I could really just make this entire blog posts saying, “I’m back! Sorry I vanished!” But I won’t. The fact is, this blog is draining and difficult for me, and sometimes I have it in me and sometimes I don’t. So consider this notice that this blog isn’t something I’m paid or obligated to do, and I post here only when my well being permits it.
I have some thoughts churning, so I might post more soon. We shall see. I hope you are all well.
I’m home.
Things haven’t been easy to return to. That’s for more than a few reasons. I had a lot of thoughts on my trip, and I think I’ll post twice today just to get my thoughts more organized and less like one really long entry.
Where to begin. I suppose I should start at the beginning. When I was in sixth grade, I started two new subjects. I began the school orchestra. I played the trumpet. By played, I mean that generally, I could hold it to my mouth and press buttons. But I couldn’t swear to what noise would come out, and I never had any formal lessons.
I also began a class in French. My teacher, a sprightly aged blond woman with far too much enthusiasm for shouting in French told me that I had lovely pronounciation, the best in my class. I was going to do so well.
My relationship with these two attempts at learning has been a process that recently went from stalemate to extremely tumultuous. First, I spent about fourteen years thinking that I was “instrumentally retarded” and that I was unable to learn a language. I even thought they were related. I thought I couldn’t “manage” another language, that my brain wasn’t made for thinking in another mode of speech, be it musical or verbal. I can sing, I can write, I can turn a phrase that will make people cry and force them to feel what I felt, but for many years, I was convinced that I was just wrong in the head in this regard. I was just broken.
Some things happened on my trip. I met someone who plays guitar beautifully, and I watched. I watched his fingers move, and I understood the theory. I got it. You do this, and this, and then this sound happens. I certainly don’t play. I’m not some savant. But now I get the theory. And it made me think, what if I could play guitar?
Then I was in a choir. It was a choir of about fifty people at one of the festivals I was at. We were singing “Hinunter is der Sonnen Schein”, which is essentially a version of the Lord’s prayer before sleep. The two women near me told me that my pronounciation was absolutely spot on, and this woman three seats ahead of me turned and started excitedly babbling at me in German, thinking that I would understand her because I sounded so accurate. I stared back blanky and informed her that I didn’t speak German. She said, “Oh, hon. You totally should.” I’ve loved German for a long time; there are bands I listen to that sing in German, and I like the sound of it. It made me think, what if I could speak German?
Those two things, the guitar and the German language, led me back to sixth grade. I sighed to myself and said, you know, if those teachers tried to teach me how to sing and speak and failed miserably, well, then I’m probably hopeless. Then I paused, and thought back. I learned to read music in high school. But I don’t remember a single note from sixth grade. I don’t remember the band director teaching me what a half note meant, or what a rest was. I couldn’t remember ever finding out what the fuck “to conjugate” meant, or why we were supposed to repeat all of these words with slightly different variations.
I was so angry. These stupid teachers. How the fuck did they think they could get me to do something without ever teaching me. How did they have their teaching licenses?! Who the hell do they think they are, teaching and sucking at it so badly?
The next bit of logic hit me, and I felt like I’d been punched. All the other kids learned how to play. All the other kids learned how to conjugate. Why hadn’t I? Was I instrumentally retarded? Was I broken? Maybe it was just me. I searched my memory lying in bed in my tent, trying to recall any reference to these classes, maybe make more sense of them sixteen years later.
A sort of chill came over me. I realized that I don’t remember any of that. Then I realized why. I was eleven in sixth grade. It was the year I was molested.
Maybe I tried so hard to forget what he was doing that I forgot school. I blocked out learning. I tried not to listen to things, not to remember them. I don’t remember how to conjugate and I couldn’t play a note on the trumpet without just guessing at what would come out. I didn’t know how to read music until high school, and now I know why I threw up after my first three classes of advanced choir trying to figure out half notes.
