A post about real love.

Tonight I am tired from the day.  It was long and parts of it were difficult- but a lot of good things came from it too.  So tonight I am tired but one of the many things that I have been learning recently is that it is not possible to focus too much on the wonderful things in your life.  So for tonight here is a list of some of the things that make me feel completely happy.

1.  The above image is a pair of boots that I drew on for a friend of mine- I love that she loved them so much that she wore them around everywhere and in the snow.
2.  I am so excited about starting graduate school; I think of it everyday.  This Friday I am going to the school to register for classes and get my ID and I am COMPLETELY EXCITED about that!!
2. b.  When I think about the private studio I will have for two years at graduate school... I get even more excited.
2. c. When I think of the art books I will soon have access to and of a printmaking shop and of being both a student and a teacher... I am thrilled!!
3.  In 8 days I will be going on a vacation and I will have TWO weeks of a rest from therapy!!  I am very excited about that.  I will be surrounded by the people I love most.
4.  I love that I am drawing everyday.  When I first started my therapy and before I started talking about having been raped and for so long- I was hardly able to make my art or take care of myself- now I am doing both of those things and I am getting better everyday.  I continue to make more art and am taking better care of myself.  So... YES TO TELLING THE TRUTH!!

I wanted to say one other thing about real love:  When I was growing up and being abused- I was told that I should not tell anyone about the abuse.  I was told that I would not tell if I really loved the person who was hurting me.  It has taken me a long time to know and understand that if someone really loves you: they do not ask you to hide or lie or cover your pain.

Here is one more thing I really love:  Eve and I have been talking a lot and helping each other more and more each day.  And recently I have noticed that every time we go to say goodbye to one another on the phone we always say, "I love you."  Every time.  And I love it.  I did not grow up with much affection in my life at all and so it gives me a deep feeling of joy to have such a great friendship and to be so close to someone as wonderful as Eve.  And it really is true- I can live without my original family.  It took me years to come to know and accept this: I can pick new people to be my family.  And I have.  And they are an amazing group of people.

I want to end this post with a photo I love; me and Christopher.  We took this picture a few weeks after we met.  He is wonderful.  And everyday- as in this photo- he literally puts a smile onto my face.  And I surely do love that.  :-)

Yes to Love!!

My real name.

I started this blog four years ago and I wrote under the name "Artconstellation".  Today I changed the name of this site and the address to my real name.

When I first started therapy to heal from the abuse I had survived one of the very first things I wanted to do was change my name.  I wanted a new one; I didn't want that connection to the past.  And I did not know it then but that wish- that wish for a disconnection from the past- that was at the heart of what I struggled most with for the past seven and a half years of therapy.  Now I understand:  It was not my name I did not want; it was the story of my life which was attached to it.

When I started my therapy work I was in so much pain that all I could see was pain and I just wanted to not hurt anymore.  I began talking about memories which I had never talked about before and my pain- which had felt very much intolerable- went from that to totally and completely worse than I could have ever imagined.  It was awful.  And so I began... limping and often being carried by friends down the beginnings of the road of my own healing.  It took years for me to start to feel better.  Slowly I began to be able to tolerate more of the truth about my past and eventually I came to understand: I am more than the painful memories of my past.

So there it is.  It took me almost exactly seven and a half years to know it really:  I am more than the painful memories of my past.  

By not disconnecting myself from the past I am able to live fully in the present and to start to think about the future.  And I FINALLY get to be me; Jenny Sawle.  I did survive 25 years of incest and abuse and then I think I really triumphed over it because... I got better.  I stayed alive, I did not continue the cycle of violence, I did not allow my life to be ruled by my pain or by efforts to run from it.  I am an artist, bicyclist, lover of books and music and poetry, lover, friend and a woman about to start graduate school in just a few months.  So YES.  Yes to telling the truth.  Yes to not letting what hurt you hurt your whole life.  Yes to being honest.  Yes to owning your own great name.  Yes.

So, to the readers of my blog... what do you think about this 'new' name change?  I would love to know.

Thank you!!

JENNY SAWLE 

Writing (and not).

