End of Year Letter with Just A Slight Edge of Gloom

The end of the year is a time for reflection.  I can look back at 2014 and see a lot of positives and a lot of negatives.  Right now, I am in a state of sadness about an ongoing situation in my life that seems to have no end and no resolution.  It is hard to muster up the New Year's cheer today.  For those that have followed my blog, it is related to My Daily Nightmare blog post and the sadness around all this feels like it is going to suck me under.  But, I will push forward and attempt to write and maybe find something in this year, in this day that is worth writing about.

This year was a year of firsts for my youngest, who continues to push forward in life with passion and determination.  First solo, first car and driver's license, first job, and first surgery.  Driving took her further away from us and closer to adulthood; it broke my heart a little, although I tried let go. Her incredible solo punctuated her love for dance and showed others how talented she really is(although I had known it all along, of course).  Tonsil surgery was brutal, but she made it through with a little help from many friends who helped her keep her mind off the pain.   She continues to push forward, much too fast, with much enthusiasm and energy. Her ability to see and create magic and beauty in the world inspires me every day.

Last year, about this time, I was getting ready for big toe joint fusion surgery.  This terrified me as 2 previous foot surgeries had been failures.  Although recovery wasn't easy, this surgery has actually been a success.  I no longer walk around with my big toe in constant and chronic pain.  With effort and a little pain, I was able to hike 3 miles last summer with my sister, niece and my youngest.  This would have been impossible before the surgery.  It's incredible how freeing and amazing it felt to have health insurance, get something taken care of and be able to do things, like yard work, that I had not been able to do for years.  I still deal with chronic foot and back pain, but at least that foot is somewhat better.

One of the most pivotal parts of the year for me was quitting a job which I hated with no 'safety' plan or back up in place.  This decision was one of the wisest decisions I have made although it continues to be terrifying.  I took the time to figure out what I wanted to do and learned how incredibly burned out I was by day to day client work and fighting with systems.  It is yet to be known whether it is a line of work that I will return to, but the break has been extremely helpful.  The break led me to writing again.  I started blogging and have absolutely loved it.  No matter what happens, I know that I did the right thing because the decision led me back to doing something I love, no matter where it leads(and a lot of bonding with  my little pack of dogs!!).

Most importantly, this year has been a year of helping people.  From helping my mom with recovery from knee surgery to helping my youngest recover from tonsil surgery, I was able to be there for my family. In March, we were blessed with a strange and unforeseen(long story) visit by a young man with mental health issues we had never met who had nowhere to go and did not know what to do. This young man was one of the most forgiving young people I ever met and he touched my heart. My partner, my youngest and I were able to be there for him in concrete ways that helped him get to the next place he needed to go.  I am always grateful for the opportunity to help my closed loved ones, but in this case, I was very touched by the three of us and our ability to come through for this young person we had never met.

Writing this blog post has shown me that sometimes, in writing, I realize the good things and can open up my own heart even in the midst of extremely trying circumstances.  There was more to this year: there was theft, filing a restraining order, a great road trip with my partner, a crazy bad camping trip, the loss of our family cabin and some of the upheaval that has plagued us for quite some time. But, the good still shines through: my partner finding a new hobby she was passionate about(fishing), me rekindling my love of writing, and my youngest continuing her amazing life journey and dedication to her passions.

As the Grateful Dead would say, it's been another long strange trip.  Most of my years are.  I am grateful that I found new friends this year to share my journey.  I am grateful for my family and my old friends who love me.  2015 will bring new journeys, heartaches and joys. All I can wish for is to continue growing as a parent and a person and continuing to help people through my writing and more.  Sometimes my heart feels too open, too broken down, and too much for this world, but somehow those little pieces of hope just help keep me pushing through.  Thanks to everyone who helps keep the pieces of my heart from flying apart. With all my love.

From Despair, Into Action

I enter the end of the Christmas season with the usual lack of Christmas cheer.  The kids will probably be critical of the gifts.  The world is filled with tragedy.  My baking and wrapping skills aren't up to par. A few situations in my life are not getting any better. I feel like I have little power to change one of them, and plenty of power to change the other, but lack motivation.

One of my biggest lurking feelings is a feeling of despair.  Reading the comment threads on subjects related to racism, rape, and homelessness has caused me to reflect on the lack of kindness and compassion that seem to be pervasive in our society right now.  Another things that troubles me is a lack of attention to huge horrible things that happen, like our countries drone program and the fact that the Taliban recently slaughtered 145 people, mostly children.  It seems, we either want to hide our heads in the sand or lash out in 'black and white', us vs. them ways that don't serve any of us.

