Hey there,
So just realized when sending an email to a friend that I should make this public. I've sent a long letter to my first step-father, the sexually abusive minister one. I have many step-fathers if you don't know that already, so making a distinction here. I asked him to fill in the blanks for me, as I have many blanks. I have no idea if he will do this or, more likely, deny everything, or what. I haven't laid eyes on this man since I was 13 or 14. Hadn't seen him since I was 6 before that. Even at 13 or 14, I thought, wow he's just this older man, not intimidating at all. He had been this giant scary person when I was little. I remember a story he told then, when I was a teenager, about handing in a paper at university to a teacher and realizing he would either fail or get an A because it was so controversial, what he had done. He got an A, of course (which is of course why we would be hearing the story) and I took that on board. As kind of a guiding principle my whole life.
This is the weirdest thing about this person in my life. His politics were very left-wing and absolute at the time. We had to go to Canada to get meat that was less imperialist and he yelled at his congregation/s for saying they were Christians and supporting the Vietnam war (we had to move all the time because he would get kicked out of the churches consequently, by the Trustees who were none too pleased to be lectured at by their supply pastor). I remember all of this, and anyone who knows me now would recognize certain features...so it is odd that he was also the most abusive person in my early childhood in many ways. I think people leave imprints in many ways.
So I have reached out to this person, in hopes of the blanks being filled - what, so I will be whole? I suppose this is my hope. Is it a a vain hope? Perhaps. There is an icy tundra in me, I feel it at times acutely and I want it to melt...but at times, like now, it feels like perma-frost. my therapist keeps assuring me I am moving forward that these are toxic feelings coming up and I hope she's right.
I'm also somewhere between paranoid and just plain weirded out by my relationship with others right now. Afraid that the dark times I'm in are alienating people...then finding out directly from some that my way has been difficult for them...no overt hostility but a kind of impending sense of doom, that I am not a good friend somehow or failing even in this...it's weird though because I have other friends where that is not the case at all. however, in the state I'm in now anyone with a negative view of me wins the contest for who am I 'really'....and those with whom I can share things honestly and openly, well that just gets thrown by the wayside, which is of course deeply unfair.
Right now, I must say, the folks who I can relate to best tend to be in AA, which makes sense, as I think we are all more forgiving of each others' foibles in general and understand more than most where the jagged edges come from...but that's not entirely true either...
Oh, the shame in writing this! The sense that I'm saying I'm a horrible friend and others don't like me so I will be shunned by the other girls in school like when I was little...WOW, amazing that that shame is still there, lo these many years later...
And of course the shame of the abuse when I was too little for school and we lived in rural countryside where there was no one to see or hear what went on...the attempt to hide that damaged child, the permafrost...seeing her in there now, suffocating wanting out, not knowing how to allow it to happen, how to warm up the ice. Christ on a stick this is hard.
Not sure if writing this will help or hurt but writing it anyhow...this was the original point of this blog being anonymous to let out what could not go anywhere else.
A friend said who does the same it's outwarding rather than inwarding and I think she's right. I've probably already written that here before but so be it.
OK, out into the wilderness with this...before I chicken out.
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