I don't like parts of myself

I really don’t like the more guarded and serious parts of myself. It feels like that side of me is stuck in a perpetual holding pattern, often circling around with multitudinous thoughts and feelings that never quite find a place to land.

This part is a perfectionist who knows how deeply flawed she is. She struggles to express anything and can come across as measured and fairly even. She’s self-conscious and doesn’t like to take risks. She doesn’t like when the focus is on her. She wants to blend in and often feels a lot of pressure because she knows she is not who others expect her to be. She is over-controlling of herself and is terrified of strong emotion. She says she “doesn’t know” when she is overwhelmed or filled with self-doubt. She’s overwhelmed and filled with self-doubt often.

She tends to think about feelings instead of feeling feelings. This part thinks that she is protecting. What she is doing is helping to avoid an extreme range of emotion – out of a wish to never be like my dad. She’s aware of the paradoxical nature of her behaviour … a limited ability to express emotions also draws some parallels in her mind. She wants to change and doesn’t know how.

On the perpetual search for self and authenticity

It is sometimes said that the four greatest and most influential Portuguese literary figures of modern times are Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa, whose name means ‘person’ in Portuguese, had three alter egos. He actually wrote under many names, but several of them were ‘heteronyms’ rather than pseudonyms. Not only were their writing styles completely different; they had entirely different world views, different aesthetic sensibilities.

While attempting to reflect on how I would define authenticity or what it means to me, I found myself drawn towards a poem by Ricardo Reis, a heteronym of Fernando Pessoa.

Para ser grande, sê inteiro / To be great, be whole:

Para ser grande, sê inteiro: nada

Teu exagera ou exclui.

Sê todo em cada coisa. Põe quanto és

No mínimo que fazes.

Assim em cada lago a lua toda

Brilha, porque alta vive.

To be great, be whole: nothing
Of yourself exaggerate or exclude.
Be all in all things. Put what you are

Into the least you do.

So, in every lake the whole moon
Shines and, soaring, lives.

This poem speaks to me about the importance of integrity and of being what we are - not more or less - and perhaps showing up with an acceptance for where we’re at in that given moment. The self-acceptance piece is what I’m still working on.

I believe I probably grew up with a skewed and fragmented self-concept and no amount of introspection has helped (yet) to truly reconcile my inner reality with my outer reality. Self-censoring and concealing or masking parts of my self is such a deeply engrained behaviour for me that sometimes am not even sure which aspects are true - If I am so self-aware, how can I be so unaware? If I like the perception that others reflect back to me, why does it not rest easily within?

Once I started school, I clearly remember the split feeling of two entirely different experiences of self: an outside persona who presented as confident and capable, and an internal experience of self-hatred and self doubt. In my mind, only one of those things could be true - my entire self concept was built around dichotomous thinking; an internal struggle that was probably amplified by having a mother with borderline personality disorder and a father who is most likely a sociopath.

My observation of my parents is that they were both pretty good at 'fooling others' on a surface level, and I believed that was the explanation for why other people liked me. They didn't know me, I was pretending to be someone or something I wasn't. I often dissociated from any emotion, particularly when I was in my dad's presence. Instead, I tuned in cognitively and watched him closely. How could someone who displayed a complete lack of empathy or remorse be able to charm people the way he did? As a child, I wondered how it was that someone that I knew to be bad was perceived by other adults as 'good'? I took that a step further. All these bad things are happening at home, but people believe that I am good. How do you reconcile seeming exceedingly confident and capable, yet suffering terribly in silence? I felt that what I was presenting to other people was 'a cover-up.'

Self-presentation and impression management is an ordinary part of everyday interactions and we all show different sides of ourselves in different contexts, but sometimes the act of 'not putting all of my cards on the table' feels deceptive. Sometimes I worry that the disparity between how I present myself to others and what I'm feeling on the inside means that I'm still not being authentic.

So here are my confessions: I am more sensitive than I ever let on. I'm highly tuned in to everything sensory and I'm habitually filtering things out or finding ways to manage the intensity (It wasn't until I found myself having to support both my children in finding ways to manage their own sensory overloads that I realised that perhaps this wasn't how most people experience the world). I am hypervigilant: hyper-aware and hyper-alert, constantly scanning my environment and tuned in to subtleties that seem to go unnoticed by most others. I think I try to add depth and complexity into relationships, so another layer in my mind is constantly analysing every emotion, thought, interaction, event ... both while it's happening and then retrospectively. 