I've been doing more writing which is helping me a lot.  Last night I also started a Tumblr blog so I have a place to just upload images whenever I want to- I doubt I will be writing much there- probably just a lot of images.  This is the link to my Tumblr page.  And there is a link to it on the right side of my blog here too.

Also- my friend Eve is writing a lot of great thoughts onto her blog.  That is here: Let the Freedom Continue

Love list.

The New York Times

The online version of Lite Brite. 

Poetry Foundation.

I love Eve and her blog is here:  Let the Freedom Continue

I love poetry and read The Writer's Almanac everyday.

I love that I am not being scared into silence anymore.
+Join me on Facebook!
+Follow me on Twitter!

I love making my work.  Here is a link to my art.

And this music.  I love this.


I love that I am healthy enough now to have a LOVE LIST on my blog!

I will be continuing to add to this list.  :-)

The man who raped me does not look like a rapist; no one does.

(Hubris, May 29, 2011)

I have so many images and memories in my head from the rape.  I am starting to drawing some of the images in an effort to start being able to see them more clearly and also to be able to see them more clearly as events of the past.  It is painful.

This morning I walked the dogs and watered the garden and felt really happy.  I am feeling a lot of relief from my therapy session yesterday and then from the blog post I wrote last night about the things I had started to talk about there.

Sorry this is short but I am off to pick up Christopher from work and I really wanted to post this drawing before I went.

Me and my dad. (A world of hurt.)

When my dad used to get angry he would say, "I'll show you a world of hurt."  Today I said this for the first time to my therapist.  I talked about the feeling that it had always been as though there was no end to the amount of pain inside of my dad.  No end to the violence, the rage, the anger, the hurt and the sadness.

My father never talked about his feelings; his obvious hurt.  He recreated it though- almost everywhere and what felt like all of the time.  It seemed like there was no end or bottom to the pain and horror in him.  The experience of his violence was exactly the feeling of: This will never end.

Thinking about this today with a lot of grief in my heart I went to look through images of my drawings and I was thinking, "I must have drawn this... I must have drawings about this- about the feeling of this hurt and the violence that felt like it would never end."  And I was looking at the pages of my work the thumbnail images of hundreds and hundreds of images of my art and suddenly I could see:  I had drawn it all out.

My father had recreated the chaos of his pain in a real-live-hell-on-earth-perfromance-art-piece.

I had gone on to describe my pain and his violence with my own art; on paper, on fabric and on walls.  I recreated everywhere too the feeling of what felt exactly like a horror that would have no end.

The biggest difference between my father's expression of his pain and my own is that I did not hurt other people on purpose because I was suffering.  Also, in talking about this feeling today- the feeling of the bottomless, endless well of suffering and hurt- I understood another way my experience of that world of hurt is very much different from his:

I do not have to live in that world of hurt anymore.

Yes to healing.  Yes to talking about what hurts so you do not have to hurt anymore.

Yes, yes, yes.

A present.

The photo here is from a blog I read daily which is written by an artist named Catherine.  Here blog is here: Marmite on toast.

I'm always happy when I see a new post on her blog; her rawness of truth both in art and words make her blog a gift everyday.

Take care of the world & the world will take care of you.  She is reaching out.  Go reach back, you!!

Running to freedom. (Not having contact with my original family.)

I still struggle with old feelings of fear from the time when I was being raped.  There were a lot of things to be afraid of then; the rape itself, the violence, the pain, the threats.

The other day I decided to join Facebook.  I realized that I was not using it because of some people on there.  People I used to have relationships with whom I no longer do.  And I tried to imagine what it would be like to tell people I went to high school with that all through that time I was being raped by my father.

I think it is most painful because it keeps making the reality more clear to me.  And that is what I need to do- keep being more honest and clear- in order to continue healing.  I have been writing on here a lot recently about the denial and needing to let it go.  The denial of the rape really has been like an addiction that has been hurting me and my life and  I have been working to stop denying reality and the truth about my past.

For a really long time- most of the last seven and a half years I've been in therapy and working to recover from the incest- I have been living a lot of time in the denial and at first only a little of the time in the reality of the truth.  I started to be able to tolerate the painful truth about my past as I kept working and then there was less denial and more truth.  But I kept running back to that denial; wishing the abuse had never happened, wishing my parents had not hurt me so much and continuing to hurt myself in order to try to hide and cover all of my original pain.