The scary thing about being violated as a child, for me, is that I’m still discovering what he took from me. I had no idea until I went on this summer trip that I had been affected by him in this way; that I had given up whole possibilities of my life because what he did to me convinced me that I was broken, retarded, unable.
I’m learning German.
I’m learning to play the guitar.
I’m on walkabout for about a month. I’ll be mostly out of email contact. A lot of this is for religious reasons, and because I need some serious time off, but most of it is due to proximity issues – I won’t have access where I’m going. Please send healing and loving thoughts my way, and I’ll be sure to post more when I return. If last year’s sabbatical is any indication, my time away will be peaceful, healing, and renewing.
Thank you all for reading, and I hope to be back soon. To those of you who are part of the faithful little circle of support I’ve come to love, I hope to see you in a month, and I have a project brewing in my mind that I hope you’ll be excited for. I’ll come back with energy and strength.
May the road rise to meet you
May the wind be always at your back
May the sun shine warm upon your face
May the rain fall soft upon your fields
And until we meet again…
There is a fundamental disconnect between some health care workers, and my concept of my own personal space. I have a few simple rules when it comes to health care workers, and it has nothing to do with dislike of the person in particular. It has to do with my space, my comfort, and my expectations to be treated according to my human rights.
1. No person, medical professional or not, is allowed to touch me without my permission, unless I am about to do harm to someone. The clear exception written into this is that if I go bonkers and start beating on orderlies, I welcome a nice pin-down and a shot of Haldol.
2. If you are going to touch me, medical professional or not, you are responsible for what you do. IE, if you touch me and leave a bruise, it is your fault, and I will hold you accountable.
3. If at any point I say no, act in clear distress, or attempt to escape you, all forms of touch should immediately stop. If you feel it is imperitive that you continue touching me for my own well being, you may THEN explain to me why and attempt to get my consent.
Why, you ask, am I enumerating these rules? Well, you remember here, where I said that I had dental problems and was terribly afraid of dentists? Funny I should mention, because Saturday night I developed a throbbing, painful, crippling toothache. I was in so much pain that I was losing my grip. Though I don’t write this openly on my “friends blog”, I was seriously contemplating suicide, because I was in such excruciating pain and it seemed there was no way out. I had an infection in my tooth that could spread to my brain, and there was no way for me to pay for it. I have no dental insurance and dentists are fucking sharks who want payment right up front or they’ll cheerfully let you sit in pain. The only good thing that kept me sane through Sunday was that the dentist was willing to at least call me in a prescription for a medication I could take (I’m intolerant to narcotics), and I was cheerfully on cloud nine for Sunday night.
Just when it seemed I was totally screwed and on my own, a dear friend took me under their wing and slapped down their debit card, saying I could pay them back over time. So I took my Ativan, tried to calm myself as much as I could, and headed in to the dentist’s office. Now, I hate the dentist’s office. I hate it so very much. I hate the judgmental dental hygeinists, I hate the smell, and I hate being pinned on my back helpless while people shove their hands in my mouth. It reminds me of being eleven and pinned down while someone shoved their dick in my mouth.
Thing is, I don’t like the dentist I’ve seen there the last few times. Butterfly talked here about what it is to have a “sense” of people, and I responded to her post with understanding, because I’ve always had a good sense of people. I know when someone is just no fucking good, and this guy is no fucking good. It’s not like it’s hard to read that, either. I’ve never met anyone who did like the guy, because he’s abrupt, callous, cold, and ignores the patient, talking only to the assistant. So this really isn’t my great “people” sixth sense – he doesn’t even require it. All you need to know this guy is a dick is good old fashioned common sense.
So they start looking me over and shooting my face full of Novocaine. That’s fine. I’m used to that. But up until my last visit, I didn’t have Ativan to use to calm me down while I was in the chair. This time, I noticed that my hands were shaking. That was strange, because as doped as I was on anti-anxiety meds, I shouldn’t have had a nervous bone in my body. So I asked the hygienist, who for once did not piss me off, if there was something in the Novocaine that would make me jumpy. Did you know that there’s Epinephrine in Novocaine?
