secrets

Runaway

~ KJ ~ 1 Comment

I listen to music every day: while I’m walking to work in the morning, while I’m riding on the bus, while I’m working, while I’m walking about the neighborhood, and even while I’m at home working on other things. Music helps distract me when I need distraction. It helps keep me focused when I need to drown out whatever is going on in my head. Music is a big part of my life.

When I really take time and listen to the lyrics, there are some songs that resonate with me. I was sitting at my desk earlier today with my iTunes on shuffle, and P!nk’s Runaway started playing. I started really paying attention to the lyrics and I realized there were parts of it that so closely related to my earlier life.

I was just trying to be myself
You go your way, I’ll meet you in hell
All these secrets that I shouldn’t tell, I’ve got to run away
It’s hypocritical of you
Do as you say not as you do
I’ll never be your perfect girl
I’ve got to run away

I’m too young to be
Taken seriously
But I’m too old to believe
All this hypocrisy
And I wonder
How long it’ll take them to see my bed is made
And I wonder
If I was a mistake

I might have nowhere left to go
But I know that I cannot go home
These voices trapped inside my head
Tell me to run before I’m dead
Chase the rainbows in my mind
And I will try to stay alive
Maybe the world will know my name
God won’t you help me run away!

-P!nk

Throughout my life, I tried to be a good daughter. It took me some time to realize that no matter what I did, I would never be good enough for my mother. She didn’t want me to be good enough, because that meant that some of the attention was taken from her. Narcissists don’t like that.

Secrets. I was tired of keeping secrets. I got to a point where I wanted to shout to the world exactly what I was going through, exactly the type of person my mother was. I started to, little by little. I was tired of staying silent. And that put me in a dangerous situation, because I was still living with the very person I was starting to speak out against.

When I talk about my journey to freedom, I sometimes (without thinking) refer to my new life in terms of running away from my old life. I’ll say “when I ran away from home”. People don’t really understand what I mean when I say that. I’m an adult. Adults don’t run away from home. They just come and go as they please.

Except I couldn’t. I was living in what was essentially a prison.  When I left on July 10th, I ran away. At 29 years old, I ran away from home. I may have left out the front door, but that’s only because I was three stories up and had no other exit.

I wasn’t really 100% sure where I was going to end up, but I knew at that point that I had to leave. If I had stayed much longer, I would not be sitting here today. And I recognize that reality. So much was going on in the months before my escape. It was dangerous. It was a dangerous place to be. I knew when I ran out the front door that day, I could never go back.

I did not run away from life; I ran towards it. Those first 29 years and four months of my existence were not life.

I ran away so I could live.

Trust

~ KJ ~ 2 Comments

I’ve never been able to trust anyone completely.

It’s not surprising. Every survivor of child abuse I have ever met has had the same difficulty with trusting people.

Why is it so difficult for me to trust? Because the first people I met, the first people I ever formed relationships with – my parents – were also the people that abused me for my entire childhood. The very person that a child is supposed to be able to trust was the very person that shattered my ability to trust anyone.

In my healing process, I have come a long way. I have learned, to an extent, to trust other people. But I have never been able to put my full trust in anyone. There are things I keep inside, never feeling comfortable enough with anyone to let them out, never trusting anyone enough to be able to give those things a voice. And in the long run, it drains me.

I have so badly wanted to be able to trust someone enough to let everything out. And I think, just maybe, I finally found that person in my therapist.

I have been avoiding telling my therapist something that has been eating away at me. It has been eating away at me for years, really, but even more so in the recent months. I have made passive comments about it, but whenever she probed further, I said it was something that I couldn’t talk about. It came up again on Monday. I don’t remember everything because I had dissociated towards the end of our session, but it must have been significant because she brought it up again in our Thursday session.

By this time, I think she had an idea about what I was hiding. She asked if we could talk more about it. She asked if there was anything she could do to make it easier to talk about. I really wanted to say let’s forget this ever happened but on some level, I knew that wouldn’t help anyone.

My words were there but I was still so afraid to let them out. I sat there with my head down, staring at the rug beneath my feet, contemplating all of the possibilities that could come out of this. I must have told my therapist at least a dozen times that I was scared. She continued to reassure me that it was okay to be scared, that she understood. She told me that she would continue to care about me no matter what I told her, that no matter how bad I thought my secret was, we would work on managing it together. I told her that no one would understand the darkness within me. She wanted to try to understand.

After a half hour (though it seemed like hours) of inner turmoil and resistance, I finally broke down. I started crying and just blurted it out. The secret that I never told another person. The secret that I never even wrote on paper. The secret I will likely never tell another soul.

Now it was out there, out in the world, and I could never take it back.

I immediately turned away from her and hid my face. I was so disgusted with myself, so ashamed of what I had done. I couldn’t face her.

But she didn’t run away. She sat next to me, comforting me, asking me questions. I asked her if she hated me now that she knew the truth about me. I asked her if I was just like my mother.

“Your mother would never be sitting in therapy like this, feeling this intensely about anything she ever did. But you’re here, feeling all of these things because you care so deeply. You’ll never be like her.”

That still didn’t change what I had done. I still felt sick. I still felt unresolved. But in a way, I felt different. I didn’t feel weighed down. I felt like I could breathe a little deeper. I felt a release.

I realized, after our session, that my therapist is the first and only person I have complete trust in.

I never thought it would ever be possible for me to trust another human being like that.

Secrets

~ KJ ~ 1 Comment

Secrets are dangerous.

They eat away at you, slowly, from the inside, like a slow-acting poison.

The shame takes residence in the pit of your stomach, where it causes a nausea that never seems to subside.

The guilt takes residence in your chest, where it weighs you down so immensely that you can feel your heart hurting from the pressure, you can feel yourself slowly suffocating.

The memories take residence in your mind, where they replay over and over, reminding you of things you can never take back, things you can never change.

These secrets can never come to the surface, so you push them further and further down, hoping that one day, they will just go away.

But they never go away. You push them and you push them as far as they will go. They jounce back, beating you up, ripping you apart from the inside out.

No one can see the damage. No one can see the poison flowing through you. You look okay on the outside. No one suspects a thing.

So you learn to live with your secrets. You let them overtake you, control you, because the alternative seems so much worse.

You can never tell anyone. You can never even write it out because then the paper will know. No one, no thing, can ever know. No one will ever understand the darkness that lives inside of you.

You become a slave to your secrets until the day there’s nothing left of you. Your mind is shattered. Your heart is broken. Your soul is gone forever.

And now you’re just a shell. One final tap and you’ll finally crack, you’ll finally fall to pieces.

But your secrets fall with you, too. No one ever has to know the truth. No one ever has to see the darkness.

Your secrets die with you.