Recently though... it is like I have to RUN towards the truth.  In the past I stayed a lot in the denial and now it has to be the opposite.  The denial is too painful.  Saying and knowing the truth and the freedom it gives me is too good.  After a life of never feeling real or whole; saying the truth is allowing me both.  Trying to deny the reality of the abuse prevents me from really being able to be fully in the present.  It is difficult though.  It is painful and scary because I "lived" for so long in the denial.

Today I was adding friends to Facebook and I literally started to have an anxiety attack.  And I could hear my father- his voice and his threats- and I had to stop what I was doing and pull myself fully into the present.  This is something I have not been able to do until very recently.  In the past (and the very recent past) when I would hurt... I would hurt myself to try to cover my thoughts and the pain I was having.

Today at art therapy I was talking about my struggle with always feeling like the rape was my fault.  I never wondered about this or questioned it. I have always remembered and heard in my head the voice of my father and him saying to me, "Why are you making me do this to you?"  It makes me sick.  I am tolerating the awfulness of it by not being silent about all of this.  Anyway- I always felt like the rape was somehow my fault- he told me it was and he said it often.  I had to believe him to survive.  I had to believe that somehow it was my fault.  And I did.  I believed it.

I no longer have contact with anyone from my original family.  It is sad and painful.  But I would rather tolerate the pain of having no connection to any of them than to try to exist in the suffocating space of pretending and lying.

The other day someone left an anonymous comment here on my blog saying that I was "dragging the family name through the mud".  No, actually I am not.  I am telling the truth.  My abusers were the ones who took the family name through the mud.

I have to live with what they did to me but I do not have to live with it in silence.  I guess they will have to live with me telling the world about it.

And that is exactly what I am going to do.  I am going to keep telling the story.  It is a painful one- but as I tell it- it does free me and allow me to live fully in the present and to imagine a future.  I will start graduate school in just three months.  I am so excited about it; I think about it each day.  An MFA in Studio Art!! Brilliant!!!!!!!  Yes.

My father used to hold me down by my neck and rape me.  I survived him and all of his crap.  Now I am safe and free and getting ready for graduate school.

In two weeks Christopher and I are going on a vacation to be with EVE and her husband and also JESSIEH!!!  So I am completely excited about those things.  Christopher and I are probably going to get an apartment together before September and that makes me really happy too.  Actually... I am really thrilled about the idea of an apartment with him.  Him and our three (!) cats.  I am three months away from being in an MFA program and coming HOME to him.  I am in this place now because I am being totally honest.

And with tears in my eyes I type the following:  I am going to keep saying the horrible truth about having been raped until I was 25.  I still struggle everyday with wishing it had never happened; but there is nothing I can do to change the past.  I can think of one thing I have in common with the two people who abused me:  They made choices.  Now I will make mine.

Nobody wants to know about a father who gets into bed with a child & rapes her; especially not the child.

I tolerate the pain of the abuse I lived through by making a decision to never be silent about abuse.  As a child I was frightened into silence and made to believe that I was the crazy one in my sick family.  I may have "acted crazy" through different behaviors at different times; but I was in fact never crazy at all.  I was suffering from the pain and consequences of sexual abuse.

Acknowledging the epidemic of child abuse is painful.  Silence is in no way the appropriate response to that pain.  Silence will not prevent any violence, protect a child or help an adult survivor of abuse to heal.

My original family denies that the abuse happened.  They wish that I would be silent about it too; that is never going to happen.

I am going to continue using this blog, other social media, my art, my voice and my good name to continue telling my story and I will never be silenced again.

The only one way to tell the truth.

For the past two months I have been working really hard to strip myself of the denial I still was clinging to about my past.  It has been enormously difficult.

My mind literally formed around the idea that the pain and crap my parents were serving me was good love.  I have had to do a lot of work to tolerate understanding that their 'love' was completely toxic.  As Christopher stated: "Their love was toxic; a nuclear meltdown."

When I got my medical records last month I started to have a lot more clarity in my mind about the reality of my past.  It was an 88 page document reaffirming so many things I had both always known about and also lived trying to block out.  But really living and blocking out the truth about reality is an impossible task.