Let me just make the irony of this a little more clear. They’re pumping every person who sits in their chair full of adrenalin. Yet, I hear all the time about how dentists hate that everyone is freaking out in their chairs and how difficult it is to have such a stressful job where everyone hates you. Is the entire profession of dentistry totally fucking retarded? Gee, I think I’ll jack someone up on drugs that make them tense and nervous and then expect them to be calm! Yeah! That’s it!
Anyway, they start in on my molar, and as he’s pressing down on my lower jaw with the side of his hand to get at my tooth, my chin slides way down and to the right. I felt a popping feeling, and protested, but he said, “Sometimes your jaw just pops out, it’s okay.” Without stopping. Okay. Deep breaths. Deep breaths. I got through the whole procedure, though toward the end, I was holding up my bottom jaw with tears streaming out of my eyes trying to reduce some of the pain by supporting it.
He got all the way to the end of the procedure without really thinking about my dislocated jaw and then removed all the hardware when he was finished. Scared and trembling, I rushed to close my mouth, and found abruptly that I couldn’t. My jaw was totally dislocated, popped clearly open. Ever seen one of those horror movies where some dark haired woman has an unnaturally large mouth and locusts or something come flying out of it? Yeah, it looked like that.
Now, feel free to tell me if I’m overreacting or something, but generally when a part of my body is grotesquely deformed, I freak the fuck out. I started to hyperventilate a little and cry, half-telling them what was wrong, which they could see well enough once they looked at me and stopped putting instruments away.
If you were a dentist, which of the following would think was the right thing to do?
A. Use a soothing tone of voice and gently reassure the patient that this can be fixed and that they should lie back and try to calm down so their muscles relax a little.
B. Push down the foot petal on the chair dropping the patient’s head as low as it can go, and jam both thumbs into their mouth abruptly without a word.
I don’t have to tell you which one he did. You already know. You know because I started this entry telling you what a dick he is, and now you believe me. So there I am, lying there, upset because my jaw is grossly distended, and then he drops my head down and shoves both his thumbs into my mouth, which makes me gag and hurts like hell.
You know, I’m really trying to come up with a way that the asshole dentist could have been worse at handling me, but short of actually sexually assaulting me, I can’t see how. He totally abused my boundaries, treated me like an object, assumed authority over my well being without a word, and violated my physical space without even giving me a chance to acquiesce.
I am still trying to decide what to do. Part of me wants to have him censured, but to do so would drag all sorts of things to light, and given my shitty financial situation, it might make it look like I was after his money. Which I could give a shit less about. I’d just like him to take a mark on his record that says that he can’t be trusted to have good bedside manner, to warn parents not to take their kids to him.
Today I had to go back to have a last x-ray and get my bite looked at to make sure everything was all right. I specified that I would not see that dentist again, and then when I was leaving I specified that I’d like to see one of the other dentists in the future. The woman behind the desk was remarkably unsympathetic and basically told me I’d have to take what I could get. Well, in that case, I’ll take my business elsewhere, even if I have to drive to another city.
There is a chance, a slim chance, that one of the people reading this blog has a job in the health care field. I beg you, consider carefully how you treat the people you tend. You wield power. Don’t abuse it.
When I was around nine years old, my family started doing martial arts. It was a very “family friendly” dojo; not very much in the way of punching walls or carrying water, much more oriented toward healthy family dynamics and discipline. By discipline, I mean the positive sort of discipline that teaches children to respect people smaller and younger than they are.
We used to go out to eat a lot, because the dojo was around 40 minutes from our house. Because of our health, our most common place to go was Taco Bell. Yes, I know, that’s ridiculous, but it was the early 90s, and we were all convinced that Taco Bell was far more healthy.
