Cometh the night, on itth thadowy thlippers!

Or something like that.

Hi folks. After not blogging for four day, I feel like I was on a long lonely journey for that whole time and now I have come home and boy, have I missed you nice people!

I mean, you actually read what I write! Despite the very strange and sometimes extremely dark contents of my stressed and fractured  mind and my leaking them all over the electronic page in full view of the discerning public, you keep on reading, no matter where this journey of mine takes me.

And I am so very, very grateful for that.

That theme of something shameful in me needing to come out has been on my mind lately. A lot of victims of child sexual abuse have to cope with a lifetime of feeling dirty and gross and like we are some kind of horrible disgusting thing.

Violation does a lot more than merely upset us. Ask any rape victim. Regardless of the ages of the people involved, the violation of self – in both the body and the mind – leaves a terrible wound. It damages your sense of safety because it shatters your sense of control over what happens to you on the most intimate possible level.

There are some deep rules to society that we never experience consciously because they are so rarely violated. One of this most basic, yet most complex, is our sense of will – of permission. We live our lives, at least in the modern world, with the assumption that we are in control of our own destiny That people need permission to do certain things to us or with us. That even those with he most power over us will respect those boundaries because violating them simply is not done.

Rape is the most potent form of this violation because it centers around the most intimate thing people do, and that’s sex. Sex involves parts of our bodies that we cover up in public and about which we tend not to talk. Not only that, but if there’s someone else involved, it not only involves their most intimate body parts as well, but even in non-penetrative sex it involves some very intimate contact with said body parts.

And if the sex is penetrative, well…. that’s another person’s body entering your body’s most private area, whatever the orifice involved is. That’s the most intimate you can be with another human being outside of an operating room.

And even there, there’s rules.

Myself, I was violated when I was only three years old. Back then, in the Seventies, most people didn’t even know (or at least, acknowledge) that child sexual abuse was even a thing that happened. That even COULD happen.

This meant predatory pedophiles acted more or less with impunity.

I certainly wasn’t ever going to tell. I did not even have the words. And it would not have helped if I had. Odds are, it would have only made things worse, and I think I was better off without the additional trauma of having adults angrily telling me I was lying and just making up dirty things just to get attention because that kind of thing didn’t happen!

For my younger readers : people really thought like that in the bad old days. Seems crazy in this world where people are hyper-vigilant about pedophiles, but there was a time when pedophilia was so unthinkable to people that they refused to believe it existed at all.

And that meant punishing the victim. God, the past sucks.

The thing about my feeling like there is something horrible and shameful about me is that I lack the psychological apparatus of guilt to put it into a cultural context. I certainly never blamed myself for the incident. How could I? I was only three years old when it happened.

What could I possibly have done differently? Reasonably speaking?

And yet, that sense of being horrible on the inside persisted. I didn’t feel like I had sinned. I never even had the concept of sin taught to me. If something was wrong, it was because it hurt people, not because it violated a list of rules.

I’m pretty sure I was better off that way. I know for certain that I am better off without that whole “original sin” bullshit. I’m convinced that the whole concept of oiignal sin was invented by old priests worried about someone gaining power over them by “cheating” – that is to say, by actually not sinning.

But I digress.

I think my sense of something horrible, toxic, and shameful deep inside me stems from something more primal that religion or guilt or any of that crap. I think it stems from the fact that I was violated at an age when diapers were not that far behind me and I was learning the basics of how to do stuff like clean myself.

I know this because when I imagine all this stuff “coming out”, I feel exactly the kind of deep, deep shame that accompanies violation of toilet rules.

I trust that the Freudian overtones of “there’s something disgusting inside me and I have to get it out” do not need to be explicitly explained.

In those terms, I have been emotionally constipated for my whole life. This is not uncommon in British-derived cultures. Our display rules for emotions are extremely strict compared to other cultures like the French or the Spanish.

We keep it all locked away. All except that particular strain of lunatic known as “the writer”, who pushes that stuff out for the whole world to see then cries out “Love me for this!”.

Amazingly, it’s been known to work.

This subject surfaced in my mind when I tried to imagine my room being totally clean and neat and tidy. It sounds good on paper, but when I imagine it, I get this feeling like something dark and horrible and deeply shameful is rising up inside me and it’s going to COME OUT and that would be the WORST THING EVER.

And besides, if all my bad stuff came out all at once…. who would I be afterwards?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.