When I left Tassie it was because I "knew" I wouldn't survive, staying in Hobart. I had totally given up on any hope that my parents gave a damn about me. I was sixteen and a half.
I had been losing time. I had been wondering around the streets at night alone. I had been going to clubs and pubs, getting obliterated and letting random guys pick me up and f*ck me. I even slept with a girlfriend who, by all accounts, I had no sexual interest in, but I woke up naked beside her once, no memory at all of what we did, but I knew we had done stuff. I'm not even, remotely, bi.
I was very, very lost and unhappy. I was suicidal, but not in an honest way, actually more parasuicidal, just wanting help. Not seriously wanting to die, otherwise I'm sure I would have managed it, because there was no one, no one, who appeared to give a shit about me.
I did lots of risky stuff. Climbed out onto a many story building roof, once, drunk, to steal into the boarding house that my parents organised for me to live in. By this time though, I was not staying there. I lasted all of 3 days? I think? Couldn't keep curfew and they had a very strict curfew.
I moved in with an older boy, I had just met.
He wasn't a bad guy but he had a really bitchy roommate, although, in retrospect, I was so messed up and drinking and smoking weed so heavily, I'm sure my judgement is very distorted. Anyway, we didn't last long.
So that's why I thought the anal rape was entirely my fault. After all, I got seriously drunk, blind drunk. I had drunk most of a bottle of Jack Daniels. I don't remember much of that night at all. Woke up at the place I was staying at, with cardio buttons all over my chest and a very sore rectum and bruises all over me.
He had left me lying on the front lawn of the house the party was at, completely naked. All this, of course, I found out post haste. I was so utterly humiliated. Mum, I think, took me to get a morning after pill, but that was the extent of the aftercare. Didn't take me home to their house, didn't hug me, didn't talk to me about it.
Someone, who was at the party, pointed out the guy, later on, and told me that a bunch of guys gave him a pounding for doing that to me, but the thought of reporting him to the police, never occurred. I just wanted to crawl into a hole and die. It was my fault after all.
Everything has been my fault all my life, according to my mum, and that pattern continued, with my children's father for the next 27 years and was taught to my children as well.
Finally, that dynamic has changed, but I am left with the physiological fall out from wearing other people's crap for so long. I don't feel good blaming myself for everything, but I sure as hell dispise having to admit to being victimized. Either way, not a feel good thing. I guess the truth is somewhere in the middle. I made choices, bad choices, based on information I had been led to believe was true. Those people weren't "good" people, honest people, kind people. This, I think, hurts more than anything, the awareness that some people are dangerously callous and abusive and disregard the lives of those in their care.
The other, more random abusers, hurt a lot less, because, everyone knows that there are dangerous people in the world who prey on the vulnerable, it's the ones close to you, who betray you, that is a constantly leaking poison that kills you a little more each day.
I, however, love life, regardless, and will continue to advocate for my right to a healthy place in it.