Every now and then I catch a glimpse that there may be a gradual shift in some of the fundamental ways that I see myself (thanks years of therapy!) and I am learning that it's possible to make space for all of these things. I am trying to step away from self-erasure and self-compression and just 'be'.

“But I am not perfect in my way of putting things
Because I lack the divine simplicity
Of being only what I appear to be.”
― Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Fernando Pessoa

I am never "only what I appear to be" and maybe no one else is either. Being ‘real’ is a process. I love the children’s book, the Velveteen Rabbit, where the Skin Horse says to the little Rabbit, “Real isn’t something you are, it’s something you become.” 

Wild Geese and Wonderment

The summer that I was 9 I spent a glorious week staying with my maternal grandparents. My Nanna had a special way of being able to evoke magic in the most ordinary moments.  One of those magical moments from that summer was with Mary Oliver. She wasn't actually there, of course, but the impact her words had on my grandmother have stayed with me ever since.

"Every flower has a meaning, it's like poetry." I had been dutifully following my Nanna around as she harvested the lavender in her garden.
"Well, I don't like poetry. It's boring." I may have rolled my eyes. Nanna took off her gardening gloves and knelt down next to me in the dirt. For just a moment we looked at each other in silence. Her mouth remained a tight line, and I couldn't read the rest of her expression from underneath her glasses and the wide-brimmed hat. Her laughter broke the silence. "Oh but darling, what a deprived child you are!" She stood up and motioned for me to follow with the empty bucket.

I'd always marvelled at the stark contrasts between each of my grandmother's personalities. My dad's mother was loud. Boisterous and a little rough around the edges. I'd learned quite an extensive list of swear words from her. On the other hand, Nanna was very old fashioned and rather prim and proper. She always wore floral dresses, went to church every Sunday and spent the rest of the week playing housewife, singing soprano and imparting gems of wisdom. She paid great attention to the finer details, and she held my hand tighter than anyone else.

On this particular occasion in her garden, she lost me for a minute. Her words cascaded around me, but I was taking in her softness and the intricate details of the embroidered lace on her flowing blue periwinkle dress. When I tuned back in, she looked brighter ... happier than I had ever seen her. I felt an unfamiliar lightness as I watched her prance around the garden reciting Mary Oliver's poetry: "We belong to the moon and when the ponds open, when the burning begins the most thoughtful among us dreams of hurrying down into the black petals, into the fire, into the night where time lies shattered ..."

It's a moment that has stayed with me my entire life, so it is with deep gratitude and wonderment that I reflect on what Mary did with her one wild and precious life. I have just finished the painting below after hearing of her passing. 

Wild geese everywhere are flying for her today.

Christmas Art

These things I carry with me...

I can't remember ever loving my dad. My earliest memory of him is from when I was around 4 or 5, and I was standing in his backyard while he was beating a rabbit to death with a shovel. I'm not sure he was even angry, that was just the kind of thing he would make us watch him do. Sometimes it was a threat or a "punishment". Sometimes it was just because he could. When we were a bit older, sometimes he would make my brothers join in. They would have a "choice" to hit me or the dog with a stick. I remember one of my brothers had tears rolling down his face while he flung a stick around. It's disturbing to think back to that time and it's difficult to talk about. It was terrifying then and it terrifies me now.

As Christmas approaches, I find myself re-experiencing some of the terror I felt throughout my childhood. I'm having nightmares every night and I'm waking up disorientated and distraught, remembering the weight of his body crushing me down.  I've never been able to forget the Christmas Day when I was almost 9 years old. I was unwell so he put me in his bedroom with a movie. He came back in while other family members were eating lunch. That's when he raped me for the first time. 

I know that I am not alone in struggling around the holidays but it can still feel really isolating and overwhelming. It's a time of year when there are so many more social events, but I feel withdrawn and 'not myself'. Most of the people in my life can't even begin to imagine the depravity of my childhood and so I end up feeling a sense of separateness. There's a time and a place for a rape story and it's not at a Christmas party, you know? 

