Sometimes I Feel…

I’ve been thinking as of late… about things I probably shouldn’t be. I’ve stayed too long in the dark recesses of my brain. I wish that I didn’t necessary feel the need to do so, but sometimes that’s just how it goes.

I’ve been talking, as of late, of confronting some of the truly shitty parts of my life. It’s not a place I relish, but it’s a place that simply exists. I’ve been thinking about going back to those horrid citadels of pain that I remember from my childhood. Those places where I was beaten, I was neglected. I’m not sure if that includes my home up until I was 7. I have visited there since. While it is the place where my mom would try to kill herself and it was the place where my dad used to beat me with a wire hanger, for some reason it doesn’t seem to have a dark haze about it.

Sure, it’s the place where I had to grow up quickly. I had no choice, after all. My mom wasn’t really there and my dad didn’t have the maturity to be there, he also worked the graveyard shift, so he really wasn’t there. But I also have a lot of good memories. I would get up early to watch very early morning cartoons… maybe that was indicative of my issues with sleep, now that I think about it. It’s where we would play Atari. I had friends that I would go and hang out at their place. We’d watch movies and play together.

As dysfunctional as it was, it was also where I grew up.

Then there’s the place in Antioch. I spent a year there. That was one year of hell. It was a year where I was the whipping boy. I was constantly beaten or humiliated for nothing. It’s the place where my mom wouldn’t help me when I was being beaten… even as I was pleading with her to do something, anything to make it stop.

Then there’s the first high school I went to.

For some reason, that place fills me with a dread that… I’m not sure if I can name it. I haven’t been back to the school since I left it at the end of my sophomore year. The thought of going there… I have mixed feelings. I feel like I need to go there. There’s something that I need to reckon with there. There’s something so dark and black that I almost flunked tenth grade. I barely showed up to school because going there made me panic. I couldn’t sleep on school nights. I’d stay up until 4 in the morning, only to wake up 2.5 hours later.

I know going there will be incredibly powerful. It’s not something that I do with any great relish. I do it because there’s a very real need. I feel bound by my rape. It’s something that I can no longer abide. I need to stand up to this.

Then I think about why I’m so fucking damaged. This is something that I am so angry about. A good part of it is that I feel like I allowed it to happen to me. It’s so problematic that I have a hard time thinking that there isn’t something so horrible about me. That I deserved the 25 years of abuse. That I deserved every unkind word, every slap, every punch… I deserved to sleep on a drafty floor while I had the flu.

This bothers me. This makes me feel irreparably broken. While I know I didn’t deserve it, I don’t believe it. I still think that I deserve it… I think that I deserve it when a partner treats me like shit. I can’t do that anymore. I can’t allow for that. I’m so very tired of feeling like I’m some horribly evil person that deserves nothing but bad things. I try not to be that person. I try to look past it. For some reason lately, I can’t anymore. It’s in my face.
I think I know why too…

So, this my new thing. Go back. Face those stupid demons. Try to move on to a healthier and happier life. That might be asking for too much, but I have to try. There’s nothing wrong with trying.