The Cerebral Mum

Two results of me realising I’m depressed. I am seriously pissed off. And I am even more exhausted. Depression thinks it is useful. It defends itself. Cas has just gone down for his afternoon nap. I slept through his morning one and my body is screaming to sleep again. Maybe I will. Maybe I can’t do this. Is that what my body is trying to tell me? Well, it can get stuffed. Because I’m being attacked on two fronts, physically and mentally. My brain is trying to to undermine me, but it’s angry, and anger is energy. So here, brain, have your say…

Ahh, and now it’s gone all shy and is pretending to be calmly rational again. But I have scribbled evidence on the notepad in front of me to use against it:

So here I am. Self-diagnosed and totally fucking furious about it.

Why? Because I am arrogant and should not have allowed myself to devolve into this state.

Why? Because I have done this before and resent having to do this again.

I resent being a statistic…

I am pissed off because I do not want to engender sympathy and support…

I am pissed off because I am not dramatically depressed. I am not depressed in an interesting, theatrical way. Not in a creative way. I’m just stale and this depression is the commonplace, pedestrian kind that 1 in 5 (or whatever the damn statistic is) people experience. I think I’m too good for it. But no.

There is no rending of garments, no throwing of teacups, no hiding in closets, no cutting myself, no starving myself, no throwing up my food, no shaving off all my hair. No words words words like swords. Just this dead person I think I’m too good to be. Ennui is boring Lassitude is sloth. There is no gaping, wounded emptiness for all the world to see, no catharsis.

Just nothing.

And it is my fault, my fault, my fault. Because I thought I was so clever that I thought I was done. I know everything, like a teenager. I know the secrets of the world. I know the Truth. I know that I am exceptional. And here I am. Not exceptional. With no excuse.

There is no excuse for being here. Not for me. Because I’m clever. Clever in the most clever way. I have the ability to make connections, to see the connections between things that seem unconnected. I have the ability to make the world make sense. Paradox and insanity are my best friends. Like most of my best friends, I haven’t been paying much attention to them.

I’ve just been hiding and wallowing and shrinking and shirking my duty. It’s my duty to know myself, my duty to be myself. That is my moral code. It should be everyone’s, but me? Secretly, I like the rebelliousness of it. I like revolt. I think I’m special.

I let my high opinion of myself absolve me of that duty I haven’t been performing for years. That’s pathetic.

I am arrogant. And I like my arrogance. And I am paradoxical. I am proud of my big pains, my glaring, gaping wounds that no one could make shut up, even when it exhausted everyone around me. Oh, yes, being hurt in dramatic, theatrical ways makes you special too. I am so fucking arrogant that I thought I could, and would, handle everything life threw at me, that I was never a “victim” - that I would never be a “victim” - that I didn’t even bother to deal with the new shit that came my way.

That quiet, nagging shit, of people who wanted me to be smaller. That quiet, nagging shit of having to do meaningless work and conform and dress right and and pay bills. And eat and sleep like a “normal” person. Stupid fucking me just slowly crumbled beneath the weight of feathers.

That’s pathetic.

And the other thing that is pathetic: There’s a bigger thing that got to me, a few years ago. A bigger something outside of me that I had no control over. A bigger thing that was done to me, that, knowing all I know, should not have made me a victim. And I made myself a victim of it anyway.

That stupid boss whom I thought was my friend who grabbed me in the kitchen, and undid my top and restrained me from behind and grabbed my naked breast and made me scared because I couldn’t find away to make it stop. That guy was a fuckhead. I reported it to the police. After months, he got a fine and no conviction.

What pisses me off was not that it happened, was not the lost job, not the talk behind my back, not the warnings that me taking action would give me a bad reputation and make me unemployable. I knew what consequences there would be. What pisses me off is that all the resources I had within myself to deal with such a thing weren’t used. If I had worked my way through it, no matter how long it took and no matter how much I fucked up along the way, I would now be proud of myself.

What did I do instead, with all my brains and all my skills? I just left.

I just left it alone.

And that’s pathetic.

See, brain. You did have something to say.

The October edition of the Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse has been posted over at Survivors Can Thrive and I read all of it today. One of the posts which particularly caught my interest was Weaknesses and Submission for Survival. The writer, Austin, talks about the barriers between her and her sister as they grew up in an abusive household, exacerbated by their different ways of coping.

