A Survivor’s Story (Part 1)

I wish my memories weren’t as complete as they are. Most I remember like it was yesterday, some like a dream. But all of it is there, ready to be told. Sometimes I think the details are important, and maybe in some places they are. But here, in my world I want to remember the fight to surviving. Because when I was just existing, I wasn’t surviving, I wasn’t fighting. But once I chose to survive, to fight, that is where the story is. That is where my story is.

But before I get ahead of myself, let me give you a brief overview of my childhood. It was very short, ending at six months old. I say that because that is how old I was when my incestuous abuse began at the hands of my Atheist father. It physically ended when I moved out of the house after I graduated high school at nineteen years old. During that nineteen years there were other perpetrators as well as six months of ritualistic abuse.

During the next four years I bounced around from “relationship” to “relationship,” which I put in quotes because they never lasted longer than a few days at my choice. I was a sex addict and used sex to disassociate like other addicts use drugs or alcohol.

Just before my twenty-fourth birthday, I married a man I thought was my best friend. I’d known him for five years and thought I knew everything about him. That couldn’t have been farther from the truth. He was an abusive, vicious man whose thoughts, plans, and actions were far worse than anything my father or anyone else could have or did do to me because I was an adult and made the choice to stay in the abusive situation. My childhood made me who I was and made me easy prey for this game playing, smooth talking, vicious predator. We separated because I finally started fighting back just before my thirty-fifth birthday. We were married for another four years after that. We’re divorced now and I am stronger for it, but it will take me a very long time to heal.