So the body is alive

So we’re alive. Of course we would be, right? Someone inside sarcastically says yah, “Oh it’s “Julie”, she’ll be fine.” And so therein some sort of sadness and ?resentment? lies, and yet, whose fault is that? Mine. Ours. The mask we raise for our sanity and for everyone else’s protection against us. Nobody wants to see us crazy and screwed up royally. Yah says someone- “Save that for therapy.” And someone else adds, “The reason therapists get rid of us, tired of us…” Just as soon as I heard that, then it was taken from me, and I could only write the gist of the faint voice I heard.

Such sadness. I can’t help but think about how when “I” was suicidal at 13 years old– how my brother found my notes about it to my friend, Kelly, and her notes back. How my brother became suicidal afterwards. Who was it that was hospitalized? My brother. My brother at 11 years old was the one who went into a psych ward for kids. I picked up his homework for him from school. I spoke to his teachers– teachers that I had at one time. And there I stayed in silence- silence of my fear that my father would rape me. Silence of my secret and shame that I would even think or fear such a thing, let alone say it outloud, but I remember it so very clearly. I remember thinking it and nearly obsessing over what I would do and how I would get away and tell. Someone adds, “this time.” I have no idea if it happened during all those conscious fears or after that. I mean, I like to think it didn’t, but too many times I have been shocked into the realization that oh fucking yah, we dissociate and lose time and so yah, it’s so possible that it did and I just had no memory of it then and now. I mean, after all, even when such an obsessive fear and plans of telling, if I had been asked, I would say that no, he didn’t abuse me. Why? Because I had no conscious knowledge of it, and I would never accuse him or anyone of something like that without really remembering and knowing it. But what kind of 13 year old daughter fears such a thing by her father with such depth and careful planning of how she would tell and get away? So there’s one of my secrets. Sometimes I can use that to point to the reality that he did sexually abuse “me,” but other times I look at it and think how it just proves how screwed up I am and that just because I feared such a thing with such intensity and planning thereafter, it doesn’t mean he ever did abuse “me.” I mean, maybe it is possible a girl fears this from her father and her father never touched her.

So basically my brother played the scapegoat role and humor role. I played the hero and invisible child. I don’t know the exact names of these like some others in here do or once did. Now they’ve changed in a lot of ways. After all, we’re the ones who told the secrets and got into therapy. So now Bryan is basically the perfect child in the parent’s eyes. Plus he’s successful in all those “right” ways. He’s got a good job, owns a house, has a child, and more.

But that’s not what this is about right now. It’s that this body is still alive. It’s that nobody really knows or understands how horrifically difficult this has been for us. Not even our therapist, Cec. And there’s anger there, that I don’t completely understand. But it is a rage and a lot of nasty things to be said that I don’t think belong on her, and so I and others squash it down. The fear of expressing such anger, especially displaced anger, and the fear of the punishment or disapproval or her hurt and anger at us for doing such a thing is more than some of us can bear right now. It’s this tentative trust we have with Cec right now. We can’t have anyone inside fuck it up for us. We’re scared of being left again or hurt again in some kind of way by another therapist. Someone screams how stupid that is, perhaps because they don’t want it to be real, or really- because they want us to just get over it and get on with life.

Oh yah, life. So we just wrote how nobody knows what it has been like for us inside. What the hell we went through inside beforehand and then all that time on Friday, even in the early morning hours (middle of the night) on Friday. But that doesn’t matter. And yet it supremely does matter. The pain in being so alone with it and unable to talk about it. Greatly needing Cec, but she wasn’t there and unable to be there. Having to be present in this world, in the time of today and not the past. Yet the past was overpowering us, and we somehow got through Friday. Really the old coping mechanisms so well entrenched in us. Those lessons we were taught so very well– to behave and appear normally and fine at the cost of us. So people called to wish Julie a Happy Birthday, and the voice responding back is someone fine, okay, and not writhering in pain or anxiety or others out-front freaking out about something.

Someone screams at me to shut up. What does it matter anymore. Now we’re left with the cost of this body remaining alive. But that’s another journal entry we need to write another time. Obviously we haven’t spoken about it after all this time and that was the main purpose in writing to begin with.

Just self-hate looms around us. A depths of despair sadness lines our walls inside. But if it is necessary, the masked face will smile and seem fine, normal. It’s what we do. It isn’t who we are.

Somebody and a few others