At some point during our visits to this Taco Bell, we saw a promotional ad that offered us a CD to buy, and half of the proceeds would go to an organization called Do Something. I loved the CD we bought; it got me hooked on Sarah McLachlan and I never quite recovered from those haunting sounds of “Possession”. I quickly absconded with the disc and my parents rarely if ever saw it again, as I played it on repeat in my Sony CD player until I thought the thing might break and explode.
——-
The other morning, I was waking up lazily and slowly and my fiance leaned over me to give me a smooch on the cheek, his forearms to either side of my shoulders. It wasn’t remotely sexual; his lower body was still over on his side of the bed and he just wanted to say good morning. I woke up and started to push and kick and punch at his arms, gasping in air to scream. Then I realized where I was and sat up and apologized and gave him a hug good morning.
I didn’t think much of it, but after it happened, I could remember something I never have before.
——-
I was there in my room. I was eleven. I was small. My pajamas were only on one leg below my knee and he was rubbing his part up against me. He was leaned over me with his forearms beside my shoulders and I was looking away, staring at the floor of my room and trying to be somewhere else. I was trying so hard to be somewhere else that I think I went there, I think that’s why I haven’t rememebered until now.
There I was, staring at the floor, and there was my Sony CD player and I could barely see through the light streaming in my window from outside that the CD inside said “Do Something” and I started to cry because I had done karate and I had learned to fight and all I could do was lay there and be terrified. I should “do something”. It was like the CD was talking to me and I was too weak and small to obey.
When I started to cry he got off of me and told me again how ashamed my parents would be if he told them I had touched myself. He told me that it was our secret. That I shouldn’t tell anyone because then they’d all know what a bad person I was, how disgusting I was, and wasn’t he nice for helping me and keeping my secret?
Then he hurried out. He was such a coward. I felt so small and helpless and scared, but the truth is the second I gave any resistance at all, the second I cried or whimpered or made a fast movement, he ran away. He was so terrified of being caught, of being found out. I see that now. So there I was laying in my bed staring at a CD that said “Do Something” on it and I started to cry. Which, I suppose, was doing something, since it made him go away. It made him afraid that I might tell.
A book I read recently said, “When a person who intends to hurt you says, ‘don’t scream’ or ‘don’t tell anyone’, it is because that is the one thing you can do to hurt them. More often than not it is not because you will be hurt if you do. Most people who resort to such threats are hoping they never have to follow through on them. When they tell you ‘don’t scream’ or ’shut up’ or ‘just sit still’ they are handing you your weapons of mass destruction for their life. They are telling you exactly what you can do to thwart whatever it is they want to do with you.”
So when they tell you, “don’t scream”, then open your mouth and let the heavens pour out of you.
——-
So now when I think of that CD, of that Do Something CD that I so loved and that song that haunted me, I have a bitter memory of the child I was being violated. But I am also triumphant, because I did something. I cried. He went away.
Ironically, the Do Something organization has no branch for sexual assault and abuse awareness.
Remember my last post? All of mine seem to link to the next these days.
After posting about the gospel song, “And the Rock Cried Out ‘No Hiding Place!’”, I decided to do a little digging into my own community. I went to the online registry of sex offenders in my area. You can do the same. Simply go here and enter your town. Their addresses, offenses, and often photographs will be posted. Then you can avoid these people in your town and keep your children away from them.
Here’s the terrifying part. See, a part of me assumes that if you’re a registered sex offender, you likely hide in your basement fapping away to internet porn and not bathing very often. I have this image in my head of these scummy sons of bitches that includes mostly keeping to themselves and being afraid to go out because they’re registered and people can just look them up. What sort of moron would rejoin normal society knowing that their face is on the internet for any old idiot in their town to look up and be on watch for them?
This is what I thought. So I looked up my town, and found a sex offender who lives on my street. Curious, I googled his name to find out what he’d done. His charges said only, “Felonious sexual assault against a minor under 13yo.” 2 charges.
