(no subject)
My mother told me the first thing I did was smile at her in this sacred way. My father said, when he found out he was a father, he was overjoyed, so proud to tell everyone, it was the best day of his life. I used to call him "daddy," now I correct my mother every time she calls him even my "father," because I don't want that imposed on me. Because he used to get freaked out when he didn't feel in control and say things like, "I'm the father, I'm in control of this household, you do what I say," blah blah blah patriarchal crap, and I won't give him the privilege of that power trip. If that's what father means to him (and that's all I've ever heard him SAY it means to him) then I'm not honouring him with that title. Hell, even if it meant something else, I wouldn't honour him with that title. It's something to be earned and he's never been that for me, except when I was so little, when he would give me bear hugs, and... there are these vague memories of having good times, of being loved.
I slept so well during those first months of my life, I didn't cry much, I was a perfect little baby, my mother said. My father said my being born was the best moment of his life and was so proud to share with everyone that he had a baby. We moved from Worcester to Oxford when I was nine months old and my mother tells me that I changed, somehow, around that time, though she often said it in a way that I took as guilting. You changed, you used to be a good baby, then you turned bad, is how I hear it. You lost your innocence and it was my fault, is how I hear it. I was in a stroller in a department store and an old woman came close wanting to pinch my cheeks or something and I slapped her glasses off her face. So I was "bad" for having boundaries in the only way I knew how, is how I hear it now.
I have a lot of other early memories of department stores. One where I was so afraid that my mother had abandoned me because I couldn't find her anywhere. It was my first memory of feeling abandoned. I don't think it was too long till she showed up, maybe having just been an aisle or two away in the store, but it planted an anbandonment seed in me. Then when my mother would switch from loving to distant, when I felt powerless to bring the old mother I loved back, I felt abandoned again. When we would play computer games, sometimes, my parents would play standing up and I wanted them to sit down because then I knew they were staying, they were all here, they were paying attention. So now, I create space, I know how to offer real attention, and I really look for that from others. Sometimes, since being fully present and engaged is my preferred state, I need an intentionally created space of presence and attentiveness in order for me to feel comfortable. Because I never know how much "time" there is, if my stepping into a place of engagement is going to leave me feel left behind or unattended to. I also have a hard time asking others to make space for me and I worry about inconveniencing them and taking up space where I'm not welcome. I used to get so excited and want my father to come do something with us but he was working on something or other and would say "not now," but we were just excited kids and were like please, please? And eventually he would just flip and run after me and "I'm going to punch you so hard you're going to see stars!" and I tried so hard not to get him to come into that room, to keep the door closed, and when he eventually got to me I found out seeing stars was a real thing.
I was trained to be afraid of strangers, never to talk to one unless they knew our secret word (awinna winna winna, I don't know where it came from) so getting abandoned and knowing I couldn't get help was terrifying. So I didn't know who to trust, the world was presented as scary, never trust anyone you don't know so -- how do you get to know anyone? My mother never made it clear that it was okay to have friends, until she saw me watching the kids next door play soccer and their mother talked to mine and she decided maybe it would be a good idea to invite me over. I never got invited over there again. I knew so well all the things I wasn't allowed to do. I wasn't allowed to leave the yard, it wasn't safe, and I felt this huge rush of power inside me when I did, and then I ran home so fast...
I never asked my friends if they wanted to play. If I wanted Emily to play outside I'd come inside and go outside, any number of times, just hoping she'd follow me. Or I'd ride my bicycle around a friend's house hoping they would see me. It's all I knew. I didn't know how to express what I wanted. Desire was tied up in all these forbidden desires. I felt like I didn't have permission to have desires of my own. Because I had this erotic desire, this overwhelming sense of wanting to be me, that this energy inside me that no one else ever talked about experiencing. The one thing I've always known was that I was (or wanted to be) a girl and that I had to hide it, and everything else that gave me the same sensation of power and being alive. I acquiesced and made myself what everyone else seemed to want me to be. I knew I would be punished for being a "bad boy" and being a "good boy" meant being everything my parents expected me to be, and tucking my real voice and my real personality away somewhere deep.
