Hi Rachel!
It’s great to hear from you! Hope life is going well for you. Are you at TV at school? In what grade?

And congrats on running also. 

Say Hi to your mom for me. 

Run on… because you can!

 Oh yeah, so that was a rant that I typed faster than a person should be able to type without some sort of genetic enhancement.  I don’t really type things like “new” when it is “knew” or have massive pronoun and grammar issues.  And I suppose this isn’t much of a success story.  Abusive childhood, violent things happening in early 20s late teens, raised in small town southern backwards backstabbing and everything being about image.  People used to be so impressed I wasn’t a hooker…that instead I was living alone and had been since most people get to college, working my way up on merit, and able to leap large mountains in many many painful bounds.  Then, sickness, ditched by the few friends I had?  Judged, misjudged more accurately by the only family still around?  (Mom still married to my dad who abused me my entire childhood, the worst of which being the non criminal, mind-frak aspect.  Imagine my shock in psych classes in college learning about brainwashing, pre and post torture techniques used to strip self identity, image, and belief that you are worthy of the most basic rights.  Calculated, researched techniques happened to me by someone who had no such research, just a little angry man who was  pushed around everywhere so he took it out on his property, his kids.  But not the whole family, who still see’s him and blames me, talk about me as the black sheep who is just playing mind games and being dramatic.  That was how we were raised.  Feelings are being dramatic.  Upset about something?  Comfort?  No, just “what TV show showed the cool kids sullen and aloof this week that you are copying?”  When in reality I was in my room slicing pieces out of myself never having heard of a cutter.  Restricted from most normal activities our age, grounding meant no reading.

I still wonder if someday when the went to clean up what had been me and my sister’s room together from 6 years old to 17, if she noticed my headboard had “never forget” carved into it.  Something I remember doing in pure frustrated, caged animal rage.  Not a promise to stay angry forever, the anger hurts me and no one else.  Just to remember not to let him get away with it, not to let the family sweep it under the rug, at least not with me around.  Well, sweep they did, and I am not around.  Sometimes the voice goes quiet and I can admit to myself there were so many things I could have done.  Never like other people, and deep down, no matter how indoctrinated by southern morals or brainwashed I was, nothing got at that tiny part that knew being different from these people could only be a good thing.  But when you grow up surrounded, utterly intrenched in willful ignorance and hate,  it is almost impossible to break away from everything you were taught.  To keep a secret spark alive where they can’t get at it.  I was a kid, it wasn’t my fault.  The events themselves I could be over.  It seems like a movie I watched anyway. It isn’t the predator or the ones that found me no matter how many state lines I crossed since that still hurt me.  It is the witnesses who would rather pretend it didn’t happen, avoid conflict at all costs, don’t rock the poisoned boat, we have to use that boat to destroy more generations.  It is my twin who is the ultimate critical judge of me and all I do and feel.  Do we pretend we never fought about it?  Do I just move on and talk about kittens and floofy clouds to the person I trusted, whose opinion still mattered to me, who spent most of my illness living 15 minutes away doing things I wasn’t physically capable of, insinuating I was exaggerating, and never apologizing for being proven wrong by time in her deduction that I was simply addicted to my pain medicine?  We traded places, and she just can’t see it.  I was the denial girl, tough, superior.  I didn’t cry for more than 4 years once.  I thought I had my shit figured out. 

I was wrong.  It can all be taken away at any moment, and you don’t have a clue how you will handle it until it happens.  Something that may end? Sure. Cool diseases where people run races for you, shower you with talk of your bravery and inspiration to others?  Now imagine the doctors, pharmacists, and a world that generally doesn’t understand pain makes you feel like a criminal, and that there is no end.  There is no “fight to survive this.”  There is just “we can’t fix it, you won’t die, no one can see your injury so they will never take it seriously, in fact they will see PTSD from abuse and rape and assume you need psych. You will be judged and people who treat you kindly will be few and far between.  For life.  Now, go be brave.  No, you don’t get a ribbon or a plastic wristband.  You live in your own head now, because no one else will be able to stand you.