengthening weak places.  Gods, hurting those you care for even once is too much, and I will punish myself for Ever.  But at least I can do my best now.  I have been so flawed, so confused, so absorbed with my own experiences and memories.... Now I am awake, and I am here, and I am never going to give up.