You Asked Me Why I am the way I am!?!?

I, for a while now, have wanted a blog or podcast kind of thing as a preface for a book I plan to write one day, but had no idea where to start. Here I am today reading a book by Suzette Haden Elgin “You Can’t Say That to Me! Stopping the Pain of Verbal Abuse”, and the tears started rolling, my brain began to rattle, and my soul told me to grab a pen. I’m on page 7, in the midst of a verbal abuse survey, and during the thoughts for the question numbered 14 “What is the first example that I can remember when I verbally abused someone else?”, I realized it was going to take some digging.

Now for the past month I’ve been at my mother’s trying to find a new place to reside (Which I’ve found, move next week, yay!), which is a place I barely am because beyond the fact of having a “big, supportive, loving family” most of my life I felt like I didn’t fit, imagine being lonely around so many people. As I grew, I left as soon as I could and kept my distance enough for my son to recognize everyone but barely have a bond. So for the past month I feel like I’ve been low-key and even now high-key trying to explain to them why I act the way I do without hurting their feelings with the words I say or how I say them and the guilt they may feel from them.

What I am not going to do to is tell you guys the kind of person I am, over the entries you’ll have your own perception, but I will tell you I am very blunt and one thing I’ve learned over the years of my traumatic life was move and act for your happiness, another person’s happiness is not my responsibility, act and let the world react around you. From that, you can take what you like and imagine the person I am. So each day here I expose a little more of myself to them which honestly hurts me more than them probably because now I have to deal with what’s surfaced now. Not the actual words but the feelings I pushed back and ignored over the years, the stuff I gave temporary “fuck its” to because if I dealt with it then, emotionally I would I have crumbled.

Then here comes question 14. I sat and scanned my brain for the little girl in me to recollect that moment, and I began to cry, still searching though and of course I eventually realized when it happened, when I became “this”, a verbal abuser, angry, non-emotional, and hard. Crying even as I’m typing this because even having the knowledge of who I am now and how I got here the difficulty in the journey to change it scares me. Going back in my life and watching the first shift in my being scared me.

Then it was just action but now I can see the young me leaving and walking away from it all, the hopes, the love, and the fairytale endings little girls yearned for and continued to let pain groom me. It hurts watching the replays in my head as a different woman today, I wish I could explain some things to myself, hold me one time and let me know it would be ok, but at that time I had that nowhere, not even in me.

Earlier I stated I won’t tell you the kind of person I am and I have my reasons, but I can tell you about who I was and when it stopped. I (to the world) was smart, quiet, respectful, thoughtful, compassionate, just down right nice (honestly makes me sick thinking about it a little because being all that put me in a lot of fucked up situations). From 9 ½ to 13 I had to go on trial against one of my sexual abusers, and at 13 is when I got my voice and was able to speak. It was so overwhelming, something so iconic to feel, a day I will never forget. The judge, and his attorney questioned me with the same question over and over, my agitation in my life has never built up like that, and I got extremely angry and I spoke, it felt so free I barely could stop. The judge even banged their gavel at me several times while verbally telling me to calm down, and I still couldn’t stop. I had to get it out, and the feeling as I spoke felt so magical like the rest of the world didn’t matter to me when I spoke I didn’t even pay mind to the judge, but when I stopped, when my anger allowed my body to stop, I remembered where I was with all eyes on me in shock. This same judge, the same set of attorneys, and jurors that watched me over the pass 3 years has never seen that me, shit I’ve watched me my whole life and never seen that me. But one thing I did know and seen in that moment was I never wanted to go back to how I used to feel, with words so crowded at the back of your throat waiting to come up and out but it hurts so bad to even swallow, and yet still no audio.

The things I went through the three years afterwards is how I actually became the me I am today. During the trial I was living with my father and finally being exposed to how my mother always felt but kept quiet to me about, and even going through everything I’ve been through at that time in life being first eye witness to that was the most emotionally challenging obstacle I’d ever had to face. Realizing the man you prayed for all your life, that you loved so much, doesn’t love you the same. After the trial I went back to live with my mother (with no control over this new voice of mine) and was showed something different from expected.