Still in early childhood, I developed OCD symptoms while walking around a department store with my mother. I only feel these compulsions very rarely now, and I think a lot of what healed it was learning to move authentically in my body and learning to claim my voice. It was all the ways I turned myself into an automaton so I'd be good, I think that started my OCD. I remember the moment it started. All of a sudden I visualized these lines, like balance beams or tightropes, dancing close to the floor, and though I knew they weren't physical, my mind told me I had to step over them. They kept appearing, they kept moving and trying to trick me, and I just knew that... the feeling that came when I didn't try to pick my legs up and get over them was really bad, so I avoided it. I developed other OCD type symptoms that especially got worse being stuck in school on warm boring afternoons. I felt like school was another cage just like my bedroom, where I was beaten and told to go, and when I wouldn't, I was dragged by the hair (by what many cultures consider a source of power) and kept there for what felt like forever and even longer the more I protested. School was never good for me, I was always sitting there watching other kids learn things I already knew, and it made no sense to me but I had to pretend to like it because that's what good kids did. I remember one day in school looking in the mirror and just clawing at my face and making marks. Nobody ever talked to me about it, I don't know if they knew, though I would think it would be pretty obvious. I just wanted... something different, to get out of these constrictions, to feel things I'd never felt... tearing apart my face just occurred to me in the moment...
Eventually I came to have a stoic response, telling myself I could handle anything, no matter how much they hurt me, I would not back down, they couldn't touch my resilience. I would survive, no matter what. I was determined. And yet I didn't know anything about soul loss at the time, and I let them get my soul. Slowly. And then one day when I was a teenager, I felt it just whooosh out of my solar plexus, and I knew I had lost something and didn't know if I'd be able to get it back. We were going to family therapy and my father made a promise in therapy not to provoke in one way or another. It felt like we were all so hopeful about change happening, but he broke that promise, and it turned into this huge fight, and he ended up sitting on me so hard that I couldn't breathe, and I was like, call the police, do anything, just let me breathe. And the more this happened, the harder it was to talk to others or to claim my voice with others because I was ashamed of this, I was ashamed of being so bad that this stuff happened to me.
I used to have these horrible dreams that this pale white king-monster that sort of looked like a pirate dwelled in the attic above my bedroom and sent his minions to take me up there to him where he sat on his throne and that he was going to give me some kind of shot and turn me bad and I was terrified of becoming bad like him. I used to dream that I ran to my father who would protect me but after a while he didn't protect me. At some point as I got older I started to feel this erotic energy around it, like being made bad would be a kind of exciting thing, it would give me power. Like I was ready to say fuck it to everything. Though I would never use those words, at least not out loud, yes, I was ready for fuck. I heard people using those words I wasn't supposed to use and they felt so free in a way I wasn't, like they had power to be whoever the fuck they were and I was trapped in all these constraints and consequences. I had dreams that using those words gave me this erotic power that let me fly with this orgasmic propulsion.
They became sacred words to me that I would not share with anyone but loved using in my dreams. These words and their secret source of power turned me on. Sometimes I would find other sources of power in my dreams like eyeliner and leather pants and everything that was oh so FUCK IT. I sort of remember the first time I allowed myself to say the word fuck aloud, I think I was lying in my bed, and I felt this surge of power rush through me.
As I got older when I would have these horrible family fights my mother would start using these words, which she never did when I was younger, and when she was really upset she'd call me "Motherfucker" which in the midst of this physical abuse and trauma and all the power I had denied and reclaimed in dreams felt like rape and perverting my source of power. I would just go out of control and she would use it again and again and it would escalate to all hell, she'd get so upset at me for being upset with this and yet kept doing it. I had no power, I couldn't make this stop. The more I needed that, the worse it got. The more I needed anything, it seemed, the less receptive my mother was to me.
I used to have crushes on all these magical people in cartoons and television shows, and I used to have crushes on kids who were okay with being bad, like shows that had this "say no to drugs message," I just thought everyone who was doing drugs in these shows was so hot, especially in the Punky Brewster treehouse episode! I just longed to finally be free of all the constraints and rules and voices in my head and just fucking stand in my power and shock everyone around me with my badness and my not giving a fuck. So in particular I had this huge crush on Evie in Out of This World. When she was 13 she discovered that she's half-alien and has all these powers to stop time and to "gimpse" which meant to focus energy to make things appear out of nowhere. She was my biggest crush, she was like magic and power incarnate. The theme song:
Would you like to swing on a star,
Carry moonbeams home in a jar,
And be better off than you are,
Or would you rather go to earth?,
Then there was this particular episode, where Evie wears leather and plays pool and rebels in all sorts of ways I don't remember much about the episode, I wish I could remember the name because they're all online, it would be great to see it again and remember what opened up for me at that time but it was like, I finally saw something that showed me who I wanted to be... someone who doesn't give a fuck.