I relate to this strongly. It may seem to those of you who have been reading this blog for a while now, that Big Sis and I have a wonderful relationship. And we do. But it is not always an easy one, and it is something that both of us have worked very hard to obtain. One of the many, many things that those who have not experienced an abusive family environment often do not understand is the way in which it damages all the family relationships. It is simple. The rule is this:

Divide and Conquer.

Often, I hear people who are shocked and disgusted by the lack of support individual victims receive from the other members of their family. It seems so unnatural to them. Mothers who remain with the partners who have abused their children, for example, are vilified. Unfortunately, more often than not it is unnatural, but not because these mothers lack maternal instincts, not because they are as heinous as the abuser themselves, but because they are victims as well. It is a vicious cycle. We should celebrate when someone, anyone!, breaks it, but we should ache as well for all those who can’t.

I would like everyone, next time they read a story in the newspaper or see a story on TV to wonder not at the inhumanity of these people, but at what they must have gone through themselves to be so incapable of defending their loved ones. I do not say this to give everyone a free pass - not everyone deserves one - but it is indeed possible that they deserve as much sympathy as the primary victim. (From strangers, anyway: A victim’s anger towards those in their life who were blind or who enabled their abuser is always justified. If they rediscover their relationships, that’s fine. If they don’t, well, they have no obligation for forgiveness. Their most important role is to find a way to heal themselves.)

So, divided and conquered they stand. Abusers are often subtle. Abuse is often subtle. Often, the things we perceive as stolen from children when they are raped and tortured have been taken long before, in painful increments which erode the child’s sense of self-worth along with their connection to the people around them. Their connection to the people they could tell. As they know less and less safety in their lives, the abuser becomes more and more secure. And so more is permitted.

And what is safety, to a child? Safety is home, it is family. It is that thing they are sure of; the haven which allows them to venture out into the world, knowing always that there is a place, and its people, to return to. If someone in the family wants to abuse a child, that place must be stripped bare of inhabitants.

…the mother made certain my sister and I stayed divided. With my sister’s cunning plans and my thinking ability to see it through we would have been unstoppable. The mother couldn’t have that now could she? Two kids who put their heads together to overthrow a tyrant, two kids completely different putting young resources together to survive that tyrant would have been something to contend with. There was no way in hell the mother could afford for us to be friends. _AUSTIN

There was no way in hell my adoptive father could afford for my sister and I to be friends. There is no way he could afford for us to trust each other, to see each other clearly. Together, we would have found the words to tell our mother, to make explicit that thing none of us alone could face.

Looking back, it is difficult to determine precisely the causes of the wedge between us. We are very different. Our minds work differently. Perhaps we would have disliked each other for those differences anyway. Perhaps we would have gone through a normal sibling rivalry. But what I remember most is this:

The way in which he ridiculed her, the way he made direct attacks upon her self-esteem. The way she never spoke back to him. The way she existed in the world outside our family, popular, talkative, confident and loving. The way all the good things about her became her mask instead of herself. The way she fulfilled every prophecy of failure he gave to her. The way he told her she was fat and ugly and stupid and the awful way she believed him.

The way he told me constantly how clever I was, how I was destined to be somebody. The way I argued passionately with him while my family, craving peace, left the room. The way I lived with fairies. The way the world inside my head was more real to me than daily things. The way he was proud of me, the way he bragged about me. And the awful way this separated me from my sister.

Picture this: In late primary school, I go to my mother crying. I ask her not why is he so mean to Big Sis, but why doesn’t he treat me the same way he treats her. I am crying because I am singled out. I cannot understand why. I do not want to be singled out. I do not want to be different, separate, from my sister. But how could I comprehend that then?

In many ways, abusers are smart. They are perceptive. They recognise the weaknesses they can exploit. My sister’s weaknesses and mine were different: I loved thinking, my sister loved people. For both of us, the other was the image we were battered with. Our mere presence was enough to hurt each other for a long, long time.

There is one thing that unites an abusive family, and that is silence. They show one face - one family face - to the world but within their own walls there are no real words between them. To speak would be to shatter the masks, and the masks are what holds the individuals together while holding the people apart. Our psyches can only take so much before our defence mechanisms kick in. That may sound like jargon but it is an accurate description. They are mechanisms, like breathing. They are not conscious and they override what would have been our normal functioning. My sister lost herself in a world of people, hiding from the fact that she felt worthy of none of them. I lost myself in the world of my imagination, hiding from the imperfection of my life.

