Feeling Better Now

I woke up this morning feeling like a big weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I normally don’t allow myself to think about the past and the resultant effects it’s had on me. But, I guess sometimes I have to let these feeling come to the surface, so that I can mourn for the little girl that was me, and the mess I’d made of my life until I learned to let it go. I can’t let the past dictate my daily life. To do that would mean that he won. I don’t think of what happened to me-hardly ever in my waking days.

I guess repressing it caused an overload and it took recourse coming out in my dreams. Believe me, a couple of nights in a row of that same horrific venue, and you’d be depressed too. It’s not always that anything bad happens, just that I awaken to realize that I’ve dreamt of that situation again. That I had to see him, again. It’s hard to explain, exactly, but it’s just devastating. My sister has a dream that we’re all rolling around in this grassy meadow as a family and from a distance, it looks as if my stepfather is just tickling us. In reality, he’s touching us. My mother is looking down on us from the top of a hill, smiling benignly, oblivious. How creepy is that to have haunting you? Fortunately, I only go through that once every few years. Maybe I have to unload periodically in order to keep going. It’s been hard and lonely. I see that people have viewed this torture I was going through, yet I am alone in that no one could offer even a word of comfort. So, I say again, that I am alone in this, as I have been from the beginning, when I had to keep the “secret.” Again I kept silent, when I realized how ashamed I was that it happened, had been happening since I was a very little girl. I never wanted anyone to know. When I finally did tell, when I was thirteen, no one did a thing to help me. I was abandoned. So I ran away from home. It was preferable to me to live in the woods than to be in that house another day. Unfortunately, I was found in those woods, and raped repeatedly by the boys and men from the neighborhood surrounding the area I was at. And, do you know, at least it wasn’t my “father.” Isn’t that a terrible thing to take comfort in?