Can you imagine my fucking horror when I entered his name and got sports scores from my college? That’s right. This kid is a star athlete at my college. In my grade year. This pedophile goes to my school, is quoted in our newspaper… I searched diligently for almost an hour and the sadly hilarious thing was, I could find 30 webpages that featured his sports scores, and not a single news story about his offense. I did a little more digging, and confirmed through the school student directory that he was the same person; the address at the registry and the address with the school matched. Now let’s do some math. It is 2008. He was convicted in 2006. He is now a sophmore, which takes 2 years. Am I crazy, or does that look to anyone else like he served no time for 2 counts of felonious sexual assault against a child under 13?
In my digging, I found out something else that was very interesting. There were three other people with his relatively rare and hard to spell name associated with the community. One of them, who is the appropriate age to be his mother and comes from the same nearby town, graduated from my college and has apparently a great deal of pull with four volunteer organizations through the college.
Good to know that nepotism and corruption are alive and well.
I’m sick, shaking, and disgusted. I reported his name to the Campus Safety office, because the person who runs it is a former professor of mine and frankly, won’t stand for any bullshit. I have hopes that she’ll call up his file and that she has resources I have no access to.
If no one else does anything, I’m going to start posting fliers around. Legally, I’m not allowed to print information from the site and deseminate it. But I can print the URL and tell people to start being aware and look up their town. I can let people find out about him on their own. And people will. They’ll pretend they don’t want to know, but everyone has a sick fascination with the criminal element nearby them, even if they don’t have the sense to be concerned. If the school won’t do anything, I will. There will be no fucking hiding place.
As readers of this blog likely know, I’m not Christian. However, I am also not a bitter non-Christian. There are a lot of aspects of Christianity that I embrace, and for a while I attended an Universalist Unitarian church because they valued the same things I did.
During my visits to the south (GA, VA), I became totally entranced by gospel music. It was beautiful. It was joyous. At times it was intensely vengeful or righteous, but it was always all of those things with the same joy and expression.
My last post inspired me to look up the lyrics to a song I heard once in a television show; it turns out the song was based on Revelations 6:15-17.
No Hiding Place
No hiding place, down here
No hiding place
There’s no hiding place
Down here
No hiding place
And they went to the rock to hide their face
But the rock cried out
No hiding place
There’s no hiding place
Down here
And the sinners are gonna be running
At the knowledge of their fate
They’ll run to the rocks and the mountains
But their prayers will be too late
They forgot about Jesus
Not knowing the end was near
At the end they’ll try to find a hiding place
When it comes their time to die
No hiding place in the mountains
No hiding place in the waters
No hiding place
Down here
No hiding place
And they went to the rock to hide their face
But the rock cried out
No hiding place
There’s no hiding place
Down here
Can’t you see old gambler running
Saying ‘Lord, save my soul’
Saying ‘Lord, Lord, have mercy, won’t you save my soul’
Saying ‘Lord, Lord, have mercy, won’t you save my soul’
No hiding place, down here
No hiding place
There’s no hiding place
Down here
Yeah
I went to the rock to hide my face
But the rock cried out
No hiding place
There’s no hiding place
Down here
That’s what we have to do. That’s what we have to say. When these monsters come to our doors and try to hide, when we have the opportunity to turn away and ignore a problem, when we have the ability to let someone get away with that… We must cry out, “No hiding place.”
If you read my last post, you likely followed my disgust at the bleeding heart tone of the journalists who took immense pity on child rapists who were boo-hooing over not being allowed to live with the children they’d raped – or near any other children.
Today, I found another story. You can read it here. I originally found it on FoxNews, but since FoxNews has all the journalistic integrity of a gossipy thirteen-year-old on Adderoll, I decided to find another article instead. This one had actual information in it instead of wild speculation and sensationalist buzzwords.
(As a note, I often feel like William Shatner and FoxNews have a lot in common. They both have “voices” that overemphasize ridiculously.)
