I wrote another thing, few weeks back

[maribou]

It's pretty heavy going but I'm glad I wrote it.

http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/2016/06/16/introretrospective-ii-violence-family-and-loss/

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

What courage that took! I am more sorry than I can express that it all happened, and how long the shadow lasted.

I hope that this speaking out will reach others who are silent out of fear.

[maribou]

Thank you. The blessing of having posted it on that website with such a larger audience is that I know (because of email) that it's already reached, and touched, a person or two who've been through similar things.

I think the shadow is still there, tbh - if anything it's harder now than it has been at some times in the past, because I'm so much more aware of everything (dissociation can be a blessing), but haven't gotten to the point in the work where it's mostly resolved yet. And on some level, there's just stuff that never goes away, you know? I'd love to think I won't still be feeling the physical effects of living that way 20 years from now, but it seems rather unlikely.

But still, the overall effect of the work I've done has been a blessing. Akin to how much lighter my head always felt when I got a hair cut when I was a teenager - just hoping it eventually feels as much lighter as my head did the first time I shaved off all my hair :D.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I think we all process differently. My sister and I have talked about this (whereas our experiences were not as horrible as yours, they were bad enough); there are some aspects to us that are evidence of the very long shadow cast by those experiences half a century ago and more. But in other ways, we have worked through and come out the other side, with insight enough to try to pass on what we've learned, so that the generations after us don't repeat the pattern.

[maribou]

That makes sense. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

[manintheboat.livejournal.com]

I love you.

And it's been MONTHS! What shall we do next?

[maribou]

I love you too.

We're out of town this weekend, superbusy next weekend, I'm out of town the following weekend, then we're doing hard labor for friends the weekends before and after labor day.

What are you doing Labor Day weekend?

[manintheboat.livejournal.com]

9/4 I think I am throwing my birthday party, Ice Cream Party!

[maribou]

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooh, Ice Cream!

I will see if I can make Jay go to a party or not. If not, maybe we can visit a different day that week? Or I could come up for party and y'all could come down a different day that month.

[manintheboat.livejournal.com]

I'll send out ice cream invites next week. Tell Jay he can hide in the basement and play Sonic the Hedgehog 1,2 AND 3 on Sega Genesis. I even have Sonic Spinball.

[maribou]

Marvelous.

[loree.livejournal.com]

Oh, honey. I love you, and admire the courage it took you to endure this man, and to write that article.

[maribou]

Thank you, and I love you too. Glad I get to see you soon.

[libskrat]

Oh wow. Wow.

So much love to you and yours.

[maribou]

Thank you. Love to you and yours too. (Especially those ridiculous and wonderful kittehs.)

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

I never would have guessed. You seem better adjusted than I am.

I'm glad you wrote this; it was obviously hard to do so. It could help somebody in need.

Woman runs away from potential trouble in Canada to the United States. Man bites dog. Film at 11:00. Good riddance to bad trash. That good part of him wasn't enough to prevent him from leaving a trail of human destruction.

[maribou]

Well, and it's pretty funny (at least to me) that he actually ILLEGALLY IMMIGRATED to the United States and then got deported back to Canada as part of the criminal proceedings .... I'd honestly much rather he was still stuck in a US prison than living in the same province as my family, the same place I grew up, but unfortunately I don't control the world.

The reason I seem so well adjusted is that I was trained to seem well adjusted in public pretty much from the time I was a baby. So much of my struggle has actually been letting those walls down, and embracing the parts of me that are "too crazy" for public consumption, in order to even be able to start to heal them and accept therapeutic help. It's absolutely a reflex for me to work as hard as possible to seem as reasonable, calm, and moving-in-the-right-vector as possible any time I feel even a tiny bit exposed. Or to display unrelated weakness / frivolousness / ebullience / etc to hide whatever I'm actually feeling.

Before all this happened, I could probably count the number of non-immediate-family who knew even a portion of how screwed up I am without running out of fingers. Hard to say since one of the things I used to do was dissociate from the knowledge that anybody knew any of it.

Thank you for reading, and for commenting.

[gement.livejournal.com]

I am so glad you could write this, and so proud of you. I've thought of you in a concerned sort of way since you first announced stuff was going on a couple years ago, but I'm crap at initiating contact, so here we are.

It occurs to me that if I knew you were carrying all this around, I might never have suggested you read my extremely fucked up fiction. I'm glad you did, and I'm glad you liked it, but wow.

[maribou]

Well, and see that's part of the problem for me, right? I don't want people figuring out what I might or might not want to read. I'm really GLAD to have read your fiction, which I love, not just like. And just in general, there's a lot of stuff I find *helpful* and *cathartic* that any well-meaning person might reasonably assume I would hate (cf that Bear and Monette book that I was disturbed to have accidentally led to you to when you found it rather horrid). I think a lot of my resistance to being vocal about my experiences is that we have so so many theoretical ideas about sexual abuse survivors, and physical abuse survivors - we all do, even those of us who are survivors - and when you've spent so much of your life working to be invisible, putting yourself into the category of someone who has This Set of Baggage seems... unthinkable. Of course, the upside, the side that will keep me from getting censored, is that no one totally knows what will set another person off anyway - I mean, my own sister sent me a book set in the same national park where our dad worked for a long time, full of disquisitions on things he also gave passionate disquisitions on, at a time where even thinking of him gave me total brain snow ... because her own dissociation kicked in and SHE HONESTLY DIDN'T NOTICE. (She didn't read the book, was going on rep of book.) So here I was reading it, thinking "why does my sister want me to confront this particular set of triggers?" and then concluding that it was because the book was so damn good that it was worth it (true), MEANWHILE she was appalled to know the setting of the book and apologized profusely and is not planning to read it herself for years if ever. And people recommend things or try to watch things with me all the time that trigger me. I'm a lot harder to trigger now, though, so I've pretty much gotten to the point where I don't need to avoid ANYTHING, just might occasionally need heads-ups. Or decide I don't like being in that headspace on that particular day which sounds like avoiding but isn't really. Is complex.

I am glad you read this, and that you're proud of me, and I really appreciate your care and support over the years. It doesn't need to be steady in volume for me if I know it is steady in meaningfulness :)