This feeling of despair is not new to me.  I have felt this 'weight of the world' feeling since I was a small child.  It has not served me well in many ways.  But, it did make me an excellent case worker, someone who had big compassion for my clients and an ability look at solutions.  Being a case worker broke my heart, over and over again.  Seeing a system that was so broken, that did not serve my people in the ways they needed to be served killed me a bit inside.  It left me feeling powerless and burned out.  So, I have taken a break and started writing again, an old love rekindled.

Somehow, I need to learn to turn that despair into action.  Blogging has helped ease my powerless feelings.  It has given voice to my personal experiences while hopefully helping others learn from my past and my insights into my experiences.  In ways, it has helped me combat the powerless feelings that I have when I read hateful comments on Internet threads.  My hope is that maybe in my little way, I am doing my part to combat the hatred, to educate people about things like rape, racism, mental health stigma, domestic violence, and more.  I can only hope that it is better than staying silent about these things and wanting to hide in a cave. (although writing does not always take away that 'hide in a cave' feeling)

This Christmas, I also try to have gratitude to turn around that despair.  Sometimes, this works and sometimes it fails miserably.  Many times, I throw up my hands in hopelessness, feeling like I don't know how to parent or even be much of an adult.  So  many things happened this year in the world 'triggered' me and filled me a sense of powerlessness.   There are days that everything seems freaking crazy and that there is nothing to do but despair.  It's my fall back, I am far from an optimist.

I do see that change happens sometimes.  In my home state of Wyoming, gay marriage is now legal. This is something I would never imagine happening in my lifetime.  We have a religious leader, the Pope, who is talking about deep and important issues regarding class and poverty.  Personally, I see the inherent goodness in people; from rallying around people who have loved ones with cancer to people in recovery helping each other in concrete and helpful ways that change lives. The Black Lives Matter protest movement is working to address systemic issues that pervade our culture regarding race.  We cannot afford to be disheartened because all around us, we see that change can happen, sometimes very slowly, but we cannot give up.

Perhaps my despair is actually a gift that pushes me to speak my truth.  It has inspired me to move, to speak about the issues important to me in my personal and professional life.  My despair has almost killed me, but it has also given me a strength and insight that I would not have without it.

This Christmas, I can look back at all the horrible things that have happened in the world and get completely bogged down, or I can choose to re-commit myself to making change in the ways that I can.  I will choose to re-commit myself to being a better parent, to teaching my kids that the latest, greatest gifts and purchases are much less important than the connections we make with people; that through their gifts of writing, dance and art, they can make changes in the world in their own small ways. I will choose to continue following my passion to speak out through writing about issues that are important to me, particularly about our mental health system and changes that must be made.  I will choose to continue learning to connect with new friends and expand my circle of people to make my world a little more 'large'.  Finally, my hope is that we can all learn to speak out a little more when we see injustice, that we can choose to help, instead of harm, that we can make space in our hearts for the suffering of the world and use our own unique gifts to keep pushing forward and change this crazy world.

Who Is The Victim?

My consciousness is not ready to let this topic go.  Camille Cosby's statement on her husband's rape filled me with anger and helped me realize that I still need to speak about this issue.  One blog post was not enough.

When I was 14 years old my world changed.  My coach was arrested for statutory rape.  My world shattered.  He was a man who I spent hours of my life with, who I looked up to, loved and respected. Innocence was lost.  No longer could I trust my instincts.  It did not help that I soon found out that many knew, but, I was one of those who didn't, who was completely blindsided.  I was sickened and sad and had nowhere to turn.  The next year I almost starved to death.  My psychiatrist in the mental hospital I was in at 16 assumed that my trauma was somehow linked to my coach and would try to get me to admit abuse.  The problem was I was never abused by my coach, but the trauma of losing my innocence, of losing someone I looked up to had wounded me deeply.  The clueless psychiatrist refused to see that sexual violence has vicarious victims. Writing about it now, almost thirty years later makes my palms sweat and fills me with anxiety.  These traumas hold on to us.  

