We become soo much more fragile as we get older...
I know, I know, I'm far too young to be feeling old but I'm looking back and that's half mistake and half healing and...
Harrumph. Johnny-boy is turning 33 next week. Most of my friends float around about that age somewhere, and aside from a distinct difference in sexual energy... Physically I have an idea of how I may get frighteningly weak (frightening to me now) if I continue this trend of never seeing daylight.
But... Suddenly I feel how my personal strength is seeping. How pain hurts me more (though never for long, maybe we learn to recover faster because we have no choice), how my aching knee would never have solicited a complaint 8 years ago but how I had tears in my eyes on the long car ride home.
Of course, I'm not worried about my knee. I just read "Touched" an old archived tale on the Fray. It's about, you guessed it, sexual abuse.
A few months ago, on my favourite mailing list (60 or so geeks in the montreal area, started off as an easier way to send each other jokes, but now that they've all grown cold we just bitch together...), we began a heated discussion about women complaining of sexual abuse. The men on the list (most of 'em, really), the ultra-romantic geeky types that they are, are irked that they're portrayed as monsters because "a few fuckers out there hurt a few women".
They've got a point, but...
I pointed out that day, that... I can think of *three* women that I know that haven't told me about having been raped. Including me. Three of those women, just this year. The three I don't know about? Maybe you just haven't told me...
It's a tough story to talk about.
I didn't, for years. I didn't let it bother me. Sure, at the time, I told his girlfriend, tried to mention it to my parents, but they called me a whore and I quickly backed off and told them I'd made it up.
Then... From when I was fourten to about seventeen or so, I lived up to the name my parents called me. "Oh, you're a drug dealer? You can get 'em for free? Sure, I'll spread..."
When Marc talks about women having power over men, all I can think behind clenched teeth is "I remember when I used to use sex for power..."
Then when I met my husband, and for the first time met someone who could *love* me... I decided I was in love with him. I had to be! I was happy. I was warm. I didn't feel dirty looking at him in the morning, I didn't have to push what we'd done out of my mind.
I learned soon enough that maybe that wasn't really me either.
Then I was free. Not married anymore, no one suffocating me. John and I played slut for a while, brought bevvies of women (and a not-small-handful of men for me) home...
That got tiring after a while, I'd proven to myself that I was independent.
Great. I'm independent. And tonight, instead of finishing up that programming assignment... I'm shivering in my ski outfit, thinking of all the men that have ever looked at me.
I don't feel beautiful at all. I've got a twat, and what can pass for breasts, that's all. And it bothers me that it bothers me now.
It bothers me that I can feel his weight pressing down on me, after nine years. It bothers me that when he started dating one of my friends in high school, she wouldn't listen. She listened to him when he called me a liar.
It bothers me that for nine years I never looked back, not for long - and aside from a terrible phobia of gynecologists... It has done nothing but make me stronger.
And now, looking back at what's gone into this diary, I wonder where the Happy Girl (that Lady called me the first time she met me) has gone to. Why do I doubt myself all of a sudden. Why am I so weak.
Maybe it's the stress. Maybe it's February. Everybody gets depressed in February.
Except me. I'm different. I'm a monstre. February isn't supposed to bother me.
Maybe my 9-5 job is making me human.
I'm sorry, guys, but I don't think I like it.
It hurts, and the hot needles behind me eyes are just getting in the way.
I don't like it when I doubt myself.
But maybe this is the 'healing process', maybe now that I'm not fighting for everything, I'm trying to let go a little and it's all hitting me now.
Maybe.
But tommorrow, I'll smile.