My Stuff

[Galien]

I was born into a family with a depressed mother and an extremely violent alcoholic father. Both my parents were violent towards me, and as the eldest of four I took on adult responsibilities. Our family often went without food because it all went on alcohol. At school I was bashed by other kids because I was poor. That abuse went on at school, every day for me until I lost the plot and threw a brick at someone in my fourth year of high school. That’s five years of primary school and four of high school, being spat on pushed over, called a dog, told I was the ugliest girl on the planet and I didn’t deserve to live. At nine our family split up when my dad abandoned us, we became homeless and I was put into a church home with my sister for a year when I was sexually assaulted by the minister who ran it.

 

I got married to my first husband just before I turned 17. Our marriage lasted two years because he used to beat me up. A lot. My face was often black and blue and my lips twice the size they should have been. I left him and ended up homeless. Then I became a prostitute for four months because I had no other real choice. I drank too much too, to drown out the fact my soul was dying and I felt so guilty about what I was doing but felt I had no choice. I went for over 50 job interviews and could not get a job.

 

Despite this I was still able to kind of look after my drug addicted mind fucked sister who is like a human tornado through the lives of everyone she meets. I met my 2nd husband when I was 20. Things were okay for a brief time, but I was from the ghetto and his f amily were rich and it caused problems. I also discovered he had his own issues with anxiety from his own abuse at boarding school. He was very emotionally abusive toward me for the whole time we were married. I always hoped he would wake up one day and see how great I was but he never did. My niece came to live with us when she was two and I was 23, instant parenthood with the head full of horrors I had was very very hard.

 

At 9 in the home I became a Christian and decided I wanted to be like Jesus, kind to everyone, treat others the way I wanted to be treated, and never ever become my abuser. At 12 I started going to an AOG church who convinced me there was a demon under every coffee mug and I spent my life in terror, too scared to sleep in my own bedroom in case I would be attacked by them. My teenage years I remember as being poor, alone, terrorised. I was lucky enough to have some friends and decent grandparents to soften the blow, but it didn’t help much. My first major depression on my 15th birthday rendered me suicidal, and that feeling of wanting to die lasted up until about 18 months ago. I have had to fight suicide tooth and nail all my life.

 

Looking after my sister has been a constant battle. She overdoses about once every two months, leaves bills unpaid and cuts a swathe of disaster through her life and the lives of everyone she touches. She has multiple substance abuse problems, is a pathological liar, thief and conwoman. Everything I am not, almost like an evil twin. Looking after her has taken a lot out of me.

 

In 1984 we moved from the city to the town I live in now and got involved in the cult. At first I felt sightly better but I still believed demons would attack me if I followed after god. I never told people about the terrible fear inside me. my husband didn’t care. I often cried all night and his response would be shut up, you are keeping me awake. throughout my life I have had no real support from anyone really, except maybe my dear grandparents. My time in the cult was about me constantly arguing with the oversight about them being assholes and treating people like shit. the cult, or the assembly as it was known was my whole social support system and I loved the people in it like my family and the constant threat was over me that I would lose them all if I did not comply. But I couldn’t. they are a shunning cult and if anyone was put out I was not supposed to speak to them. but I don’t let men in suits tell me what to do. I was always in trouble for every single word I said. People would spy on me all the time and tell the pastor everything I said. I would get hauled up and screamed at for three or four hours at a time.

 

As time went by my untreated and undiagnosed depression and anxiety was getting worse and worse. I was having horrific nightmares pretty well every night. My eldest, who I had adopted from my sister started running wild and acting like my sister. I was devastated and felty a failure as a person and a parent. My life was slipping away from me and I could do nothing to stop it.

 

They put me out of the cult. I lost all my friends in one day. I was isolated in my home. I had a breakdown with firstly manifested itself in obsessive compulsive disorder, Firstly I had to stop driving because every time I saw a truck I was compelled to drive into it, with my two year old daughter in the car. Then I would wake every ten minutes thinking I had stabbed my baby girl in her bed and kept checking her over and over and over. At my uni lectures I thought I would jump up in front of everyone and start barking like a dog. Terror of losing control in public took its toll. I started having hallucinations. I went for help. I was unable to eat, drive or have a conversation for 8 weeks and even though I was heavily medicated, all I did was cry. I lost a lot of weight. The church told me I was separated from god for my disobedience, and that this breakdown was punishment from him. I was separated from the god I had loved my whole life almost. I was in hell and I didn’t know how to come back. It took a year before I felt almost normal again. It was hard having 2 children to raise aged 4 and 12.

 

At least my depression had finally been diagnosed and I started on antidepressants, but I was still stricken by a sadness and emptiness so deep it had no end. I could no longer feel anything but emptiness, loneliness and even in a room full of people I was totally isolated. Then my husband left me.

 

I did, in my stupidity, allow myself to be dragged back to church by well meaning friends. I sat in the back of the church every Sunday and cried for the first four years because I thought god still didn’t want me. Over time the church made my depression worse, blamed me for it and in the end I left after 10 years there. The church and I no longer had anything in common.

 

In 2001 I had my first fulltime job at a school in the finance section. I was very happy to be off partial welfare and I finally felt like I was becoming partially human again. I made friends with a teacher there who had bipolar, as usual my empathy kicked in and I wanted to help her cope. She was on her third marriage, and that was on the rocks. I minded her kids so they could spend time together. the marriage probs were her fault but she just didn’t listen. I was still in church at this time, and my employment contract specified celibacy in singleness, which I was happy with at the time. My depression had killed my sex drive anyway, and my husband used to withhold sex from me when I wouldn’t do what he said, so I had pretty well forgotten what it was.