As vicarious victims of this crime, we spent hours of our lives year round with this coach. From him, we learned a lifelong passion and life lessons.  It was hard to grasp that he had done something wrong.  It was stunning and sad.  For some, these feelings made them lash out at the victim with great vigor.  I remember being baffled by this also.  They could not grasp that this figure that they loved could do something wrong, or that it was wrong to have sex with a minor, and even more so when you are in a position of power.  Many made the victim the 'wrong' one in this case.  It was a case of extreme bullying which I am sad to say I did not speak out against, but only watched in silence.

Watching this ostracism and bullying taught me that it was extremely frightening and isolating to report a rape.  It kept me from reporting my rape my first year in college. Perhaps if the adults in our lives would have been more open, would have come out and talked to us about how wrong it was,  maybe things would have been different. The victim left our school and life went on.  All of us shell shocked and unsure how to process what we had been through, we just pushed forward.  I don't know if anyone realized how traumatized we were, how much losing our sense of safety and trust affected us. We learned to vilify the victim of this crime and to silently cope with our conflicting emotions in sometimes destructive ways.  

Unfortunately, I have seen this same type of victim bullying in the  Cosby case. For me, these very public rape cases have triggered me and filled me with anger when I see victims blamed yet again. When Camille Cosby compared her husband's rapes to the UVA rape case and said that the UVA rape case 'proved untrue', she was bullying that victim.  I felt sick for the victim in that case as Rolling Stone's poor journalism has thrown her story into question and people are now throwing it out there as an example of false rape reporting. Camille Cosby is using it as an example of why we should think her husband is innocent.   I hear Camille Cosby asking 'who is the victim?' and I cringe inwardly.  In this case, I do not understand how her denial can run so deep as to claim that over 20 women are making up the same story.(a story that isn't new to her since a case was settled in 2006 with Cosby which had 13 witnesses with similar stories, many of whom are coming forward now) Why say anything in this case? Why bully the victims of her husband and the victim in the UVA case?  To many, it is very clear who the victim is, Camille Cosby and it is not your husband.  

We want to believe that sexual predators look a certain way.  It's hard to believe that they are often perfectly nice people in many areas of their lives.  But, the reality is that many sexual predators are like Bill Cosby and like my coach.  They are sometimes good parents, good friends and even 'role models'.  They don't 'look' or 'act' scary and this makes it harder for us to believe and support victims.  We do not want to believe people like our good 'father' figure, Bill Cosby or my 'fun' father figure, my coach are criminals in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This mantle of respectability and kindness give predators a great deal of power with victims and with the people around them.  It contributes to burying allegations of sexual crimes and blaming the victim.

I think of the men and women who I know who have been sexually abused as I read this latest round of victim blaming.  I think of people who have been abused by siblings, by acquaintances, by fathers, by strangers, by teachers and by coaches.  I knew what it was like to love and respect a sexual predator. When, I found out he was a predator, my heart was broken.  My feelings were so mixed up because I could not accept reality.  Our culture refuses to accept the reality that men and women who are 'respectable' can be predators.  We  need to wake up.

When men and women come forward with sexual harassment or rape allegations, we need to confront those who immediately question and shame victims.  We need to know that in spite of how someone may seem to us, they indeed may be sexual predators. Our culture is rife with examples of victim blaming that starts sometimes as simple as a 'boys with be boys' attitudes when girls are harassed in schools.  It starts with something as simple as abuse of boys by women being laughed off and ignored.  As victims, we need no longer remain silent.  We need to fight back in ways that make things different for our children.  All of us can no longer sit silently by and tolerate victim blaming or sexual abuse on any level.

Together, We Are Not Broken

Since I started this blog a few months ago, I often have inspirations; a small voice that tells me what I need to write about next.  Sometimes these hunches are inspired by current issues in the media and other times they are inspired by personal experiences that are making their way to the surface of my consciousness, urging me to write about them.  This topic has been a nagging small voice for at least a month now.  The media has definitely pushed this nagging voice, with Cosby, with the Rolling Stone debacle and the discussion of campus rape.  But, I had a great deal of fear about writing about my experiences.  I realized that my fear is not all that different from what I felt 25 years ago when this experience happened.  The fear is rooted in the shame of what I experienced and that blame that I still put on myself 25 years later. This collective, misplaced blame that our culture inflicts on survivors of sexual violence is something that is hard to escape.

25 years ago, October, 1989, in my first month of college, I was raped.  As a teenager, I never had a relationship and had never even kissed anyone.  My experience with drugs and alcohol was extremely limited.  On this night that is etched in my consciousness, I hung out with my roommate and her boyfriend and was under the influence of a drug that rendered me somewhat frozen.  My roommate and her boyfriend left me at an apartment with someone I did not know.  This person was drunk, took advantage of the situation and raped me.  