As a teenager I devoted long hours to learning astral projection and discovering the idea that we have different energy bodies and this physical is just one of them gave me the hope that maybe, my energy bodies might end up in the body of some badass girl with other parents and then I could own my power. Either they'd be parents who supported me in being whoever the hell I wanted to be or else they'd be parents I could rebel against and feel POWER not shrinking not this horrible shrinking in doing it and be like, sorry, I'm being me now. There was so much power and longing in this idea of just being in someone else's body for once, with other people who I could more easily experiment with rebelling with, and it's like I wanted nothing more in the whole world.
Even through the physical abuse I was still open to my father. When I started playing golf in high school he became interested in playing and we used to play together. One day he made a promise that he would play and he broke that promise, and I know he remembered it, but instead of apologizing, he insisted it never happened, that something was wrong with my mind for remembering a promise being made. I was really perfectionistic about golf, wanting to please others, hoping I'd finally be worth something if I could just be good at the game. I got so frustrated with myself and one day I got really frustrated and my father just kind of... gave up on me. I was just misbehaving as far as he could see. That was the day his mother had a heart attack and she died not too long after the surgery. He never asked me to play again though it was so obvious he was playing without me and finding ways to hide it. I was so resentful, I introduced him to this and now he was going behind my back and using it to hurt me! I gave him a chance one time, deciding to go to Maine with him and my maternal grandmother. My grandmother asked him in the car, "So have you played much golf lately?" He said, "No." Then, right away, he looked at the backseat, and thinking I was sleeping, pointed at my grandmother. Then he nodded his head up and down really fast, like, yes, I have been playing and shhh, I don't want *them* to know. And that was kind of it.
It was always odd to me that, through all the physical abuse, I never completely closed myself off to him, but then when this emotional betrayal came around, I was done. Physical abuse plus emotional dishonesty, there was no working with that. We haven't had any kind of relationship since. I keep my distance. Even after he tried to punch me in the car because he was frustrated that I wanted the air conditioner on my side off, and he thought I was trying to be difficult -- he aimed at me but ended up punching the mirror and getting his blood all over me (which I hated, ugggh, and I screamed and screamed and he only drove faster and faster and it was horrible, I threatened to jump out of the car, I needed to wash up, but he would not stop probably because he was terrified someone would accuse him of abuse, he would not allow himself to be made accountable.) Even then, I didn't close myself off completely. He wasn't so physically abusive anymore, but even so, the emotional disconnection was the end of it for me.
And now so many years and so much healing later, I feel the effects that all this has had on my life, how I'm afraid of being too much because I'm afraid of being beaten, how much I need BDSM now for healing, how much I need to reclaim being bad, to own all of my desires and stop pretending they're not there or that they're unimportant, and I see this new me emerging, this me that's letting go of all the old constraints and dissolving the blocks that came out of childhood abuse, blocks that tell me every little bit of being too much is forbidden and will get me beaten, and I'm ready to just be in everything that's always been real for me that I always denied. My desires are my power. How much I want to run around with someone who also doesn't give a fuck and just light up the world with love and badness! How much I need goddess to surrender to and also help me reclaim my power.
The goddess that has been playing hide and seek with me all these years, peeking out from behind trees and buildings, blowing her clove incense in my face, making me feel things that made me knees weak... and one day a couple years ago she started playing BDSM games with me and I realized she was the goddess of fuck and so fucking sacred and I'm finally starting to see her role in every moment of my life, and now she knows I'm ready, she fills me up. I feel more spiritually connected than I ever have before, I feel more ready to let go of everything I'd been terrified of letting go of that would let me become me. I'm not waiting anymore. I will run around with her and be bad and stir shit up, because I know that she is protecting me and she can whip me, gladly, because I'm her bitch, and I will recognize what being in my truest power looks like: power and surrender are the same. And now so many resources are coming into my life, books and people and it's like, finally, this is what I was born for. Fill me with your ecstasy, fuck goddess!
It was goddess that taught my heart to fear, and goddess that fear released.