I had come so far in my work to tell the truth- yet I was terrified to really go all of the way.  I kept wanting to slip back- back to dissociating and back to wishing that none of the abuse had ever really happened.  But the very thing that had saved my mind and life was far from protecting me anymore.  The dissociation and wishing the abuse had never happened had saved me, but now it was now keeping me as a prisoner of the past.  I was unable to fully live in the present or to think about a future.

So I started working on fully accepting the painful truth about my past.  I started to try to accept it FULLY.  I started working to not slip into a place where I was pretending the abuse had not happened.  At first it was totally and completely awful.  I kept wanting to run and hide from the painful thoughts I could not 'catch a break from'.  But as I started to feel more present I started knowing it what it was like to not be living a life running on old pain from the past.  I started tolerating the pain of the truth, the pain of the memories and when I wanted to go back to my old ways of hurting myself in order to cover the original pain- I just sat- and I let the painful thoughts pass.  And they do.  The painful memories pass.  I have to keep reminding myself of it now- but it is working.  I am starting to finally be able to not hate myself, to take better care of myself and to be more in the present.

One of the many great things I have come to understand in the wake of the enormous grief I have been having is that what my abusers did to me was not powerful.  There is nothing powerful about hurting a child.  I had always viewed my abusers as very powerful.  One of the things that has helped me a lot is to keep remembering: THERE IS NOTHING POWERFUL ABOUT HURTING A CHILD.  That thought has helped me a lot.

My friend Eve has been helping me a lot and a lot by being honest about her own life and pain.  You can read her great blog here.

Eve and I have been reading from the 12 steps for Survivors of Incest and something I read in there last night is what I keep thinking of today:  If we survived the abuse, we can survive remembering it.


I have come to see I am able to stay safe and to take good care of my mind and my body when I am fully honest about the past.  I can live with the past; I can not change it but I can accept it.  When I accept the truth about the past I become free to live my life fully in the present and I can begin to dream of my future.

Seeing his face right in front of my own.

This morning I started making these images- drawings of memories of the abuse.  Then I started wondering... should I not post these to my blog?  I was worrying because I see him so clearly in my head and I know if I keep drawing him and the images of him raping me that it will all continue to become more clear.  But I can not bear the pain of this alone and I will not be frightened into silence.  Some of the images may be triggering.

Also... after a morning of thinking and talking about seeing so clearly the FACE of my rapist: I made a decision to rejoin Facebook.  I have had an account there before but deleted it because it felt too painful and complicated in regards to "family" and past friends.  But I am not going to be silent anymore and I have to stop carrying this shame around.  What happened to me was not my fault; I can not continue to act in any way as though it was.  I am not sure yet how much I am going to use Facebook- but I am not going to hide from it either.  I will not hide my face, my art or my story.  If you would like to connect with me on Facebook; MY NAME IS JENNY SAWLE.

Q and A. (Saturday, Sunday.)

"I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space."

Viktor E. Frankl, "Man's Search for Meaning"

Day 11 of the 30: The blanket of love.

11 days ago my closest friend Eve and I decided to do a project together.  We had been talking on the phone a lot before we started this but I don't know if either of us realized how much we were already being changed by the other as we both worked to free ourselves from childhood abuses and its after effects.

Eleven days ago I was shrinking back from my own suggestion of the project and trying to avoid a call from Eve as she was writing her first post about the next thirty days and what her plan was.  You can read about that here: The first 30 days of Eve loving herself.

When Eve and I spoke that day she told me she thought my project should be: 30 days of accepting that I love Christopher.  My first reaction to that was a firm: NO.  You can read about that here: Me starting to take part of a baby step toward love.

A lot has happened in the past 10.5 days.  First, I came to understand right away that the reason I was having trouble accepting that I love Christopher so much is because I was really hating myself a lot.  I have hated myself for a long time because of the abuse I lived through.  I have been struggling with how to love my body and mind which were so violated and which I have hated both of for so long.

I felt afraid and powerless for so long it has been difficult to imagine that I could suddenly just stop hating myself.  The real truth is: I have been holding myself back from all of the things that I really want the most because I am afraid.  My fear has been like a security blanket.

