Never Safe

My name is Cristina D. Johnson

From somewhere deep inside, tonight, I came to a realization: nowhere is or has been ever safe. In my "live blog," Is This Where It Starts?, I sometimes get stuck. I get stuck in my head - where I've spent most of my life, away from the reality of yesterdays and days before yesterdays, in denial of (or absolute unawareness of), sicknesses that riddled my life, my toddlerhood, my childhood; sexual perversions that twisted, tormented and distorted every sense of everything a normal child would have.

Yeah, yeah I get it. This has always been my mantra.

"But me. Well, I'm okay. I don't need fucking therapy," I'm known to say. "You're the one with the fucking problem," I often chastised and argued. "I'll send you back to your psych professor with your highfalutin' tail between your legs," I would challenge.

No...I have no problems. Never have.

Right?

No.....

Not to my knowledge. Or, should I say, not to my awareness. I simply was, who I was and at times in my life - here and there - I was good with that. Comfortable with that. Other times....well....

Mood swings.

I remember talking with Bill when I was living with Gary - the man I loved and intended to spend the rest of my life with. Still, we had our problems and I would lament to my best friend: Bill. He was always kind, considerate, understanding and - most importantly - honest.

He once said to me (paraphrasing), "Well your mood swings definitely kept me on my toes." (Bill and I were together either as friends, roommates, loves and partners or all or one over a period of about five years prior to my relationship with Gary).

Anyway, I'm veering off track here...............

There's an ache in me tonight. I can't vocalize it. Just like last night. We watched the film, Trust and I cried multiple times. Cried over the 'blame the victim' attitude of the unwitting father.

Cried over what I never had.... Cried over never mattering enough. Cried over never being able to say, "I love you daddy," with confidence and without fear. (incidentally, I also cried at the end of The Little Mermaid when she said, "Thank you, Daddy," for the same reason. I never got to say that nor did I ever have any reason to).


Tonight, we watched "Voices Within" which is based on the true story of Truddi Chase and the Troops - after the book, "When Rabbit Howls." This book I've read and if you can get past the first three or four chapters which can be a bit confusing, it's a profoundly informational and insightful book on the life (and inner life) of someone with DID (formerly known as MPD, or Multiple Personality Disorder). This is a must-read for anyone with the diagnosis or anyone who wants to know and understand better, the inner workings of the disorder.

Anyway, watching "Trust" and "Voices Within" last night and tonight, respectively, with each violent/sexual assault scene, Bill would ask, "Do you want to watch something else?" or "are you okay?" and to him I would say, "Oh yes. These are the easiest parts to watch."

This is true.

Rape, violence.... oh those things are just.... things to me. I'm so disconnected from these things that I feel nothing watching them. This sounds brutal and callous, I know, but it's really just another brilliant part of my defense mechanisms, built over a lifetime of abuse, abandonment and dissociation.

So I watch these scenes and it never occurs to me that I'm not feeling anything. I said this to Bill last night, watching Trust.

"Are you okay watching this?" he asks, as the scene goes to a motel room where a 14-year-old girl is being manipulated and sexually assaulted by an online predator who is at least 35 years old.

"Oh yeah," I tell him. "It's the parts after this that will get me."

And they did. The outrage of her parents. The support. The openness she had to counseling. The support. The SUPPORT she had. It literally tore me apart inside.

I watched while one of my favorite male actors - Clive Owen - portraying the father, made mistake after mistake through the eyes of a survivor. No, no no I wanted to scream (and even once said). Blame the victim. Big mistake. Oh God....

Yet that's what I do to myself. What I've always done. What society seems to demand.

Why put myself in the position to be gang raped by 4, 6, 8, 10 men? Why not go home? Why run away? Why did I stay on the streets? I was asking for it, right? So I shouldn't be mad. Right? I shouldn't be hurt or angry or scared or upset. I brought it upon myself. Rather I should just own my mistakes (those of an 11-, 12-, 13-, 14-, 15-year-old CHILD.

A CHILD

Tonight, I listened to a (poorly done but okay enough, I suppose) movie - Voices Within - and I was struck by a couple of things that were said but most striking, to me, was when she talked about how "the stepfather" came out of the darkness and if it wasn't dark, he made it dark.

Somewhere, deep, deep inside, far away, hidden, buried, a part of me felt exposed.

"It didn't matter where I was, he would find me," she said.

And in that instant, I realized - for the first time in my life - that I was never safe. Not inside, not outside, not in St. Louis, Pensacola, North Carolina, Louisiana.... nowhere. Not even with my mother whose husband - my stepfather - saw fit to molest me, too.

Rape and incest and molestation and beatings.... oh  those are norms.

I am so accustomed to it (whether emotional, mental, physical or sexual) that I disconnect and feel nothing.

That is my grooming.

And truly, nowhere is safe.

This is spoken from a far away place. Untapped, young, afraid, easily hidden like the way a turtle jolts into its shell the slightest tap on the head or perception of threat.

These parts of me that feel just disappear and I am left with an ache and a curiosity and a need to know, a desire to heal. A desperation. An internal cry, "Please please come out. Please, please talk to me. Please, please tell me what I don't remember. Please, please....please...."

I don't want to be crazy but the world thinks me so.

I am not.

Yet I cannot show my face, nor go into public, nor literally speak my truth until people know - we are not crazy.

We are survivors, trying so hard to fit in.

Trying so hard to give meaning to atrocities many never see and still others see and never speak of.

Oh my voice.........

Give me my voice.

I want to be safe. I don't want a gun or any weapons. I don't want some man to be responsible for making me feel safe. I want to shed this lifetime skin of constant vigilance; this pervasive awareness of the ugly in the world; this unwitting knowledge of the perversions that exist in reality that so many  choose to be ignorant of.

I want to be safe. I want to be free.