So I try to 'take back' this time of year in small ways... I try to stay in the moment with my children, and it is actually nice to be around their excitement and joy. I feel like I am in a better place than I could be and I am grateful for many things. There's a little analogy that I sometimes share with my students about disruption and the potential for posttraumatic growth, and it's about the process of seedling development and how there's no seed that breaks through the soil without disrupting the soil. So you start with disruption, but you end up with growth and perspective. I think this year, thinking about those kinds of things helps to step out of the helplessness a little.

I've been wondering how I get myself out from under the weight ... the literal weight that I feel when I remember that first rape, and the sheer terror of all those years.  I've been working on a few different art pieces, but I don't know how to depict the darkness and the heaviness without falling completely into it. Instead I have tried to focus on where I would go in that moment if I could get out from under the heaviness. 

Stuck Points

Trigger warning: This post has graphic details of one of the nights I was raped when I was 17. I tried to go back to see it from the perspective I had back then, to give full voice to my experience and to try to understand my reactions a little better.

I’m sprawled across someone’s bed, fully clothed. My shoes are on. The room is spinning and it takes me a moment to figure out where I am. Scott’s room. I can see a pile of CDs on the bedside table, a mess strewn across his floor. I can’t really move. There’s rap music vibrating through the ceiling from upstairs. I’m not even sure how I got here, but I am really drunk. It feels kind of like I’m floating. I wonder if anyone’s looking for me.

When I wake up again everything is much quieter. The light is still on but there’s no music, no laughter. I am inside the sheets and I seem to only be wearing my bra. I’m not alone. I try to sit up and Scott reaches across me and holds me by the arm, “Nah, it’s okay. You can stay.” He tilts his head and smiles at me. It’s more like a smirk. He seems so sure of himself and I’m not sure at all. Did I lead him on? Did we already have sex? I don't speak at all. Inside my head I am screaming at myself, "What are you doing, get him off you!" I can’t seem to move my legs. He keeps a firm grip on my wrist and it’s hurting. I’m kind of dizzy. Really drunk. He puts his fingers inside me. I don’t try to stop him. I don’t do anything. He’s really calm and I think, "I must have agreed to this." Then he manoeuvres my body, turns me over onto my stomach. He’s penetrating me from behind. I can barely keep my eyes open but I notice the black satin sheets and the chunks of vomit in my hair. I don't think I feel anything but numb.

I’m not sure how I get home. Later I’ll call Katie and tell her we had sex and that I’m so confused because I don’t even like him "like that". I’m so ashamed of it. We’ll never mention it again.

This memory has been one of my sticking points ... It's something that I could never really bring myself to talk about because it felt like it was evidence against me. It was proof that this was 'my pattern' and that I was stupid or reckless or naïve. The self-critical part of myself wonders why, after this happened, I still considered Scott to be a friend or at the very least wasn't more suspicious of him. 

He was the essence of casualness, both during his assault and afterwards. His self-assuredness made me question myself. It gave me the impression that what happened wasn't so bad, I must have been overreacting. If I hinted around at it and other people couldn't figure it out, it must not be all that important. It felt as though it were in a 'grey area' because I'd been drinking. I think my NOT labelling it was my way of protecting myself from the ugly truth. If I didn't say the words I didn't have to face their impact. We'd been close friends since we were 12, and I thought that if I made everything normal then it would be. That's how he remained in my friendship group. Silence, denial and that same 'everything is just fine' smirk of his. I see all of the insidious ways it affected me even when it was buried.

***

A month or two after this happened, we were both at a mutual friend's 18th birthday party. My family had gone away on vacation, but I had chosen to stay behind because I had exams coming up that whole next week. The plan had been that a couple of my friends would be staying at my house too, so that I wasn't alone because I had a restraining order out on my ex-boyfriend. Things didn't end up going to plan. The self-recrimination comes in because Scott was really insistent about giving me a drink. I didn't drink the whole thing because I realised he was being weird about it... but then, I still left with him. I wanted to leave the party earlier than the friends who were supposed to be staying with me because I wasn't feeling well. Scott offered to share a cab, with the intention that we were going to drop me off first and then the cab would take him to his house.

I passed out in the cab, and I remember my head on his shoulder and I don't really remember much else. I don't know if it was a blank or if I literally woke up at his place. I remember standing out the front saying really adamantly, "No, I'm gonna call the cab back. I need to go home. I can't be here." Then there was a back and forth where he said, "I just need to make a quick phone call and then I'll walk you home. That's fine, you can go home."

