Therapy and meetings were great places for me to begin to open my mouth and speak about the goings-on inside my cluttered head. The meetings helped me begin to compartmentalize all the baggage of my past, but they were only a couple of hours a week. I still had the other twenty-two-odd hours in the day to deal with, so I would write. I started to feel as though I had the vocal form of Tourette syndrome, because some of the shit that would fly out of my mouth was beyond inappropriate. I had no emotional or verbal filter. Whatever came to my mind somehow came out of my mouth and often hung in the air like a really bad fart.
My sponsor Rose would just laugh at me and assure me that it would pass, that I would begin to figure out how to grasp my emotions and become able to share them appropriately. She reminded me it was all about progress, not perfection, and that as I grew healthier I wouldn’t immediately want to share every random thought or feeling that entered my body with everyone around me. I was a little uncertain, since I had gone from one extreme to another, which is quite common in early recovery. I went from never sharing anything or expressing myself to verbally and emotionally vomiting all over everyone around me. How unpleasant for them.
So there I was, home from therapy with all these realizations of who I was and who I was becoming. I ran a hot bath and disrobed as I thought about Ted and Kathy. I knew there was great meaning in everything that had happened over the weekend, but I just couldn’t shake it all up in my head enough for it to fall into place. I felt anxious and utterly drained. I lit a bunch of candles and turned on some peaceful music as I slipped my aching body into the warm bubbles. Tension slowly released from my shoulders, and my head started to unwind a bit.
I thought about Ted as my hands began to slowly trace my body, trying to find some connection to it. I realized that I didn’t know my own body; I had never really understood it or loved it in any way. I had used it, abused it, and detached from it so many times that I was unsure of its soft and curvy terrain. I didn’t understand sex; I never had a healthy place to start understanding my own sexuality, other than starting with my body, my hands, and my own touch. I began gliding my hands over my supple breasts and felt my nipples get hard under the pressure of my thumb. I’d never really enjoyed anyone touching my breasts, and this sudden surge of excitement caught me off guard, but I gave into it as my body sank deeper into the steaming water. I let my hand travel farther and allowed the multiple sensations to overcome me. As I reached climax, my moan of delight quickly turned to heaving bouts of anguish as I began to sob uncontrollably.
I cried for myself, for my friendship, for what I allowed Ted to do, and for what I once stopped. I cried for the little girl who went away that night on the mountain so many years ago when I was sexually assaulted. I sat up in the tub, slipped my arms around myself, and hugged myself as I rocked back and forth, crying harder than I had ever remembered. I thought about all the damage I had done to my body, all the men I had allowed to touch me and enter me. I felt sick as bursts of tears just kept spilling out of my eyes. I felt so violated and ashamed of myself and the lack of respect I enabled for so many years.
When you don’t know yourself, it is so easy to allow others to define you, and that was what I did for so many years. I let friends, family, and others use me and define me and do what they wanted because I had no spine, no sense of worth.
I would assume that when most people masturbate, they just enjoy the sheer beauty and ecstasy of it all, but for me, as a rape survivor, it brought more sadness and confusion than pleasure. It turned a moan of delight into a cry of emotional pain. My sexuality was so intermingled with the bad sexual experiences I had had that it was hard for me to know and understand what a good touch is as opposed to all the bad touches over the years. Having been violated in my past, my identity and sexuality had been taken from me as well.
Learning how to love yourself and touch yourself and stay connected to all those feelings is a very hard task for any rape survivor. The violence perpetrated onto our skin has sunk in so deep that it permeates every pore, preventing us from really soaking in fully any joyful or innocent sexual experiences. The trauma resurfaces in our minds and spirits with each touch. Our skin has memory like foam, and we reshape into the curdled mass of nerves and fear we were on the night we were violated. It is why on most nights I still leave the light on, because the dark scares me.
This will be a process for me, I realized—a long process of healing and trusting and recovery, from not only drugs and alcohol, but also from self-loathing, confusion, and violation. I prayed the innocence that was stolen from me so many years ago would reemerge.
I stayed wrapped up in myself like this for a long time. It felt as though the tub drained of water and filled with my tears. Waves of emotion kept coming and crashing over me. Instead of trying to detach or stop them as I always had done in the past, I just rode them out, feeling certain they would take me under and spill over the side of the tub and drown me. But they didn’t. They rose and fell in and around me like a hurricane as I screamed and cried out from this large, spinning hole that was opening up inside me, splashing emotions all over the place.
After what felt like hours, I began to calm down and pulled the drain plug from the tub. When I stood up and stepped out of the tub, I rubbed the steam off the bathroom mirror and stared at the reflection of blotchy red puffiness starring back at me. But something looked clearer. I thought I saw a little bit deeper into my blue eyes. I crawled into bed and slept more soundly than I ever remembered, awaking the next day refreshed and somehow much lighter in spirit. I was on a new journey to discover myself and had a giddy excitement in my belly about what I was going to discover.
15
WHO’S THAT GIRL?