When we grew to adulthood, I remained the image she was battered with. She remained, to my mind of pictures, less real than me. It took a lot of years, a lot of talking and a lot of arduous respect to learn each other’s language and find the things we shared. It took a lot of years to learn the other was not what we despised, and not the thing we should have been.

There are worse childhoods than mine. I come from a cycle which has been broken. By all of us: My mother, my Big Sis and me. I have the gift of an extraordinarily strong family which will never be taken for granted. Not all victims of abuse are so fortunate. Please feel for them. All of them.

We ask ouselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?… Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t be insecure around you. _{Marianne Williamson}

Bec left this quote for me today on my post, Imagine if… and it says far more succinctly and purposefully one of the things I was trying to say. It says something I have known for a long time and that knowledge has kept my head above water through some dark days.

But knowing it and living it are two different things.

There have been times in my life when I have lived it; when I’ve spoken with the courage of my convictions, when I’ve given my feelings and ideas the respect they’ve deserved, when I’ve revelled in my own existence. Memories of those times have been sustaining while living as a shadow of myself for the last few years but they have also been a temptation to regress.

You can’t go back to the girl you were because you are now so much more! Mourn her if you must, but don’t let her keep your eyes closed to a new world. _{Rob on Minutiae… or I am nobody…}

I started this blog as a lazy way to stay in touch with the diaspora of my family and in the process I remembered the power of writing. Not just the power of writing, but the power of my writing. I remembered my ability to write myself into existence. I remembered the fullness of words and faintly heard my forgotten voice.

I changed the subtitle of this blog to thinking my way back to myself… and took my first steps on that journey. Yesterday, when I wrote Imagine if.., those first steps became a stride.

Often in life it is when someone else’s needs are greater than your own that your potential becomes your reality. Often, when you can not care enough about yourself to be fully present in the world, you can find a reason to in others.

Yesterday’s post was difficult to write but not because it was deeply personal or painful. I have been at peace with the ugliness of my history for a long time. My childhood is a part of what made me who I am. I have learned many things, things that I am proud to have learned, not because of my experience, or in spite of my experience, but through my experience. I don’t wish anyone to have to learn those things the way I did, but I would not change my history if I could.

The reason yesterday’s post was difficult to write was because it would be confronting for those reading it. I had to overcome the hurdle of that social taboo that tells us we cannot talk about politics and religion at a dinner party, that tells us we cannot discuss subjects that cause controversy, that tells us we will make people uncomfortable.

I wrote about child sexual abuse and it is very common for victims to fear speaking up. In many cases they have been living with a “behind closed doors” and “keeping up appearances” mentality for a long time. The power of that taboo keeps them silent and they minimise their experiences in order to contain them, making them mistrust themselves.

But the reason I wrote what I wrote was not just to speak out against child sexual abuse, even though that issue is of enormous importance and needs to be written about over and over until it no longer exists. The issue is broader.

It is not just victims of CSA who live under the weight of this taboo. How many things do we stay silent about in this world? How many people learn to live, like myself, as shadows for fear of offending?

Self-censorship is a social disease.

I cannot attribute my own self-censorship to that specific part of my history. It may have been one of the paths which led me to it but I am an adult and I believe that I am free. Knowing that I made myself who I am, I am able to take credit for who I am. And when who I am falls short of my own aspirations or my own principles, knowing that I am free allows me to accept the imperfection of my humanity without ever seeing it as the final measurement of my self.

Yesterday, outside events moved me to overcome that taboo which I gave power to. I am proud that I did.

And I like talking about politics and religion at dinner parties.

And I choose controversy over Let’s agree to disagree…, which is a noble sentiment only when not used as a coward’s weapon to shame others into silence.

And I like it when I make people uncomfortable. Writing Imagine if… was an uncomfortable process for me and I am closer to my aspirations and my principles because of it.

I like being brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous. And I am grateful when other people are.

Those people light the way. And I can be one of them.

The third assignment from 30 Poems in 30 Days. Writing about issues…

“Find a news or opinion article that was published on the web this week. I recommend using Google News because it can take you just about anywhere. Look for a story that has some emotional or philosophical impact on you and use that story as the basis for your poem”

I love men.
I love the stillness of them
Their lack of agitation
When they shake off
Their workaday
Clothes

Their ability to not
Talk, to not repeat
Their thoughts
Over and over again
Their lack
Of doubt.

