Drowning In Crap

(Be safe: This may trigger.)

A few months back, I had a therapeutic breakthrough that resulted in my really feeling, in ways never before felt, the ultimate crap and horror of my childhood. I've felt it in such profoundly relentlessly disturbing ways that for the first time in my life I made contracts with several people to not self-harm. My struggle since then has been to throw off the overwhelming residual feeling of taint. It feels indelible, and saying it's misplaced doesn't make it vanish.

So the rational person will say (and does say), "You were a very small child. You had no other choice but to do what you did to survive." And therein lies a fundamental problem.

Today I realized there are two very different rivers of crap flowing here, each with their own type of stain. There's the river of crap filled with things done to me, and things I saw, before I even reached kindergarten. Things I was made to do. I can almost deal with this.

Then there's the other river of crap filled with childhood-born self-loathing because I desperately wanted -- and tried unsuccessfully -- to kill myself several times between ages four and six. It just wasn't that easy at that age in the 1950s, and once dissociated from the horror reality, I was otherwise a very naive child.

I'd tried telling what was happening to me and my sister to everyone I could think of. I wasn't my most articulate when terrified. My mother's favorite line about me was "you know how she tells stories." No one believed me. And I'd tried provoking my main perp's hair-trigger for violence against me, hoping he'd make a mistake and either kill me or wound me in such a way that it could not be ignored or talked away or hidden by my mother the nurse. Obviously, I failed.

As I grew older -- toward five, then six -- I realized that as long as I lived, the things I was made to do specifically to other children would continue. I realized that the only way to stop it was to stop myself from living. (Of course that wouldn't really stop it, but desperate children need to believe in something.) But because my plans were -- face it -- childlike in their execution, it never happened. It also never happened because there were others inside of me who refused to die, if for no other reason than that someday I would make people believe me.

So there's this raging conflict where I should be enjoying the fulfillment of my longer-term hopes, but it's subsumed by and filled with this sense of taint. The triumph doesn't exist in this revulsion that I ever allowed myself to live a second longer when it meant another child would also hurt.

The rational voice says "It was not your responsibility to die as a five or six year old. The child survived and made a much louder, much more persistent, voice not only possible, but heard."

It's all so ... rational, but it takes none of the revulsion away.