Anyway. I’m torn about this article, but only a little. A small perhaps 10% of my mind has some doubts. That small part of me worries about the assault against the justice system, and the chaos that mob justice brings. I look, rationally, at the possibility that someone I love could be mistaken for some guy on the news and beaten unconscious instead of taken to the police quietly. That’s difficult to justify, in my mind. These people took the law into their own hands, and I very much hope for their sakes that this man is guilty, or else they have done society a grave injustice. The fact that he had to be caught instead of reporting to police to clear his name seems to indicate to me his guilt, but I’m only a layperson.
The other 90% of me wants hit squads on every corner. I want pedophiles to know that there are angry women and men with bats that have nails through them that will hunt them down and beat them unconscious before handing them over to the police. I want the threat of being exposed, being violated, being helpless against the attack of an angry mob, to hang over every fucking pedophile’s head. I hope for the sake of that very deterring force that the man in that story is guilty, because then the pedophiles and child rapists who want to follow in his footsteps and brutally rape an eleven year old girl will learn what will happen to them if they do it.
On the one hand, I know vigilante justice can be flawed. Without a legal system, we have no proof of guilt. With no investigation, beatings that are undeserved could be meted out. On the other hand, it is this level of mob justice that deters criminals from committing a crime. Pedophiles, child rapists, and sexual abusers thrive on silence and fear. They are most powerful when they have the authority and the ability to silence their victims and their families with threat of humiliation and retribution.
So I say throw the doors wide. Scream their crimes to the sky, because like blackmailers, they only have power so long as you let them retain the upper hand. Make examples of the guilty and maybe the (so far) innocent will remain that way. Maybe these fucking perverts will restrict their sick fantasies to their own homes and learn from this example never to involve a child in their search for perverse gratification.
If that man is guilty, I hope he suffers. I hope they find a bridge to drop him off under after a nice long jail sentence, and I hope he lives in his own filth and squalor because this mob was brave enough to stand up to him and take his ass down publicly. Anonymity and police protection of “persons of interest” will no longer save him from public scrutiny. No mother with a third of a brain and a conscience will ever let her children near him again.
These are the deterrents. These are the crystalline moments of clarity that stop child sexual abuse. Those people stood up for their community and said, “No more.”
First, I’d like you to go read this. I’ll wait. Go ahead.
Now I’d like to talk about retribution, logic, reason, and what proper punishment is. Because I’ll tell you, in that article, the only problem I see is that people forced into squalid conditions will eventually try to escape. The only problem I see with that camp is that there isn’t a fence around it. The only issue I have with that camp is that they can leave.
I’ve thought long and hard about what I’d do if someone hurt my daughter or son. I’ve had leisure to think about it, and to think about what I wish my mother and father had done. I don’t blame them, I don’t think they failed me. I just think they could have done more.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m polyamorous. This means at least in theory that I may continue to date after I have children, like my mother did. This, as you regular readers know, is how I met the Monster. So I’ve thought about how to prevent that from happening to my children. How do I stop someone from hurting my children if not through matrimony and emotional bonds?
The first rule I’ve made is that no one will have unimpeded access to my children. I will express my vigilance to the people who will be around my kids, and they will know that I will employ surveillance equipment, intensive questioning, and that I will believe what my children say. I will sleep on the outside of the bed, and I will tell my children in no uncertain terms that So and So is not allowed in their rooms at night when I am not there, and if they ever go into said room, the child should scream until I come.
Finally, we will have a conversation. The conversation will be simple, and it will destroy relationships. It will drive off anyone who intends to hurt my children and serve as a warning to anyone who might be tempted after they’re involved. It will go something like this:
“Please understand that what I’m about to say I need to say to anyone I date, anyone I let into my home, and anyone who I let near my children. The fact that I am saying these things is not a judgment of your character but rather a hard fast rule that I must obey with every unknown quantity that comes into my children’s lives.
