I can try this. I can write about that which I dare to speak of. How stupid of me. For it is nothing. Nothing to make a big deal of. “Stop being so melodramatic, Julie” says the voice. A voice so scathingly like the mother’s voice. I know it isn’t anything big. It seems so stupid for it to bother me?, bother us to some degree or another. And yet it does. But as I write this, there are no feelings. They are held deep within, away from my heart, lest I actually admit that it IS a big deal. Lest I fall apart as the shame succumbs me and the utter self-disgust rots my insides out.
So what is it? What could be so vile and so intrusive that would mark such a meaningless post of melodramatic neediness and speaking of abuse that really isn’t real abuse.
The neighbor boy (R)- he was only at most a year older. Although he had an older brother (D) several years older than that and some inside say also abused them. And yet, in the young girl’s eyes, R appeared and seemed so much older than her. So much bigger than her. How silly and stupid of her to view him that way, and yet she insists that he was bigger and older than her.
To tell this dumb “secret” in public, to an open audience, is so much harder than it should be. The fears that if the details, the additional information, the whole picture, if all of this is written about, given, portrayed accurately, that anyone reading it would surely know that it really is her fault (my fault? our fault?). And I suppose one of the bigger issues, is that it would utterly be true that she was and is making a big deal out of nothing and being melodramatic and needs to shut up and get over it.
And the sad thing is, the more this is written about, the greater the build up of intensity of “what is it?; what happened?” and of course this all leads to such a stark contrast to what really happened. Not much and yet, enough to imprint itself deeply into this young girl’s heart and mind forever.
Can I do it? Can I write it? I can’t really begin to tell the memory piece without providing some general history information to provide a better understanding of how it affected her.
The walls have come down hard and come up hard. The switch happened and it is locked shut. How many times will we do this before we write it? Before we just tell it. Not to only our therapist. Not to perhaps a trusted friend, though only pieces of it.
Another attempt gone by. Perhaps inching closer to the reveal. The reveal wherein the fear and belief is so strong that this will indeed prove it was nothing at all and we made a big deal out of nothing. That somehow this has haunted us always– for we have always remembered pieces of this memory… parts of it were never forgotten. We always knew it happened. The shame constantly eating away at us. It is hard to believe there is anything left of us after all these years. The self-hate and badness looming and proving that it is so much greater than anything we could ever do to overcome its truth.
And truly, this is in many ways, a “mild” memory. I mean, worse things were done, and yet this affects us. It is the emotional content and dynamics that have left scathing wounds.
And so it lives on buried within.
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