I grew up completely unable to count on my mom and dad for love and acceptance.  I grew up knowing for sure that I was going to be scared and hurt.  Scared and hurt formed the yarns of my security blanket and I dragged it from my childhood into the present day.

Today I went back through and put the label "The blanket of love" onto each post from the past eleven days.  I am going to let go of my old security blanket of fear and I am going to have a new security blanket; a blanket of love.  From now on- when I feel anxious or overwhelmed- I am going to imagine myself wrapped in my blanket of love.  I am going to draw or make a blanket that represents the fear and pain that I have been holding onto and I am going to do the same for the love blanket.  I will be posting more about this soon.

My name is Jenny Sawle.

May 20, 2011.

Every line.

This morning I have been writing. And not in the forced ways I have usually found myself recording snippets of thoughts in and from the past. I started writing and let the thoughts connect and keep coming and keep connecting. This is new. New for me, new for my life. Writing has always been painful. I understand now that pain was the struggle between different streams of my thinking and the fight inside of me that was always more like a raging war; the battles always between the wish to know my own mind and the voice of the threats. The voice that seemed to echo forever and into everything and every stream, but one day, it did not echo anymore. Then I understood I had not been able to understand. And when I said, 'I was tortured out of my mind.', I finally understood that statement was in no way any kind of metaphor. It was the truth. And I am going to keep telling it.

Jenny, Christopher.

Taking back everything.

My therapy this morning was difficult but good. After it I felt a lot of anxiety and sadness but I called Eve, texted with Christopher, read and wrote. Now I am feeling better. It is so painful to know why I have certain feelings or react certain ways- but as difficult as it is- it is a relief to not be having my life run by old fears and feelings. Daily I have to remind myself I am safe and safe to talk and think and write- it is sometimes still difficult to remember I am free and safe... But it is true. And when I sit with the painful thoughts and feelings; allowing myself to know & feel them... the painful feelings eventually pass. Then I feel better. Then I can go on living my life in the present and not be run by my past. Then I can be powerful; make choices, make art & celebrate each day.

I step into my own life.

Survivor.

A very painful truth. (Body and mind.)

***Trigger Warning:  I have never felt more shame and pain than I feel about what I have written here.  I also know: The shame does not belong to me.  The people that abused me own that shame and I will not carry it for them any longer.  I am posting this here because it feels nearly impossible to tolerate knowing alone and also because I know I am not the only person who has had to live with experiences such as this.***
---------------------------------
I have hated my mom beyond words.

I have hated myself.

I have hated myself and I mean:  BOTH MY MIND AND MY BODY.  For all of the time I have existed on this earth I have hated both my mind and my body.

When I was 7 or 8 years old my mom read me a book about how babies were made.  I remember her holding it in front of me, I can see some of the images from the book.  I had to undo her explanation.  I needed a different way that babies were made.  The thing she told me could not be right because my dad was not my husband like it said in the book the father is and also because I was not having babies.  Then when I was 14 and I had the miscarriage and had to flush the remains of that miscarriage down the toilet- my belly had hurt- the remains were treated like shit- it had not really been my belly that hurt but close enough and so... food.  The connection was made in my head between food and being pregnant.  And babies and children (in my house) were treated like trash and shit.  Eaten and then shit out and in your belly and then shit out.  And when I started to ask myself yesterday:  WHY HAD I NOT PROTECTED MYSELF FROM BECOMING PREGNANT ALL OF THOSE TIMES???  Today I knew:  Because I was not able to.  Because I thought I could not get pregnant.  Because I thought I could not get pregnant like that.  I had not been able to get protect myself from pregnancy because I had literally had to come to think it was not possible to get pregnant in 'that way'.  And as illogical as it may sound- that was far more tolerable and more logical than knowing that my dad had been raping me since I was two or three and that it went on until I was a 25 year old woman.  And knowing, on top of all of that horror- that my mom had known and never stopped him or rescued me.

Tonight I told Christopher on the telephone exactly this, "I feel like I can tolerate knowing that my dad raped me for all of my life until I was 25 years old and even that I had several abortions.  I just feel like I can not tolerate having any of that connected to anything about my body in any way."

