One of the on-line stories that I've downloaded and reread a lot has as its main character an AMAB person who, at age 6 (early 1950's), was caught wearing her sister's clothes and as a result was sent off to be abused by the mental health profession and later in a borstal, until she managed to escape.
For reasons that are too long to describe here, she becomes responsible for two young girls and is having to deal with social workers who want to know about her past. She tells them a small part of the horrors she endured, and when the social worker suggests that it's in the past, she answers that the abuse is still running around in her head, the pain never goes away. "It's a life sentence."
Anyway, recently that phrase has been echoing in my mind. I'm slowly becoming aware of how much the Hell I went through is an integral part of who I am. There was never a time before the horrors, so there is no self that wasn't already deformed and maimed by the abuse. There is hardly anything I do or feel or am which isn't still visibly affected by it. I'm realizing that unless someone knows this about me, they will never understand me or why I do what I do.
Up to now, I've avoided talking about any of this because my experience growing up was that nobody wanted to hear any of it. They'd push it away or dismiss it or minimize it. What surprises me is that now some of the people I know are willing to listen and even sympathize and validate my feelings. Somehow this is allowing me to actually feel for myself just how bad it was -- and still is.
I think that this is once again a case of my subconscious not letting me feel something or even see it until I'm ready to deal with it. Last weekend I was back in the headspace from childhood where no one can be trusted and anyone I talk to will try to make me feel bad, and on Sunday, someone from my church, seeing how upset I was, got me to talk to her. She was willing to hear me, to sympathize and support me, which in my state of mind was kind of a shock. I cried and felt my despair, but because there was someone there who could hold my despair in her heart and not freak out or push me away, I was able to bear it. It made a big difference.
It's a little like my being trans and out: the more the people around me can recognize my transness (and my peculiar version of it), the more comfortable I feel with my transness myself. Maybe, as I'm more able to open up about my pain and brokenness and despair and see people validating and accepting it, the more I'll be able to deal with it myself and won't have to run away from it. (This is very new and very scary stuff for me, though.)
I will always be what my Hell has made me (and maybe that's not entirely bad), but if I can be "out" about it and still be in the human race, maybe I won't have to suffer the additional Hell of being alone with it.
