Ichabod Crane, Nerd Misogyny, Losing (and Reclaiming) pieces of yourself (hopefully)
Once upon a time, I bought this pin when I was underemployed. The people at the Walt Disney Family Museum (shout out to them for always being MVPs, seriously) were nice enough to give me the members' discount even though they knew my membership had expired because I couldn't afford to renew it at the time (and they knew what the pin was for, and wanted to be in on it). The road to [my personal] Hell was paved with good intentions, as I had purchased this for someone else. I would eventually get my hands on my own, after finally being able to renew my membership and then (impatiently) waiting for this pin to go back in stock, over a year later. I know this seems like an over-explanation, but all of this proposition is important, I promise.
Trigger warnings here on out about child abuse, sexual violence, emotional abuse, physical violence, and mental health.
I've touched on this before, but The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad is one of my favourite things in this whole wide world. It's one of the very few things from my childhood that was not marked by terror and violence. Watching the Sleepy Hollow edit of the VHS in the classroom was one of my very few happy memories of being in school, and always one of the happiest days of the year for me. There are not enough words to convey, even were I have to possess the appropriate eloquence, how much this little story has been part of my life.
The fourth year anniversary of my nervous breakdown is coming up. I've mentioned before that I have no "before and "after" period of my life when it comes to sexual abuse the way that older victims would have, but I certainly have a "before" and "after" clear delineation between the period before and after my nervous breakdown. I realized that the life I knew before that point is gone forever. My world was shattered. I lost things that could never be replaced. I lost things that were so precious to me, I didn't even ever think about what it would be like to live without them. I don't remember much about that night, other than it was storming, and I came to from disassociating in the pouring rain of a storm, bloody, shredded clothes, barefoot not knowing where I was. There was this pang in my chest, like I was suffocating. The only way I could describe it was "dead inside."
Four years later, it's still there. I've done All The Things, and Tried Everything, and nothing has worked. It's not going to go away. I just don't think about it all the time. It never went away, it's just not at the forefront of my mind anymore. I realized it was never going to go away, and that this was the New Normal. I stopped experiencing any kind of emotional, physical, or sexual attraction. All of the healing work I had done over the decade before that through working with RAINN and doing other things was all gone. I've done the best repair work I can over the last 4 years, but, unlike when I was younger, I don't have the resiliency to "bounce back." I've had to accept that this is how things are now. Instead of beating myself up and berating myself for not being able to make progress, accepting my own limitations. There's a freedom in that, I think. It was like this great burden had been lifted. One of the reasons I had succumbed to this in the first place was being crushed on the burdens of the absolute selfish actions of people I cared about so much.
One of the most acute things I lost was one of my most special friendships. One of my oldest friendships. One of the few memories of my childhood that had made me happy. I remember the joy of going to school every day to see this person. I remember making them sit on the rug next to me in second grade on the day we got to watch Sleepy Hollow VHS in the classroom (which was literally like a holiday for me). The joy of our cute little adventures or getting in trouble together--if you can imagine the "you're my best friend!" moment from The Fox and the Hound, it was just like that. These were so sacred to me.
But they weren't for this person. This person who use these to manipulate me. This person would use these to hurt me. This person would take advantage of my isolation and loneliness from not getting enough attention from someone I so deeply loved to further isolate and control me. And, in the end, when I didn't give them what they wanted, I paid for it with violence shattering me to my very foundation.
I had mentioned in my " everything wrong with Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow" piece about how the 1999 film perfectly encapsulates the nerd misogynistic fantasy, and I am most certain that this person probably saw themselves as Ichabod Crane. True to the trope, they assumed that if they kept putting in Nice Person Coins, my love would come out of the Vending Machine. I wasn't a figurehead of a fantasy, but an actual person, and these actions had real consequences.
For years I have blamed myself for not being able to give this person the kind of love that they wanted, or being enough for the person whom I did love. I blamed myself for my own audacity and foolishness of thinking that I could ever actually be loved, and how stupid I was for wanting to be loved. I am still so mad at myself for not being able to give people what they needed or wanted from me. In the end, it was all my fault, and I imploded because of it. Serves me right, I guess. Part of me wonders and fears if I had also displayed nerd misogynist tendencies. Maybe it IS all my fault, and I am the Bad Guy.
But, back to the pin.
After my nervous breakdown, I had to get rid of everything. I didn't want to remember. A lot of things I just flat out threw away--every article of clothing I had been touched in was the first to go. Then other things, like photos and books--and my copy of the pin, were mailed away to a friend.
I am finally at a place where the pin can come back into my life--I've really been into my pins lately, and even bought an Ita bag to showcase them. I asked my friend to find it, and gave her the money for the postage. I am trying to find a balance between reclaiming parts of my life again and not re-triggering myself off into these black hole spirals. I know the pin is a touchstone for some really bad, painful memories for me. But in some strange way also reminds me of human kindness. The way that our brains are wired (especially for trauma victims), we only remember the bad things. We are hard-wired to only hear the bad things people say about us, and not the good.
But I might finally be able to see this little pin in the context of some friends whose names I don't I even know doing me a solid.