There have been several quotes I've clung to during the work of healing and taking my life back.  When I first started my therapy I wore a Jenny Holzer t-shirt that read: "Abuse of power comes as no surprise."  Someone gave me the quote by Winston Churchill that I came back to for years:  "If you are going through hell, keep going."  And when things finally started to seem slightly better I got a bracelet with the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."  In the past few months I think daily of the words of Gandhi:  BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD.

systemic

Giving up the addiction of denial.

A few weeks ago it suddenly became clear to me why there is a 12 step program for survivors of child sexual abuse.  For an adult survivor of child sexual abuse the addiction that needs to be broken is the denial of the abuse and the denial of its consequences.  The denial is like a drug.

As I continue my healing more memories, thoughts and feelings come up from the past.  I am also starting to tolerate being able to hold together several of the memories, ideas and pieces of the things I have been working on- and that results in looking at a bigger picture of the abuse.  That results in a more clear understanding of how badly I was hurt.  That results in knowing how deeply the consequences of the abuse have affected my life.  All of that usually ends with me wanting to pull a blanket over my eyes- literally.  I used to use other things to injure myself or distract myself but none of those things work in the same way to prevent me from knowing what I have been both working all of my life to not know and then for the past 7.5 years- working to know.  And as much as I know that the only way out of the rest of this pain is through it- I continue to come to these really difficult places on the path to healing and I think:  I hate this road.  It is a struggle to keep knowing- it is not the path to healing that I hate.  And I do not want to hate myself anymore; I can not.  What I hate is the abuse that happened to me.

It is difficult work to turn with honest eyes and look at the things you have spent your whole life avoiding.  One of the ways that I coped with a lot of the terrible things that happened to me was to listen to my sick family and believe that I was the crazy one.  I believed I was bad, that the abuse was my fault and I spent most of my life feeling like the crazy person they told me I was.  I was slowly slowly stripping myself of the insanity of my sick family and then I met Christopher.  And then I had a really major problem.  A few, actually.

It is day 8 of the 30 day project Eve and I are working on in which we are working each day to love ourselves more and accept that we are loved.  When we started this 'project' a mere 8 days ago Eve suggested to me that I finally 'accept that I love Christopher'.  And I at first said NO NO NO.  I knew I was avoiding this for a reason...

The problem about knowing that I love Christopher and that he loves me is that I have to stop denying the past or I can not fully live my life in the present.  It is impossible to have both.  In order to survive the past I had to block out a million events; almost everything.  I blocked out the good, the bad; all of it.  The 'problem' about really wanting to have my real full mind and be honestly present in the present is that I can no longer block out the past or the present; the present in which I am still very much often times running on things that are still actions and reactions to events that happened long ago.  And while I am becoming able to stop myself now and say, "What does this mean?  Why am I doing this?"  It is painful.  Because the answer to the question of, "Why am I in a paralyzing depression this afternoon and unable to get out of my pajamas?"- the answer is never some brilliantly happy memory from my childhood.  Or from my teenage years.  Or, as I have been coming to know so painfully in the past several weeks, probably not any 'bundle of joy' from my early 20's either.

In the past my reaction to memories like I have had today would have literally been to eat a box (or two) of doughnuts, cut myself, take a large dose of sleeping medication and sleep the rest of the day and night away.  None of those things was ever very helpful and I was not able understand then that I was hurting myself to try to not know about how much I was already hurt.  And I was not able to see that I was adding more pain to a mountain of pain I was already buried beneath.  And the only way out of the pain is through it.  But there is the problem of the denial and I am still struggling a lot with that.  While I am glad I am not physically hurting myself anymore- I still have the same reactions to the pain of the past.  That would be a screaming feeling of, "I DO NOT WANT TO HURT ANYMORE."  Which seems pretty logical.  I have also come to understand that the only way not to hurt is to talk about how badly it all hurt in the past.

Stopping the hurting myself with the food has been one of the most painful ways of covering (now uncovering) my pain.  So many bad things happened in my past, so much pain- and the thing is- I never had a lot of choices during the time of the abuse.  And then even after the physical raping finally stopped- I felt like I did not have the power to make choices because I had never known what it meant to really be free or feel powerful.  The food is painful because every single time I go to put a piece of food in my mouth now I am realizing that I am making a choice and then I am understanding how long I lived never having very many choices at all.