 

Over time I became friendly with her son. She abused him pretty badly and he told me a lot of stuff he couldn’t tell anyone else. He and I had our nutty mothers in common. he was very smart for a person his age, and because he had pretty well looked after her for most of his life he was wise beyond his years.

 

My church asked me to do a course on my childhood sexual assault in the hope that I could facilitate the course in my church. It ran for 2 blocks of 3 months. the first three months was very very hard. It unravelled me in way I had no expected. I realised I had been raised to believe my needs were of no importance, and I had squashed them down so deep I could not even identify them anymore. I got so angry at my parents for doing that to me. Rage and despair started flying out all over the place. In the middle of the second course of 12 weeks I changed my antidepressants and my hormones went off like a volcano.

 

During this period of time I got a txt message from my friend’s son telling me that he had romantic feelings for me. I told him he was too young and it was inappropriate for us to be together. The next time I walked into a room where he was my feelings for him hit me like a bomb. I was in love with a person young enough to be my son. I was devastated. I told his mother straight away how I felt. She said ok, but nothing could happen because of his age and she had felt similar feelings for him, which I found creepy in the extreme.

 

I spent the next three months in extreme depression, guilt and anxiety because of the feelings I had. I accused myself of everything. I went to see a shrink and three different counsellors. I just wanted to die. I had nightmares every night when I did manage to get to sleep. I realised in the end I had two alternatives – suicide or accept my feelings. Didn’t mean I had to act on them. The shrink told me that the fact I had retained my capacity to love after all this shit, was the most important thing.

 

But eventually I did act on them. It took me three more months to fully accept my feelings, and to change my long held paradigm of no sex outside marriage. When we eventually did sleep together, it was the most wonderful experience and one I will remember for life. I was sick and tired of being miserable and it was time for me to acknowledge my needs and have some of them met. I thought people would understand love. They didn’t. My daughter read my txt messages and told a friend about the relationship I was having. And she told someone else etc, etc etc. I thought the fact we were two consenting adults over the age of consent would mean it was our business. I was wrong.

 

Because he was still a senior student at the school I worked at, and I had breached my employment contract by having sex I had to leave. Some people decided that anyone who has sex with a student is guilty of sexual assault. I was absolutely devastated that anyone could accuse me of such a thing after what had been done to me as a child. Again, I lost most of my friends, my Christian friends because I had sex outside of marriage. Again I was thrown into social isolation. The relationship ended, and I became suicidal and had to be hospitalised for my own safety. The next six months were a nightmare from which I thought I would never awake. I could not live my life without him. My love for him had turned into something I could not control, and it was going to cost me my life. I was deeply in love with this man that I could not have. Ever.

 

The hospital finally found me a therapist who helped me to find myself again. She told me that most people who live with my level of emotional distress do not survive. It has dogged me most of my life. It has taken four years for me to sort through pretty well all of my baggage. I no longer care what others think of me, I have discovered a lot about myself. I no longer give a shit about social mores or other people’s judgements. Fuck them. if they don’t know who I am by now, they haven’t been paying attention.

 

In that period of time I have been fucked over badly by two other men. One told me I was pretty well just a beer courier and a bed warmer after we had been together a year. The other one told me he loved me for a year, then I discovered he had been fucking someone else the whole time, and he went off to live with her.

 

I have learnt a lot in this life, but under it all I am still the same gullible little girl who wants to do the right thing. I have made decisions other people don't agree with but they were my decisions, made for my reasons.

 

Despite the fact I don't really believe in god anymore (there I've said it), I will always, always believe in love. Love heals. I always thought that all the love in me came from god, now i dont know where it comes from. Sometimes I think there is a collective bank of it somewhere that channels through us from who knows where. What I do know is that despite all the shit I have been through, love will remain my goal and the most important thing in my life. Not one single fucker is going to take that way from me. Not churches, not belief systems, not hardhearted cynical people, not anyone. They will still find me clinging to it when they put me in a box.

[Shyone]

Despite the fact I don't really believe in god anymore (there I've said it), I will always, always believe in love. Love heals. I always thought that all the love in me came from god, now i dont know where it comes from. Sometimes I think there is a collective bank of it somewhere that channels through us from who knows where. What I do know is that despite all the shit I have been through, love will remain my goal and the most important thing in my life. Not one single fucker is going to take that way from me. Not churches, not belief systems, not hardhearted cynical people, not anyone. They will still find me clinging to it when they put me in a box.

Oh, darling, that is heartbreaking. On top of that, your poem tore me up.

 

The heart can't choose who to love. I really believe that.

 

I hope you have the love you want in your life. I'd say you earned it.

[Galien]

Thanks Shyone. No, one never knows why the heart chooses as it does. Some days are diamonds, some are stones. I have two lovely daughters that I love more than life itself, a home, a job, dear friends and a man who loves me. Could be a LOT worse. Some days I still feel angry about what I have missed out on, but overall I am just damn glad for whatever genetic accident made me such a defiant little cow. I used to feel suicidal every day, then it went to every second day, then weekly, fortnightly, monthly and now I have not felt actively suicidal in over a year, which is the longest time since I have been 15, and I turn 50 in November.

 

Onward and upward, no matter what.

 

(Except for that damn plane trip in 3 weeks time to my kid's wedding. I keep asking myself - if the plane blows up and you dont die will you be conscious until you hit the ground?) Hmmm. 10 hours in a plane. I didn't think I would ever love anyone that much

[Shyone]

 

Onward and upward, no matter what.

 

I haven't heard to many people say they wished they had committed suicide. Things seem to get better most of the time, and sometimes things get really good.

 

Just wait until you have grandkids!

[ShallowByThyGame]

You are a treasure. Keep that heart open and let it shine on everyone you meet.

 

It saddens me to imagine how much love is destroyed by church dogma, it's almost as if they fear love because they know it is more powerful.