I am moving in on 40 years old. My life was roughly on track until approximately 7 years ago, at which point I opened up the box of my father's sexual abuse of me and all the other ways in which my family's psychopathology had railroaded me.
I was the family scapegoat. And I am loathe to write that because I admit a certain dark part of myself that thinks others who write that are grandiose self-pitiers. Which is to say, I don't really think that except of myself. I mean to say, I have internalized my family's judgment and sometimes I still side with them and project it back onto others. Which makes me feel as though I have caught the bug of evil. Oh, and not evil in any cosmic sense. Evil, like Martin Buber writes, as the absence of dialogue, the absence of authentic relationship with others. Alas, the family was a quagmire from which I divorced myself but am still haunted.
My dad's abuse will always be fragmentary in memory. I fought this so hard. I tried so hard to establish a clear, non-etheric timeline so that noone would ever doubt the veracity of my story. That failed. I ended up nearly killing myself by diving deep into scummy pits of decompensation, fraught, manic and alcoholic. I got addicted to the feeling I would get when they subsided. Cleaning up where I had vomited, tending to my dogs, cleaning my house. Opening the blinds for air and sunlight.
But it is and will always be fragmentary. I can describe his nude white skin like a rotten whale carcass, bloated and hungover in the sunlight, in the attic, on my parent's bed. Then I recall that, in that house, their bed was never in the attic. That the slanted roof in the room where I was abused must have been somewhere else. Or a hotel. That I recall clearly. More clearly. But there is trauma thicker than setting concrete and it derails my mind and my heart when I try to stitch the pieces together. When I try to know where each thing happened. When I try to locate, in time and space, just when certain threats were uttered. I can't really do it. And so I have no past. Because my whole past, everything that came before is the remnants of a shipwrecked cargo barge, bobbing along in a sea of the trauma that shall not be named, owned and strapped down. This boat will never sail again.
I knew another survivor once. We went fishing one afternoon. Caught nothing but had lunch in a diner afterwards. He told me how much he dreamed of disappearing. Of how his grandfather raped him on the family farm one afternoon. How his grandmother turned a blind eye, sweetly cleaned the blood away from the little boy. I know that feeling like I know what it feels like to pee. How much sympathy passed unspoken between us, I cannot convey.
Another end of the year. Another attempt to disappear into my own life - I have never given up and I will achieve these dreams with vim and with vigor. But I will never have existed.
I was the family scapegoat. And I am loathe to write that because I admit a certain dark part of myself that thinks others who write that are grandiose self-pitiers. Which is to say, I don't really think that except of myself. I mean to say, I have internalized my family's judgment and sometimes I still side with them and project it back onto others. Which makes me feel as though I have caught the bug of evil. Oh, and not evil in any cosmic sense. Evil, like Martin Buber writes, as the absence of dialogue, the absence of authentic relationship with others. Alas, the family was a quagmire from which I divorced myself but am still haunted.
My dad's abuse will always be fragmentary in memory. I fought this so hard. I tried so hard to establish a clear, non-etheric timeline so that noone would ever doubt the veracity of my story. That failed. I ended up nearly killing myself by diving deep into scummy pits of decompensation, fraught, manic and alcoholic. I got addicted to the feeling I would get when they subsided. Cleaning up where I had vomited, tending to my dogs, cleaning my house. Opening the blinds for air and sunlight.
But it is and will always be fragmentary. I can describe his nude white skin like a rotten whale carcass, bloated and hungover in the sunlight, in the attic, on my parent's bed. Then I recall that, in that house, their bed was never in the attic. That the slanted roof in the room where I was abused must have been somewhere else. Or a hotel. That I recall clearly. More clearly. But there is trauma thicker than setting concrete and it derails my mind and my heart when I try to stitch the pieces together. When I try to know where each thing happened. When I try to locate, in time and space, just when certain threats were uttered. I can't really do it. And so I have no past. Because my whole past, everything that came before is the remnants of a shipwrecked cargo barge, bobbing along in a sea of the trauma that shall not be named, owned and strapped down. This boat will never sail again.
I knew another survivor once. We went fishing one afternoon. Caught nothing but had lunch in a diner afterwards. He told me how much he dreamed of disappearing. Of how his grandfather raped him on the family farm one afternoon. How his grandmother turned a blind eye, sweetly cleaned the blood away from the little boy. I know that feeling like I know what it feels like to pee. How much sympathy passed unspoken between us, I cannot convey.
Another end of the year. Another attempt to disappear into my own life - I have never given up and I will achieve these dreams with vim and with vigor. But I will never have existed.