And it is more than just the overeating that I have been giving up in order to be fully honest and healthy.  There are the unhealthy relationships.  For more than a year I was going to a meeting for survivors of child sexual abuse and then immediately after it going to be with the one person in my life who denied completely that any of the abuse ever happened.  In that way I was constantly preventing myself from fully going forward.  The pain from the denial and the wish the abuse had never happened; there comes a point when the pain of the denial and its consequences of that are worse than the pain of the truth.

It has been difficult to stop running back to the denial- I am still struggling with it- but not as much as I was.  I am not self injuring and the fact that I am down to spending the majority of the day feeling incredibly sad about a lot of things that were in fact incredibly sad seems very... real.  So it is painful, but it is honest and that is a relief because living the lie was almost like not really living at all.

One of the many truly great things about facing the rest of my past and being totally honest about the terrible things that happened is that I am learning, remembering and being reminded all of the time now that:  THIS IS THE PRESENT.  And also: There is a future!

I do not want to hurt anymore.  I want to make my art.  I want to be the person I have been unable to fully be because of the debilitating effects of the abuse.  Stripped of all the lies and pain from the past I am learning I really can live in the present.  And I have a lot of things I am really sad about, but there are so many things I am excited about... like loving Christopher and being loved by him.  Oh, and he has a cat; Rocky.  A cat whom I have always felt is my archnemesis.  But I am thinking now I was perhaps projecting a few issues about my fear of love and loving onto her too.  Oh Rocky, I am scared of of you; but I'm working on letting go of that fear too.  

A direct message to you & to Jessieh.

(Jean for Emily, final. May 16, 2011)

I was not able to understand how much I had been hurt until I started to know how it felt to be truly loved.

I miss you so much it hurts.  I love you.  And yes, I mean YOU.

And you, Jessieh.  You taught me what it felt like to be loved so much I knew I could make it through the very worst pain I have ever known.  That is what your love taught me.  You understand what that means about you, right?

You're brilliant.  I am so proud of you.  See you soon.

Sign to you.

Last first.

Eve held out her hand and I grabbed hold. (My life without self-injury.)

Today I was powerful.  Today I had some very painful memories come back to me and for the very first time in my life (!) not only did I not self-injure... I took care of myself.

This morning I ate breakfast, went to a meeting, talked to Eve, ate lunch, went on a a short run and when I had the painful memory- I sat in my bed.  I texted Eve and I did a little knitting.  I thought about the memories.  I felt really sad for about an hour or so.  I talked to Christopher, did a little drawing, spoke to Eve again and now I am typing this.  Typing with a smile on my face.

Today was a triumph.  It really was.  The memories I had were painful; terrible.  I knew a few weeks ago when I understood the rape had gone on for many more years than I had been able to yet tolerate knowing about- that the last big chunk of time held a lot of painful things that I had been holding back.  I did not imagine I would be able to tolerate them in this healthy way.  Tonight when I talked to Christopher I was saying that today was not even a 'bad Saturday'.  It was so much better than many other days I have lived:  It was really painful to remember and know and think about what happened to me in the past- but it was better than all of the many many days when I have sat feeling tortured but not able to know why my body and mind hurt so much- then usually hurting myself more to try to cover the pain from my past.  I am able to tolerate the memories- to have them and to sit through them and to know about them and to go on.  I want to know now about the pain of my past and the whole truth of my life so that I can live fully now and with all of my mind (and heart!).

Today is the 5th day of the 30 day project Eve and I decided to do.  Eve is strong and brave.  Her ability to be honest about her own life is helping me to tolerate and know about the rest of my own.  This is helping me to finally be free of suffering and move toward being more and more fully the person I truly am.  Eve's blog is here; you should read it- she's amazing.  She is an inspiration.

This morning I was saying that at first I had thought the rape and physical abuse were the worst of what had happened to me; then I understood the emotional torture was what had hurt me the most.  Now I understand that not only was the emotional torture worse than the physical and sexual violence... the emotional torture kept raping me of my life even when the physical raping had stopped.  The emotional torture kept holding me back from fully knowing my own mind and thus being able to fully live my own life.