I remember making my way back to my apartment, broken.  I remember the long shower and the feelings that could not be washed away.  I walked around campus that day in a fog of sadness and pain; heartwrenching physical and emotional pain.  Back in my apartment, my new friend, Heidi looked at me and knew something was wrong.  She pulled me back into her room and asked me what was wrong.  I told her.  She was loving and kind and most importantly, believed me.  Somehow the story got out to my 4 other roommates. One was extremely angry and wanted me to press charges.  Two of them did not believe me and openly said that I was responsible for this experience as I was there alone and it must not have been rape.  The one who left me there never did say much except to tell me later that her 'real' boyfriend(not the one she had been with that night) was very angry at her for leaving me there, unprotected and vulnerable.  

Reporting this rape was not an option in my mind.  My mom was a director of a family violence/sexual assault agency and I heard all the stories of women who were raped and their rapists were never convicted.  Most importantly, in high school, I witnessed extreme victim blaming when a victim of statutory rape was ostracized for reporting the rape.  These fears, the reactions of my two roommates, and the fact that it was an acquaintance rape where I was under the influence of drugs kept me silent. I did what was expected of me, kept quiet and let this trauma eat me up inside.  

This experience colored my life in ways that I was not aware of until much later.  It made an already difficult relationship with my body, even more difficult.  I learned to disconnect from my feelings even more and to detach from my body.  The only thing good that came of it was that it solidified my friendship with my lifelong friend, Heidi.  My relationship with men became fraught with mistrust and fear for many many years.  It took away my intuitive sense of what was healthy and what was not, and it was hard for me to discern who the 'good' men were and instead, I could only love men who were broken, even if they were violent.  The disbelief of my roommates and the dismissal by others taught me to question my own reality  My intimate relationships were effected in ways that are difficult to define. I never went to therapy for it because I didn't know if it was real.  Was it a real 'rape' or were my roommates correct in thinking it was my fault for being in that situation?  Were the feelings of violation and deep despair a mere figment of my imagination?  

Since this experience, I met many women and men who experienced similar traumas; women and men who never reported sexual violence, who questioned their reality even when they knew deep down they had been violated.  These shared experiences have helped me validate my own reality, to know that what I experienced was real and to see how it effected me.  I am filled with despair and guilt when I hear the statistics about the percentage of rapists who rape again.  Could I have stopped this rapist? I can only hope it was a one time thing for him, but I will never know.  

Why do I share this  now? Some of the reactions I have seen to the Cosby rapes and to the Rolling Stone rape story, have made me deeply uncomfortable.  Again, 25 years later, I see victim blaming and questioning of victims stories.  It is not a walk in the park to come forward with a story of deep sexual violation.  The percentage of 'false' reporting of rapes is very small.  It makes me physically ill when I see women and men accusing victims of lying or somehow profiting from reporting of these horrible violations.  The Rolling Stone story made me even more uncomfortable as I heard that 'friends' were sharing that there were discrepancies in Jackie's story. This could have been me.  My roommates could have come forward with similar allegations, even though what I experienced was very real. My heart went out to 'Jackie' going through her recovery from this horrific event in the public eye.  I cannot imagine how heartwrenching and painful this must be for her.    

I share my story because I cannot be silent.  My silence makes me complicit in a culture that still blames victims for rape.  I have two daughters and I do not want them to live in a world where women are brutalized.  Unfortunately, they do. What can I do? I can teach my daughters to believe survivors of sexual violence, support them and fight for them.  I can teach them to be open about their own experiences, to seek support and fight back.  Importantly, I can teach them to never leave their friends alone in situations that could be dangerous, to listen to their guts and get themselves and/or others out of situations that just don't feel 'right'.  

Looking back on this experience, I feel tremendous sadness for the broken and alone young woman that I was.  My heart fills with gratitude that I had my friend  to support, believe, and love me even though I could not talk about it.  My heart breaks for men, women, boys and girls broken by sexual violence.  Sometimes, we learn to slowly mend our broken pieces and tragically, sometimes we don't ever mend those broken places and escape in death or addictions. The more we speak out about our experiences, the more we can fight a culture that shames us and strives to keep our experiences hidden. If we have the courage to share with others, to band together and speak out, we can become unbroken; ready to change a world that shames us and to eliminate sexual violence.