So I remember waiting outside and I was feeling confused and panicked. I'm pretty sure that's when I first had the thought that perhaps my drink had been drugged, and that maybe it wasn't the first time... and even though I had that realisation, I was still there waiting for him to come back to walk me home. I don't know how to forgive myself for that. I didn't feel safe with him, I'd chosen to leave a party with him, and suddenly I was in a "fooled me twice, shame on me" kind of situation. I can't know for certain, but I'm fairly sure he was calling the others to tell them of a change of plans. Someone who I had once trusted and considered to be a friend, set me up to be gang-raped and I didn't see it coming.

I know that what I’m dealing with is an illusion of control and I want to work on the self-blame and the internalised responsibility that I have used as a coping strategy. I remembered a response that I had written to someone else years ago when I was in my early 20s, so I searched for it to see what advice I'd have to say to someone struggling with similar feelings. This is what I wrote back then:

I'd like to gently challenge this idea you've expressed that your experiences of sexual assault fall into a grey area. The sentiment that there is such a thing as 'grey area' consent doesn't make any logical sense to me. Either someone has consented, actively and willingly without coercion, or they have not. It is not possible to give half-consent or to be half-raped and therefore there is no grey area, regardless of the relationship or what led to that moment. All this to say that from my outside perspective I can clearly see that what you endured really wasn't your fault, you did not do anything in the lead up to deserve his horrific actions. You certainly do "deserve" to be here and to be supported as you navigate your way through this. It's always much harder to apply this same compassion or logic to ourselves though, isn't it?

Sometimes I find myself thinking about self-betrayal, self-blame and fear as us potentially being afraid of our own power. What happens when we feel empowered? Typically positive things, but it can be difficult to empower ourselves in the aftermath of trauma. On the flip side, it can be really easy to slip into a belief that we had more power than we really did. 

In so many ways the feeling or belief of self-betrayal could also be framed as a way of trying to maintain a sense of control. "If only I'd…" In reality we were in a situation/s that we had no real control over. We were at the mercy of a merciless other or others. Feeling powerless and helpless is a terrifying feeling that we understandably all want to avoid. Who ever wants to be vulnerable? But perhaps it is walking into the heart of that frightening, dark place that we begin to truly heal. Easier said than done in many respects, is my experience... but I think that is exactly what you are doing here in a forum of survivors who can relate and understand and hopefully challenge the notion that you are in any way to blame.  

For me, accepting that it wasn't my fault always leads back into not having control... at those times, in those circumstances.. When I self-blame I don’t have to deal with the true reality of my childhood or the multiple rapes I have survived since. If I am to blame, then I can somehow “rape-proof” my life with reassurances that it won’t happen to me again because I won’t let it, right?

It's interesting to me that I seem to have circled back to a similar stuck point, it seems it has always been easier for me to intellectualise an idea rather than truly take it on board as something I can feel wholeheartedly. I do feel like I am a step closer than I was back then, my past no longer has the same kind of power over me that it once did. I post this today with the knowledge that there's nothing so dark that we can't even speak of it. 

November

As a bit of darkness comes back to my edges it feels very real. If I allow myself to sink into it, will I find all of the unexpressed, unwanted and unknown thoughts and feelings from a moment in time that I’d rather stay well away from? Every November I find myself circling back to it in the deep stillness of the night. I play it over and over, the vivid and the murky memories, never really sure what I’m searching for. What is it that I’m unwilling to claim? What is it that I’m unable to let go of? Today may not be the day where answers will come, but it feels good to write about it.

I've been trying to find my place in it all, coming back to wonder whether certain things I did or didn't do in the lead up to the gang rape somehow contributed to how it all played out. Actually, what I would really like is to find a way to forgive myself. I thought that I had, but this year's 'theme' seems to be all about self-recrimination.

I worked on a mixed-media painting this week, with the intention of stepping toward the part of myself that I feel resistant about. When I thought about what I don't like or don't want, the feelings that come up are vulnerability and shame. I don't like that I couldn't find a way out of that situation. I don't like that I wasn't in control. I don't like that I was overpowered, outnumbered, exposed.

I wondered about what the barrier looked like and it wasn't a wall. It looked like water. I am terrified of water. Water feels like not being able to breathe, it feels like being held under. It feels like being water boarded with beer. It's the plan they had to dump my body in the lake.

When I painted I thought that I would find self-compassion, but instead there is a lot of displaced anger.