*CONTENT WARNING! Common themes of this blog include, but are not limited to, PTSD and abuse, sexual and otherwise.*

[written on June 2, 2012]

Here’s to hoping June is better than May! As of this morning, I believe I consider May 2012 to be one of the most difficult months of my life. Not necessarily the saddest or the most destructive or…something. Maybe not the worst? If not the worst, only because I think I have more tools to deal with difficulty, now.

For the past ~4 nights, I have had nightmares. They aren’t sexual, they just involve me being stuck in a violent or threatening situation and having to escape. Last night was wholly different and unexpected. Last night I dreamt about E again, but not like I usually do. This time, all I wanted to do was talk to her. She was so angry in the dream — she wanted nothing to do with me at all. When I finally did talk to her, I wanted to tell her that I’m going through this process now.

By the end of the dream, I think I finally had some subconscious info about our relationship because I think I kind of understand what went on there. I think it’s interesting I never put all of this together before, but as soon as I told E explicitly some of what happened to me (in real life, not in this dream), and she was the first one I ever told that to, I think I knew, somehow, that we weren’t going to work. I think E is the relationship I had to sacrifice in order to do this whole healing thing. For the last 4 years, I’ve been talking or thinking about hate crimes* as the reason our relationship didn’t or couldn’t work. I kept thinking and feeling like I just wasn’t getting the support I needed from her. I think that was and is true. I don’t think she could have supported me from ALongDistanceCity and I also don’t think I was ready for this healing, but knew somewhere along the line it was going to happen. It’s like, once I had the courage or impulse to say out loud what happened, it was the first step in dealing but I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. There must have been something inside of me that knew this was coming and knew E wasn’t the one to do this with me, if anyone was. I think hate crimes provided this trigger-like response — they created an unsafe and violent sexual environment which awoke the part of me that had felt the same ways before. I don’t think I realized at the time, but I think I was asking E if she could stand this sort of pending struggle, and something about her response told me she couldn’t.

In some ways, I think she actually did help me along this road — if all of these choices are first steps, then she helped me start. 4 years later I feel like I’m really doing this. I am healing and clearly coming to a greater understanding about how all of these seemingly dissociated events are  linked by the fact that they’re all my experiences. It’s clear I don’t understand how my life fits together yet — I still feel overwhelming pressure and sadness and confusion and exhaustion on a lot of days. I still feel like I am not living a life in which my experiences are unified. I am still working to understand what it means for me to be healing from childhood sexual assault and what that means for the overall thread of my life.

But, after 4+ years, it seems like I’m finally starting to understand how my whole life is affected by my childhood, and once I figure out how to live that full experience, I really do believe there’s greater understanding and the “end” — not just about me and my life, but about how my life and experience is connected to all of the violent norms in our society. This isn’t just a fight for my own life back. This is me trying to gain something that leads to a deeper understanding of pain, struggle, trauma, identity, recognition, and individual agency with respect to the choices we make for ourselves. The resolution will be amazing, whatever it is. I just have to keep trying to get there. Along the way, I think I’m going to learn a lot about myself I didn’t know before.

Here’s to June.

-FTL

*I was a target of anti-queer, anti-gay hate crimes in the early months of 2008, during my final semester of undergrad. It pretty much sucked, and E, my girlfriend at the time, was living across the country.