I don’t remember my 18th birthday. There are whole weeks at a time from after my mom’s death until about a year later that just aren’t there. These symptoms continued to come up at other times later in my life following traumatic events. The extent of what happened to me is unknown, and I’m okay with that. There’s enough I already remember that I wish I could get rid of.
What we remember of our own life is already pretty selective. What we remember about other people is selective, coupled with an already small base of actual knowledge mixed in with withheld truths, misremembers, points of view, and context. But even just these pieces I’ve put together make a pretty obvious story when seen from a safe distance.
I learned that my rapist was sexually abused as a child. I also caught him hiding porn that he would secretly watch with his guy friend, so I’m certain he had a lot of his own shit going on that he hadn’t figured out yet. His story is the story of a lot of men in this country who were fed a steady diet of repression and idealized abuse. I broke up with him early the next year, and only right after that did I come out of my memory lapses for a bit.
Around that same time, I started calling out of work sick a lot (half the time I was sick, the other half I was panicked about having to work with my assistant manager), which my manager was super not into. Eventually I showed up one day and could just tell he didn’t want to hear about how I’d been sick (mostly because I’d already been yelled at on the phone) so I just blurted out that I quit so he wouldn’t yell at me anymore. My assistant manager was moved to another store, and gave up on me soon after, most likely due to distance.
Dad died a couple years later. He died the way he lived – high as fuck on opiates. I was with him when he got the call from his doctors confirming his cancer diagnosis. I tried to be the “better” person and help him out. I drove him to appointments and treatments. But cancer wasn’t eating into any of the parts of him that caused him to be an abusive piece of shit, and I had to stop. I was in Philadelphia by then, at community college getting my GED via college credits, and I stopped making the drive.
He died in our house, under the care of a nurse and on a morphine drip. Our dog and the nurse’s dog were there, and the story I was told was that both of the dogs were in the room with him and they started suddenly and frantically clawing at the patio door. The nurse opened the door, and they dashed outside. Minutes later my dad was dead. After things were sorted, the dogs slunk back into the house and both jumped up on a couch in the room he died in, and hid their faces in the cushions.
My interpretation of this was that an actual demon had been conjured to reap my father down to hell and it was so frightening that the dogs ran away from it. The hyperbole helped to put some sort of fitting closure to that part of his story and mine. I know now he was also a victim turned attacker, as many end up. It doesn’t make me like him any more, but I understand what caused him to be what he was.
Dads aren’t supposed to steal from you for drug money while you are in the hospital after your mom dies. Friends aren’t supposed to rape you when you go to hang out at their house. Authority figures aren’t supposed to lure children in their employ into their homes with their own children so they can groom them for sexual assault. Moms die sometimes, but the rest of this stuff shouldn’t have happened. Communities aren’t supposed to let any of this happen.
Well, I say “supposed to.” I mean supposed to in a reasonable, healthy society. We don’t live in one of those. We live in a society of shame and abuse held together with ticky-tacky on a foundation of slavery. We’re not supposed to talk about it. We’re told not to compare notes. Because if we start sharing our experiences, it makes them real. It gives context to other people’s chaos and it helps us navigate out from under those who need us cowed and broken and doing their dirty work.
It wasn’t even 10 years ago that I was sitting in a bathtub in the middle of the afternoon, shivering and sweating through opioid withdrawals. My doctor had started prescribing me high doses of opioids to combat debilitating migraines. I inherited my dad’s tolerance levels and soon this barely adult-sized lady was on morphine pills every few hours. The migraines turned out to be caused by the stress of yet another bad relationship and an exploited situation, and the fog of the abuse made it hard to see that I was leaning on the (legally prescribed) drugs. I never went on to try to stay on opioids or acquire them illegally, but that’s just the luck of my situation and is in no way a judgement on my moral character or intelligence.
It’s hard to fault anyone for leaning on substances, or even fault those providing them, when artificial joy is the only joy around. If you can’t have health and safety, at least you can numb the panic. Our communities are sick. Our country refuses to provide access to bare necessities and instead gives us expensive and dangerous band-aids. My asthma inhalers were always more expensive than any amount of opiate I’ve ever been prescribed.
There were parts of me that always recognized the sham we live in here. I stopped saying the pledge of allegiance in 5th grade because I didn’t understand why anyone should pledge allegiance to a country. Why would you be loyal to a country? It just felt wrong. I wasn’t trying to protest or make a statement; I was very quiet about it. I would stand and put my hand to my heart but I wouldn’t say anything. I feel like any explanation beyond that would be colored by my current views, but the instinct was there.
The same instinct that told me to reject wearing dresses when I didn’t want to, and to befriend every bullied kid in grade school, is telling me to share this with you now. All of these things that happened that we are told not to talk about – they happen everywhere, in every community, in nearly every home. There are parts of this story and so much worse on every street in America.
It is nearly impossible to know what’s happening while you are inside of these situations because they are so normalized and hidden at the same time. Abuse feels like love, too much feels like enough, shame feels like control. It’s easy to get lost or lose others before you find a way out, and in the all-consuming dark it can be scary and even dangerous to speak out for help. But it’s bordering on obvious once you emerge and look back at where you came from to see things for what they are.
If you make it out of the woods, tell your story. Light signal fires. Draw maps. Leave care packages along the way. The only way out is through but we can make it easier for those who are still finding their way.
