Okay. So I’m going to tell you some awful things.
There were lots of awful things for me, growing up. Maybe that’s normal. I don’t know. I only know what I lived through, and some parts of it seem pretty fucked up. I’m a person, just like anybody else, and who I am is complex and impacted by these things, just like anybody else. I’m not saying I’m more special or hurt or convoluted. I’m just saying these things are things that happened, and they have been part of everything that’s made me who I am.
I need to ask something first, though. And it might be hard, and it might seem harsh, and if you agree then you might find you have nothing that you feel you can say to me, after hearing these stories, at first. I hope you agree. I hope you understand. And when you feel like you can’t think of a single thing you can say, afterwards, then please - wait. The words will come. And because they are not what I always hear, they will be the perfect words to say.
When I tell you my stories, I need you to do this one thing for me.
I need you not to say you’re sorry.
Yes, that’s what you’re supposed to say. That’s your immediate, sympathetic response. I know, I get it. That’s what I would immediately want to say as well. But I need you to consider this.
I have told these stories many, many, so many times. I have told them to friends when they happened, to friends after the fact when I needed to explain something, I have told them to so many boyfriends and kissing partners and significant others and therapists, some of them I have told to every single therapist that I have had which is probably somewhere around half a dozen. I have been going to therapists since I was about 14. I have told these stories a lot.
And so many times, I have heard “I am sorry.”
I have told these stories so many times that I hate telling these stories. I hate having to revisit the same old sad thing I have thought about so many times before. I hate that I am dredging it up again, that it is still a part of my life, that when I tell the story I cannot help but think about how awful it was at the time. When I tell a story I cannot deny to myself what I went through and what I felt. I can and do block some of it, as I discovered when I read through my diaries - the pain seems less intense in a story than it was. What that really means is just that sometimes I find myself doubting if it was really as bad as I seem to think.
But that’s besides the point.
The point is that now, when someone hears these stories, stories which are, rightfully, stories that explain how I became to be me, a person who I have worked so hard to become and believe is powerful, tough, capable, independent, and in control: someone who can answer a fight, instead of succumbing to it: someone who NO ONE would ever think was a victim, or a survivor, or someone who must be treated gently in case of breaking, as if I were spun glass; someone who NO ONE would ever see as a warning of what could happen if…, a person to pity, a person to feel bad for, a person who could be victimized, taken advantage of, and when that someone, my audience, responds to these battle hymns with their admittedly well-meaning and psychologically correct apology - their “I’m so sorry you had to deal with that,” their “That must have been awful for you” - I become reduced to that person. I become a person to be pitied. I lose all the battles I have fought since then, as a result of then: I am stripped to a person who could not stand up, a person who could not protect herself, a person who was a victim and now is a survivor.
I am not a victim. I am a fighter. I am a conquerer. I am Who Shall Overcome. I will never be that person, who had those awful things happen to them, ever again. I have not been for a long time. At least, that is what I want to - what I must - believe.
And so the very last thing I want, the only thing I do not want to hear in response to my stories of blood and valor, lost skirmishes and abandoned battlefields, is that you are sorry for them.
I would never have become strong without those experiences that taught me where I was weak.
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