MY THERAPIST WAS WORKING WITH ME ON MY SELF-IMAGE. I truly had no idea what that was. After everything that had happened with Ted and Kathy, I started to feel good about myself. I was walking around on a little bit of a high, armed with some good, healthy experiences and decisions behind me. So in keeping with the roller coaster ride of recovery, I guess my therapist thought it was now time to dig a bit deeper and take my self-discovery to another level. It seemed like every time I made progress, I was then forced to go further down a path of wellness, which inevitably then brought back up some hurtful experience or shame or issue I had. So my mini-self-esteem rush was quickly halted when she began challenging me about the way I dressed and presented myself.
I was always a girl who was dressed up. I bought funky dresses and wore chunky high heels that resembled bowling shoes. I spent hours on my hair and makeup trying to match myself perfectly to the models in Vogue magazine. I was always trying on a new persona. Sometimes I braided my hair and wore shiny silver shirts with short “Catholic girl” skirts and boots; other times I wore long, flowing dresses and resembled a seventies hipster.
I was also addicted to trends and always bought the latest fashions. A slave to whatever fashion magazines said was cool that week, I had no clue what I was without the outward appearance of rebellion that most of my clothing conveyed. I was overly provocative in most of my outfits, teasing everyone with my vast cleavage or wearing T-shirts that rode up my backside, exposing a little thong or crack for the viewing pleasure of anyone behind me. I had that “hey, look at me, I’m hot shit” attitude, but then if you dared to stare too long I would snarl at you. I was a hot mess is what I was, just a very sad and lost girl.
What I really needed was love, acceptance, and someone to notice me in a nonsexual, caring, parental kind of way. But I craved the attention of others because it was the only way I knew love. The only way I could measure my self-worth was in direct proportion to the amount of attention I received on any given day, whether positive or negative attention. If I wasn’t getting the attention I felt I needed, I would do things to obtain it. I might say something completely ridiculous to pull the focus onto myself or act out in an absurd manner, knowing that someone was bound to notice. I was the class clown, the first one to break the
silence with some over-the-top comment bound to elicit a response. I fed off attention like a spring flower craves the rain. It raised me up and kept me high on the allure of false self-esteem and confidence. When I didn’t get it, I crashed back down to the ground, falling into a vast tunnel of depression and self-loathing. It was a rapid shift from one extreme to the other and back.
My therapist and sponsor both assured me this was normal for addicts. Having never really lived life with any degree of honesty, it would be hard to actually know who I was without having many days of recovery under my belt. I just prayed they were right, because I still felt so fucking uncomfortable in my skin that I wanted to crawl out of it.
It had been easier before to hide beneath the high, to create the self I thought the world wanted and remain high enough to not really care that I was all fake nails and hair dye. I didn’t know who the girl in the mirror was, and I had no idea what this body was supposed to do and how I should have felt or even what I should have worn. I always dressed up like a Barbie doll, emulating what I saw in magazines, on TV, and in the shadows of my mind—I didn’t know what I really wanted.
I didn’t leave the house without makeup because I hated my skin underneath. I hated the vulnerability my face exposed without heavy black eyeliner and bright, fully lined lips. I wore different-colored contacts all the time to change my view, and I colored my hair more frequently than the seasons changed the leaves from green to red. I changed everything. I transformed the outside to figure out whether it matched the inside. Nothing made me feel complete, just covered up enough to blend in.
Dressing provocatively, or “in character,” had worked for me while I was using, but now being in recovery, I was lost in this state of total confusion as to who I was and what that should look like. One thing was certain: I was no longer “that” girl, and now with the gentle prodding of my therapist, we would have to piece together who this new girl was and what she should look like.
16
PSEUDO-LESBIAN
I BEGAN TAKING AN INTEREST IN AN OLDER LESBIAN IN my meetings. A small clique of them sat together at meetings and I started to gravitate toward them. I felt a connection that I couldn’t place. I became friends with them and began going to dinner with them after meetings and hanging out with them on the weekends.
I was slowly becoming part of their crew, even though I was not yet identifying myself as a lesbian. I knew I considered myself bisexual based on my past experiences, and that was about as far as I was willing to go in the acceptance department at that point. My sponsor Rose was a part of this group, so hanging around her provided me with a great excuse to latch onto them all. I still had all kinds of confusion and fear built up inside me about my sexuality. But I knew I felt safe with these women, and I felt a kinship with them that was so nice that I just went along with it. They never questioned me or my intent; they just accepted me as one of their own.
One woman in particular, Lynn, caught my eye, and she and I became great friends. I loved hanging out with her. We started calling each other on the phone incessantly and would talk for hours. There was an ease in the conversation that was wonderfully simple. I didn’t have to search my brain for topics or conversation starters; thoughts just flowed from our mouths like water and seemed to endlessly stream on and on. Eventually she became the first call I made in the morning and the last call I made at night. She always gave me that little belly-flipping feeling when I would encounter her with her short, graying brown, butch-cut hair and masculine facial features.
