I was always looking for someone to love me enough to fix the hole in my soul that perpetually blocked happiness and success. Instead of love, I attracted what I was familiar with and ended up marrying men like my father. I became even more damaged and lonely. The hurts that I carried came from others so it was only natural to believe that the solutions could only come from someone taught to heal such wounds. I was in a therapist’s office staring at a poster of a whale’s tail arching upwards from an ocean splattered with the colors of a setting sun.
“How did you live through all of that?…I mean where did you find the strength to continue with so much horror around you?…Why didn’t you just give up?” She was studying my face with academic curiosity and puzzlement.”
My mind was instantly flooded with memories of the countless nights where I knew that I could not live one more moment with my pain. Pain that came from feeling so worthless and repulsive that I sometimes had to will myself to breathe. Pain that came from the agony of looking into the faces of so many people and not finding a single shred of humanity looking back at me. My body simply wanted to die all on its own in order to erase the unbearable images of those faces. But I always waited. I waited for that first light of day to leave me exhausted enough to sleep.
“I did try to kill myself a couple o’ times.” I felt my mouth twist into a smile about an experience never shared before. “I ate a bottle of aspirin once and washed it down with a bottle of white wine. Vomited blood all night…didn’t die.”
She continued to study my face as if I had given an incorrect answer. So I relented and told her the silly secret to my endurance.
“I guess what really saved me was this funny belief that if I died…then the very next day would have been the best ever…and I would miss it.”
She still didn’t seem to approve of my answer even though she went on to a different topic. That’s because she didn’t know my longing for one perfect, happy fairytale day! I had always felt that that day was slightly beyond one more sleepless troubled night. A miracle would be waiting! I just had to hold on one more night.
I had lots of those nights and only promises of that day. But I still held on.
I was in another office years ago with a wonderful local church leader. I shared my tears over the troubled past that I was fighting hard to be free from, and he listened just as he had before. He noted my discouragement and tenderly made promises just as he had before. He tried to lift me up by telling me lovely things just as he had before. Then he suddenly became a lost, lonely little boy, confused and sad and introspective. “I had something like that happen to me too…not as bad, but it was every night. I cried from the pain, but he wouldn’t stop.” He was obviously accustomed to his own buried secret hurts. As he gazed listlessly at the wall, there was a tired, worn-out acceptance flooding the air that said it was just the way things were and nothing could ever be changed. He played listlessly with a pen and then the fabric on the sleeve of his suit jacket. “It was my father too. I guess that’s what makes it so hard to deal with.”
There was silence while I tried to digest the reality of what he had shared. I, who had suffered so much sexual abuse, had no idea how to comfort him. And so we sat in that silence. Two broken children quietly sitting in the ashes of our childhood. I went on to dream of my perfect fairytale day, and he committed suicide.
It’s hard to describe the dimensions of a wound that society has historically refused to acknowledge. In the past, sexual abuse was mostly grist for jokes and sordid stories. We were told to “Just get it behind you, and move on with your life!” But there was no life. Only a large gaping wound where a life should have been. With time, I have tried to define that wound. It is as if there is an inner cathedral in each one of us. A sacred, golden cathedral of light. It’s so sacred that it holds secrets to all that is divine within us. It has an alter that declares our divine, eternal worth. There are candles carefully placed around paintings and mirrors and gorgeous hand carved woodwork. It’s warm with peace and safety, and time is pulled out on a ribbon of forever with a knowing placed there with angel kisses and God’s own loving hand. And then, it’s all gone. Left in chaotic rubble. The golden beauty of it has been slashed and torn and burned. It’s no longer sacred, and it no longer has any safety or peace.
Healing begins with accepting the loss of the innocent child we once were. That child is gone and so is the adult we would have been. We might always be homesick for what was and could have been, but we still courageously walk into the rubble in spite of the pain to pick up a painting…and a candlestick, and a broken piece of a mirror. Those who vandalized will not be back to pick up a single nail. It’s up to us to make it beautiful again. The love that spontaneously rested there before can only be called back after we have taken one of those broken mirror pieces and gazed into it long enough to feel God’s love reflected back. That love is what is needed to make it sacred once more.
I heard one man grumble about the girls he had raped. “They just want to play the victim!”
We are not being “poor sports.” We are not “playing the victim.” We are not lying. We are not “looking for attention.” We are trying to describe an indescribable injury that has permanently altered us and destroyed the quality of our lives. We want to make sense out of the senseless. And we want to find that perfect, happy fairytale day.
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