I had a thought the other day- I was thinking about a younger way of my thinking and how I was scared to let that way of being me talk directly to my doctor.  When I thought about why- the answer to my own question made me feel really sad.  I thought: What if that six year old way of being me says or does something really bad and my doctor is sitting there thinking, "I don't like you very much.  I wish you would be different."  And after I had the thought and thought about the thought- I knew:  That was the feeling I had felt from my parents when I was young.  And that made me feel really sad.  I guess the good side of my parents not liking me very much is that I did not like them very much either.  I always did feel like they wished I would be different; calm down, be quiet, stop making noise, STOP DRAWING ALL OVER EVERYTHING!!

Well, I wish they would have been different too.  But they weren't.  They were them.  And I was me.  And I lived all of my life thinking that their ideas of me were true- which is to say: I thought I was crazy and bad.  Now I know neither of those things is true at all.

Oh.... And this:  I AM GOING TO DRAW ON EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!

YES!!!!!!!

Ok... One last thing for tonight.  Here is a photo of me and Christopher.  We took it a while ago.  I don't remember when exactly.  Anyway- it makes me really happy because when I see it I know that I am loved.

A choice of weapons; Hello Red Heart.

(Insoluble asphyxiation bib in two sizes.  Acrylic yarn.  May 13, 2011.) 

At different times various people and I myself (many, many times) have asked the question:  What are you going to do with all your anger?  Valid question.  Raped until I was 25, I spent the past seven and half years in therapy and now I am thirty-three.  The majority of my life has been about surviving being abused, abusing myself to not know about the abuse, surviving the aftermath of the abuse and abusing myself through most of that because it was so painful.

The rape stopped eight years ago and I've (recently and FINALLY) been calming down on the self abuse for a while now... first quitting one form, then another, then another after that.  I asked my doctor a several weeks ago in desperation: "How will I know when the self-injury is really over; when will I know I am really done hurting myself?"  He said at first there would be a lot of wondering if the self-injuring was done; then there would probably be a lot of sadness.  And that is almost exactly what it looked like.  Almost exactly just like that only I would also toss in the phrase "dense grief" if I wanted to give a better mental picture of it all.

I started cutting myself and abusing myself with food when I was a very small child and I started having dangerous/hurtful sex when I was a teenager; all ways of trying to cover my original pain of having been abused.  I hate a lot of the things I did to myself but I stayed alive and surviving the toxicity of my family feels like nothing short of an act of genius.  I'm not going to be upset with myself any longer for any of the things I had to do in order to salvage both my mind and body from that cesspool of trauma.

So that brings me up to the present day!! Thirty-three years old, seven and a half years of therapy under my belt, not self-injuring, three months away from beginning to work on my MFA and I've formed an incredible group of wonderful, healthy and loving friends who are my new family.  I have scars, emotional and physical, but I made it.  Today I wept in relief:  I'm alive.

I do have a lot of anger.  Rage is probably a better word for it.  I also have a huge amount of sadness and grief.  Other feelings too though... Last night I was in bed; tossing and turning as I keep stitching together the fragments of myself and my memories in my head- then I wrote the following quick email to Eve:

"There are so many good things about really living this good life.  My favorite- after love and then art- it's the music.  It's definitely the music.  Then all that dancing."

This morning I spoke to my art therapist about possible ways to deal my rage.  Since I have lived most of my life in the emotional prison of my childhood and I finally just now got out; I am going to choose the way in which I do not spend the rest of this life in a physical prison.  I am going to make my art.

I'll listen to an opera while I knit a life size recreation of the bloody revenge I imagine in my head.  I'll sing with Nina Simone while I make those larger than life detailed paintings of my abuser that I keep talking about.  I will show my work and I will keep telling the story of what I survived.

I will never be silenced again.

Liza Lou's "Kitchen" is brilliant.  I love that after she became famous from that piece she started making work about abuse and torture.   So much truth in art.  So much power.  (You can see some of Liza Lou's work here- be sure to click on the images- they are sculptures covered in millions of glass beads.) 

Autodidactic.

Yesterday's poem on 'The Writer's Almanac': http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2011/05/12