Day 0637

I’m allowed to say when I’ve been treated poorly. I’ve more than learned that during the past four years.
But I’ve also learned this: I’m allowed to say what was done that caused the poor treatment.
In fact sometimes saying it out loud or in a blog or wherever is an entirely powerful thing.
People who do mean things probably already hate themselves for doing them – at least my bleeding heart view tells me they do.
But that doesn’t mean we need to be kind to them by not stating what was done in black and white.
To pick my favorite example:
Halfman more than knew what he did to me. He hated himself for it – or for getting caught but he still persisted and denied and even had the moral vacuum to try again.
But what hurt him more than anything – what weakened him completely – was to be told or to read what he had done in black and white.
Somehow my doing that made me the mean one in his eyes.
But I watch these women who have decided to take their bodies back after having naked photos put online without their consent; the ones who put their own naked photos on the web by choice to take their power back, and I think: that is power, that is rising beyond not just above.
Rising above is just another way of letting a perpetrator not face what they’ve done. We seem to consider it elegant because there aren’t any ugly emotions or unpleasant words involved.
But to rise beyond … That is the new goal for me.
There is power in outing a Halfman even if he is truly the only one who knows who he is.
There is power in saying of He Who Shall Not Be Named: You are an abuser of women and children. I feel sorry for you but I will not pretend it didn’t happen. You put a fist to my face and you will have to acknowledge that or spend all your energy pretending the truth is not true.

Days 0604 & 0605

Are dreams the mind’s detritus or do they reveal your deepest thoughts?

This question posed by a great podcast (Wiretap – find it here) got me thinking about all the silliness and decidedly *not* silliness of the dreams that ooze and zip around my brain.

For years and years I had recurring dreams that I was being bitten by vampires and couldn’t scream.

Then, when my first long-term relationship was going all to shite, I had recurring dreams that I was being buried alive.

I still have recurring dreams that I can’t open my eyes and look directly at people.

When I change antidepressants (which has happened a few times), I get extremely violent dreams where I am crushing people’s heads with jagged rocks and bricks. I have woken up from these horrific dreams with the smell of blood in my nose.

And, of course, I have those dreams that lead to total embarrassment where somehow I end up having sex with someone who I am totally not attracted to but who I inevitably bump into early the next morning in real life.

In some ways I am hoping all that is detritus and yet …

Day 0375

Realising how someone else sees you can be a transforming experience. It can definitely be hard to take: we all make certain assumptions based on being inside our selves constantly. It can be totally revealing to learn how wrong we’ve got it.
One of the most hilarious I’ve received is this description by a man on what he thought of me when he met me for the first time 30 years ago: You were beautiful and terrifying.
Two words I would never ever use to describe myself – my favourite was ‘terrifying’.
Then there was something said to me by a wonderful person who is also a lawyer.
By that time I’d spent a year or so untangling myself from a severely controlling and emotionally abusive husband. I had met this person in both a work and a client context.
I was rather taken aback when she said to me: When I see you at work meetings, I can see someone who has been abused, who knows things but is afraid to say them.
I felt, as I say, taken aback, I wanted to say ‘no I’m not, I haven’t been whacked into a meek and mild version of myself …’ But I didn’t because … She was right.
Up until that moment I think I’d accepted that the label ‘domestic violence and abuse’ was the one people put on my marriage, but I didn’t actually believe it was true. No one really ever wants to believe that, do they?
But that observation tipped me over into realising it wasn’t just a label – it actually was the case.
It made me more conscious of not letting myself be pushed away from what I wanted, it let me open up to understanding the consequences of living like that for so long, and it let me finally allow myself to be helped.

Day 0247

I sat in a witness box once when I was 19. It was a harrowing experience. I had to sit across from a man whose face was unfamiliar but who managed to radically alter my life and my outlook, to undermine everything I had believed to be true up to that point with an act that lasted less than five minutes.
What he did was monstrous. But there sitting in front of me was a dude you would see down at the pub or not even notice walking down the street.
The only good thing he did for me was make me vastly more aware of and grateful for the good I find in people.
I remember sitting there being asked what I was wearing at the time I ‘met’ this man (a grey-blue, I’ll fitting polyester overall type dress that was my uniform working as a checkout chick at a chemist in the mall – super sexy stuff). It was my lawyer asking so the other one wouldn’t: and I so resented having to answer.
Sometimes it is only the big picture that should matter for justice: not the small details.
A man attacked a woman he didn’t know in a lift. That is wrong. Does anything else matter?
A man terrorized his wife for 10 years. Does anything else matter?
Yes, we are all hurt and broken and warped by our parents, but when it comes to acts against each other, while we should all be forgiven in the end, do the little details bear assessment?

Days 151 & 152

When I was a child, I learned that being passive was the only effective counterattack to violent anger. My sister would punch me, and kick me, hit me with things, suffocate me under a pillow, scream at me and hold my head underwater while we were swimming. The only thing that ended these sessions of good sibling ‘fun’ was acting like I didn’t care.

I foiled her by reacting to violence with peace, to anger with calm, to yelling with quiet.

It was so effective that she showed me off to her school friends by asking me to stand still while she hit me and they all watched. I obliged. it was so much easier to stand there on the sidewalk outside the school living inside my head, than to react and get hit again.

The school friends all laughed, of course, but I’m not convinced a couple of them didn’t look at me like they found my sister’s behaviour a little concerning.

And that is exactly where I still go when confronted: though I’ve expanded the menu somewhat, offering a la carte servings when my feelings are being hurt.

‘Just go into your head,’ I tell myself, ‘just stand here and think for a moment, and it will all go away.’

The last time I did that was a year ago today when someone I thought cared a lot about me said something that made me feel cheap, unimportant and hurt beyond measure. And doing that to myself yet again finally made me realise I am not going to do it any more.

After four decades I am  realising none of ‘it’ has gone ‘away’. All those times I forced myself inward, I forced those feelings inward too. They didn’t go out into the world and disperse with the evening breeze, they piled inside me on top of one another, stomping the preceding ones down until they sit there in hardened shapes that shift and groan like tectonic plates.