I just had this voice in my head that kept reminding me:

That bullying?!? Naw smack that bitch!

They think they can say what they want about you, naw correct those hoes!!!

She’s hurting your feelings?!? You better say something, but that’s my mom, naw did she think about how she hurt your feelings???? Fuck her too!

I didn’t realize at that time that my anxiety and bi polar was at its peak. And since no one understood, my mind and body refused to crumble and feel that balled up feeling, so I grew the worst “fuck it” attitude you could witness. I remember the day it happened, actually realizing (in my mind) that neither one of my parents had the love I thought they had for me, I stopped being that little girl completely at thought. Compassionate? For what? Straight A’s, who’s watching or give a fuck? Helpful and giving? Why when no one has anything for you!!!

Now what I’m about to say you would think she probably was smelling herself after the first piece of optional dick (at least that’s one of the things that ran through my mind, but the rage and anger was deeper than that). The day after I lost my virginity, I went to my mother to tell her, and also to mention birth control because… Well it made sense (by the way I was 15). She had her comments and they weren’t that positive and, in my mind, I’m thinking so I can be everyone else’s play toy as a child but when I actually feel ok to have sex on my own, I can’t. Now that was in my head but what came out of my mouth was, “so my whole life from 4-9 I can be exposed to sex but when I want to I can’t, that’s dumb”. At that time, she only knew of one of my predators, so I guess she was saddened emotionally stuck on one thing while I was angered emotionally stuck on another. That’s the first time I remember intentionally verbally abusing someone, the words weren’t that disrespectful, but I knew they would hurt, and I wanted her too. I came to her to have a special conversation I felt, and I didn’t get the response I wanted and her response hurt my feelings, and that was the first time I ever not cared about how she felt. It was my last chance to me, to reach out to her about growing into a woman and how to deal with that when I dealt with what I dealt with, and I felt like she smacked my hand with rejection, so I felt like I had to make her think about it anyway. I wasn’t going to be the only one stressing out about how I’m going to properly have sex without ever having flashbacks of bullshit, and I nicely asked for the conversation before I spat out those words, so I felt no guilt.

Not too many days after I sat in Girls High’s lunchroom and wrote on the back of a flyer about how I felt in poetry (which by the way was the last poem I ever wrote) and it was long, and I swear you could see the anger on the paper without even reading a word. I read it back to myself once and vowed to change and ripped it up and through it out. After that, I began not going to school at all, I did email my teachers and got my work done (the only reason I graduated), just to see how they would react and of course I barely got anything. Of course, my grades slipped due to attendance, still no one paid enough attention to even ask what’s wrong, why the difference. That’s When I learned to say fuck them too, just like they are everyone else and find my own source of happiness and motivation in life. I wish people could witness my graduation day, another day I learned to say temporary “fuck it” to, until those emotions connect to something else and randomly arise.

After letting pain raise and groom me over the years, honestly who do you expect me to be other than this? How do you expect me to speak any different than I do? How do you expect my tone in voice to be any lower? These are some of the questions that skip across the mind when they ask me, why am I so mean? Why you have to say it like that? But when you ask the questions I stated in response to theirs, you get an: oh my god! Why everything about the past! ARD SH….A!

Well the past isn’t done with me, and since you’ll don’t understand, this is the me you will get, and you just won’t understand who I am. Which I also became fine with. That day I mentioned I felt no guilt about my words to my mother, was the day basically the world had me fucked up! If I don’t care how my mom feel about what’s coming out of my mouth, who the fuck is you???? And that went for anybody, and that’s the way I stayed. It became more and more comfortable every day, to a point where I didn’t have to fight my self for the courage for the words, but I was fighting myself for the discipline to stop.

Which lead me to my healing my process, which is the topic of my next entry. Look out for next week’s material. Happy reading!