It might be more than I can put into words.

I mean, how do you put the pain of being raped when you were 4 years old into words 47 years later? It’s the defining event of my life but despite the millions of words I have written in this space, I can’t possibly do it justice.

But I have to keep trying. Especially now that I know just how big the cost of keeping it suppressed has been. It feels like at least a third of me and all I could be are locked away with all that silent suffering, and I want that part of me back.

No wonder I have been an emotional cripple for so long. Able to make it through the day without too much pain and suffering, and that’s it. Helpless to help myself, doomed to at best tread water till the day I finally give up and drown in a pool of unshed tears.

How could nobody have noticed the drastic change in who I was and how I acted back then? Because I know I was but a ghost of my former self. I went from being a happy, precocious little charmer to being shy and scared and timid and hesitant.

The experience shattered me and nobody even noticed. Sigh.

I guess they didn’t want to know. They wanted to keep believing I was okay without ever checking to make sure I was because the real goal was to forget I was even there.

And I tried not to be. But try as I might, I just kept on existing.

How thoughtless and inconsiderate of me. I hadn’t even been invited into this world in the first place. I just barged into my family’s lives and then dared to have needs that seriously inconvenienced all around me.

And years later I was still there. Appalling.

No wonder I am plagued by the idea that everyone would be better off without me. That’s the exact message I got all through my childhood. It was the unwritten rule of my entire existence and it continued to crush me to this very day.

I can tell myself how unfair that was, and how I was a great kid who deserved so ,much better than what I got, and so forth and so on, and I can even make myself believe it for a little while.

But my unwelcome nature is bred into every joint and sinew of my existence. It was a message I got from birth and that’s not the kind of thing you can just shrug off.

Especially when I have done so little with myself. I have very little evidence to offer to prove that I actually do deserve to be alive and to take up space.

Just all that “potential” that I’ve never gotten to use.

I could do amazing things if I just had a mentor who could provide the kind of structure and goals I need to keep me motivated.

I’m too weak to create that for myself. On my own, I am limp and diffuse and vacillating and bereft of even the most basic level of motive force.

Abd that’s no accident. I think a major part of my retreat from reality has been to let reality become all foggy and misty and blurry in order to hide my pain from myself so I can keep going.

I would be a hell of a lot healthier if I wasn’t so good at suppressing things.

But I suppose that’s true for everybody.

Conversely to my “blurring”, I think the main thing keeping me from “getting my shit together” is that if I did so, I would have to deal with all that pain inside me, which would suddenly become all too real.

That’s why I have to take things so damned slow. If I go any faster, I will have to deal with all that pain.

The best that I can do is feel it a little at a time, all the time.

And that’s taking forever.

And I haven’t that much longer to live.

Guess I’ll just die, then.

More after the break.

---

Fruvous in love

I’ve tried to imagine what that would be like.

As you know, I’ve never been. Everything I know about romantic love, I learned from TV.

I can imagine what early infatuation is like, at least. That, I have experienced a little, in furry virtual sense.

Most recently with Luke. But like always, I moved far too slow, and now someone else has his love, and I never see him any more.

I need to either become more forward when it comes to romance, or at least fall for someone who is.

Anyhow. Me in love.

It’s both easy to imagine and not. I can fantasize about being really into someone whom I think is wonderful and sexy and smart and all the things I want in a man. I can imagine showering him with affection in my effusive way and making sure he knows how much I love and treasure and desire him. I can imagine talking into the wee hours of the morning with such a man.

But that’s about where it stops. Because sooner or later, the infatuation fades, and reality returns, and…. they’re still there.

And I need my alone time. I need a lot of it, actually. I’m an introvert, after all, albeit one with some extroverted tendencies.

Well, nobody is ever all one thing, am I right?

So in a way, I can imagine myself dating someone a couple of times a week, but I have no idea where it would go from there.

I know I will want to get closer to him. But that doesn’t mean I can.

I know from self-exploration that I have some extremely heavy duty psychological defenses that nobody knows about because they’ve never been activated.

And that’s because I have never gotten all that close with anyone.

But I can easily see getting some poor dude caught up in my emotional volatility and ending up hurting him by, essentially, being a crazy bitch.

And I would hate that. I hate people like that. Have some restraint.

And my God, what if they blamed themselves?

That’s too horrifying to contemplate. I wish I hadn’t thought of it.

I guess I won’t know what a Fruvous in love is really like until it happens.

And God knows how that would ever come about.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.