Men are peaceful.
But there are times
When they need
To think beyond
Their words
Beyond

Other men’s words
Times they need
To see the
Queen trapped
In the corner
Of the chessboard

While they laugh
Albeit humourlessly
At another joke
At the Queen’s
Expense
While she shrivels

Beneath the gaze
And turns to ivory.
Women talk
But men hear
Men’s voices
Like dogs

It’s all
In the pitch,
Bitch.
When they
Are not funny
Why won’t you
Snarl at them?

The news story I chose, Sexual harassment in Wadadli - Where do we draw the line? The key lines are, “Have we then as men and women facilitated an environment where people get away with such deeds that to some this has become the norm? Or is sexual harassment a cultural phenomenon that has to be defined according to the socialisation of the men and women in that environment?”

I think that men have a greater responsibility than women to speak up when other men cross the line, a greater responsibility to criticise their friends and colleagues openly. To not do so silently confirms that men think it is okay for men to objectify women.

My message to men: Your silence enables other men to continue to feel respected by the only people they respect. It is the tip of the iceberg and it is a slippery slope. If your mates are allowed to get away with this, what else do they think they can get away with?

There is something I hinted in The fable my tattoo tells me… which I never intended to talk about in detail here. It isn’t what this blog is about. I’m thirty four and my history is history. I don’t know whether the subject will come up again but it has today so I’m writing it. I don’t know if you will want to read it.

But I’m writing it.

As a child I was sexually abused by my adoptive father. This information is for “back story” only. It is not something I feel the need to get off my chest. To be specific about the nature of that abuse; I was not raped. The majority of the abuse was what, as adults, we might call sexual harassment. Groping and sexual comments made to appear as jokes but with a real intention to intimidate and shame. My memories are sketchy but these are a few.

In Grade 3, I ask him if he would like a cup of coffee. He says, “No, but you can give me a head job.”

In Grade 5, being punished for something, I am made to take off all my clothes and stand against the wall. I stand there for an hour, waiting to be smacked. He just looks.

16 years old. My mother is away. He has been drinking and comes home. I have a male friend visiting. My friend leaves. I go to my bed. He comes into my room. For six hours he sits on my bed in the dark, talking about sex. The conversation begins as a warning against being seduced. It becomes a conversation about how wonderful it is to be seduced. He says, “I am sexually attracted to you.”

Not long after that, I leave home.

Perhaps this doesn’t seem particularly abusive to you in the scheme of things. There was no bruising. I have no scars. It is difficult to describe the pall over our house, the tension that arose in all of us when it was nearing the time he would be home.

Every day, he would play with himself on the couch while we watched TV. He would masturbate the dog.

He was an alcoholic; unpredicatable, irrational, aggressive and insecure and there were sexual overtones in everything he did. I lived in sexual fear throughout my childhood. That threat hung over me before I could even understand what it was.

The reason why I have written this is because a few days ago while looking for Australian blog carnivals as a way to promote my site, I came across a blog about child protection called Imaginif.

I didn’t want to read it.

I said earlier that my history is history but it never as simple as that. In my life I have spent a lot of time thinking about child sexual abuse, studying child sexual abuse, talking about child sexual abuse. I have spent a lot of time getting angry and getting better. I understood all that could be understood. I was done with it.

I don’t consider myself a survivor. That term reduces me to circumstance and traps me in the past. The events of your childhood, good or bad, provide the language through which you understand the world. They are like a desert wash, a dry stream bed, and when it rains, when life happens, the water naturally flows there and the channels deepen. If you listen to the currents, your childhood is the symbolic key to the map of your present self.

Tonight, I found out something about a young girl I know, which I cannot discuss here, and my stream bed flooded. I felt sick and voiceless and trapped and I was forced to travel through the physical memories of my past again. I recognised the echoes of my own pain and I reclaimed my anger.

I have spoken a lot here about not knowing who I am, about being nobody. There are many pressures in this world for us to reduce ourselves, to not feel too largely, to live passionlessly. To deny everything.

Not wanting to read that blog on a subject I was once passionate about, one that everyone would be passionate about if it wasn’t so unseemly, was just such a denial and I am voiceless because of it.

Tonight I remember the language of my childhood and I remember why I should never stop speaking.

Shrinking yourself to an inoffensive nothing is not just self-harm. If we do that, who will speak for those unable to? Who will cry for those who cannot? Who will guide those who are drowning in their childhood to safety?

__________________________________________

This post, Imagine if…, has received a Perfect Post Award. My humble gratitude to Musing Woman who nominated it. If you would like to read the other award winning posts for September ‘07, click here.