She looked visibly weathered, and her hands were rough and clearly had been used plenty. I was drawn to her in an odd way—not so much in a physical or sexual way, but in an “I would love to be your best friend,” intriguing way.
I have had crushes on females since kindergarten, and although I attempted to pretend these feelings didn’t exist, I always knew deep down that they never went away. In my drug-using past, I’d had random hook-ups with a couple of women, but I always discounted them, saying, “I was drunk” or “I was just experimenting,” and I went about my heterosexual lifestyle. All the while, the thoughts and feelings lingered inside me. In recovery, as I began to be honest with myself and take this journey of self-discovery, I was finding myself once again drawn to women.
I had thought a lot about what my therapist and I had talked about regarding the way I dressed and how I carried myself. I began to explore different ideas of clothing and my self-image. My new friends were very different from the people I had hung out with in my past. They were casual and not slaves to trends, as I had always tried to be. They would often comment on my midriff shirt or my pants that were so low my underwear was showing. They confronted me in gentle ways, asking if I was trying to get attention. They asked me whether I really wanted all eyes on me. I started to take cues from them and began transforming my wardrobe. Lynn and I went shopping at stores I never would have shopped in before because I saw their clothes as nerdy or conservative.
Gradually, I began trading my halter tops and low riders for polo shirts and cargo pants. As I got comfortable with this clothing transformation, I realized it felt good to be covered up and not have men staring at me like the piece of meat they thought I was and that I had placed out before them so eagerly. Under this new layer of clothes, I was safe to try to explore who the person was inside.
As the days, nights, and weekends that Lynn and I spent together began to string on and on, I found myself in a pseudo-lesbian relationship. I say pseudo because the most intimacy that ever resulted was long and inappropriate hugging and snuggling. I was enjoying her company and learning how to be intimate emotionally with another person, which was something I had yet to really accomplish. We would sit around and talk about everything, and we began to share this wonderful bond that felt safe and secure. The fact that there was no sexual intimacy was a plus for me. I was still very confused about my sexuality and needed a nice, long break in the activity in that department. We slept together almost every night but nothing ever happened. It was nice to have a relationship (with sex nowhere in the picture) that felt so much more intimate than any of my past relationships. Sex used to be the glue that held together the farce of intimacy for me. I felt great comfort in just being with someone without the demand of my body as the ultimate price.
Lynn also told me about the depths of her pain and her past experiences, some that mirrored mine and others that were just horrific. While the strands of this extremely intimate dialogue slowly wove themselves into a comfortable and warm relationship, I found myself opening up to her in ways I had never done with anyone before, telling her things that I had only mentioned in my journal. Sharing my deepest fears and doubts with her felt so natural. When she questioned me about my past, I didn’t become defensive or shut down like I usually did with people. Instead, I allowed myself to feel, to trust, and to share my most private thoughts with her.
I had always been reluctant to trust anyone, thinking that the person probably had ulterior motives. But Lynn was gentle with me, and kind. She wanted nothing more from me than I was willing to give on any given day.
For once, someone was interested in my thoughts, ideas, and, most importantly, my feelings. She held them all in the palm of her hand in such a gentle manner that I didn’t know how to begin to dissect it all, so instead I just fell into the relationship and relished this new feeling of intimacy that was so foreign to me.
17
MOURNING
ONE NIGHT DURING ONE OF THE THOUSANDS OF DEEP conversations Lynn and I had, the subject of my mother’s death came up, a topic I had rarely spoken about since getting into recovery. At the very mention of it, I started to cry. I started and didn’t stop. Suddenly this floodgate in me opened up, and I began to dump my emotions all over her lap. I cried and cried, harder and heavier than I had ever done in the presence of another person—heaving sobs that I usually reserved for the privacy of my bathtub. I found myself hyperventilating and snotting all over my pseudo-lesbian
girlfriend. She just held me and comforted me. She wiped my tears away and brushed my hair away from my wet face, just as I had always envisioned people doing for others they loved. I felt incredibly secure in her arms. For the first time, I felt I could be truly and uncharacteristically vulnerable with another human, free from the usual fears that stopped my tears from flowing and forced my body upright into a protective manner I would retreat to when things got too deep for me to handle. On this night, I just allowed myself to crumple into her chest and let the feelings seep out of me.
I fell asleep crying that night. When I woke up, I was still sobbing. My pillow was so wet that it was evident I had been crying all night in my sleep. Lynn had to go to work, so I was left alone. I called off work at the travel agency because even as I made the phone call, I could barely speak; I was heaving so hard with emotion. When lunchtime came and went and there seemed no end to my tears, I called my therapist’s office, sure that I was having a breakdown of some sort, since I had already gone through two boxes of tissues. I was thankful that she was able to fit me into her afternoon appointments. I attempted to take a shower but ended up falling against the wall in sobs. This was ridiculous, I thought. I couldn’t stop no matter how hard I tried. The tears kept coming like a harsh spring rain on a windowsill. They spilled down my face with no end in sight.
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