I am vigilant against child abuse of any kind, and I will be watchful. I will not ignore signs of abuse, and if my children speak of abuse, I will believe them and you will no longer be allowed in my home or my life once I have sought proof of that abuse. I will watch you. I will wake in the night and check to be sure you are still in the bed with me and I will check my children’s sheets, their pajamas, their bodies and their words. I will be vigilant, and you will not hide from me if you intend to hurt them. I will guard my children against abuse, and I know how to do so because I have been abused.
If I find that you have abused my children; if I fail to be vigilant enough and you manage to rape the innocence of my young, I will never stop destroying your life. I will follow you with word and deed. I will hang up signs in your neighborhood and I will tell every mother near your home what you have done. I will call your workplace. I will follow you to your next workplace when they fire you. I will tell the news. I will tell the courts. I will destroy your life. I will not attack you. I will not assault you. I will not kill you. I will make you wish you were dead.
I will tell everyone we know what you have done. There will be no one who does not know of your crime. I will tell them and I will shout it from the roof until everyone knows what a monster you are. I will call your family. I will tell your mother, your father, your siblings, your friends. I will mow your name into my lawn or burn it there with gasoline. Every car you own for the rest of your life will have “rapist” keyed into the side.
So do not hurt my children. Do not touch my children. Do your utmost to be sure that my children feel safe and comfortable around you, because the impetus of your innocence is on your head. If you cannot abide these things, stay away from my children, and get out of my life. Leave now. If you are here because I have children you can get access to, or if you are angered by what I have said, you can go now, and I will never question which was the truth.
But that is what I will do to you. I will destroy you, brick by brick, and you will beg for death when I am done with you.”
I think that about covers it. Live under a bridge. Live in a tent. Live in fucking squalor surrounded by the depraved ramblings of your own perverse fucking kind. But do not for a second think I will have pity on someone who molests a 12 year old girl or rapes a boy in his cubscout troupe. Because I won’t. Fence them off. Shoot them to the fucking moon. Set them on fire for all I care. Make them eat their own feces. But don’t mistake my rational desire for justice for something that might apply to these monsters, because they are no longer human. They are no longer worthy of justice.
I find myself struggling between two psychosis; on the one hand, I am an admited hypochondriac in some ways. I freak out about certain changes to my body because I am afraid of losing control of it. My akathisia caused me nothing short of panic. My lethargy made me afraid that I was losing some highly metaphorical but vital essence of myself. So I fear things going wrong with my body. I want to be able to seek medical care. I want to be reassured and cared for. I want to have a medical professional aware of where I’m at and watching my body/file for scary changes, especially as I get older and things like cervical cancer and mammograms become more of a concern.
But on the other side, I fear doctors. I fear dentists. I fear the gyno, even though she’s a lovely old white hair woman with purple gloves and the stirrups have blue fuzzy covers. I fear these people because they take my control away. I fear them because I am under their power, and they have the ability to force me into something. And I fear them because as a child, someone forced me to show them my body and told me that it was for my sexual health.
I have terrible dental hygeine. It’s one of the things I almost never talk to anyone about because it’s so embarrassing. My parents didn’t have dental insurance for most of my childhood, so I was constantly being nagged and told to be ashamed of how I took care of my teeth. As I grew older and went for years without an appointment, that fingerwagging shame dovetailed with the way the Monster told me I should be ashamed of touching myself, and every time one of those dental hygenists opens her mouth, I want to cram my fucking fist in it.
Eventually I will have insurance, and eventually I will find a dentist that I can talk to and that will obey my wishes because I’ll have enough money to throw at them. Eventually I’ll find a dentist that will agree to let me roll on my side now and then, and knock me out for anything that involves serious drilling or cracking, and just get as much done while I’m unconscious as possible. But until that day it’s just far too expensive and stressful for me to fight for it. And for now, I have to live with the possibility that in ten years I won’t have teeth.
Every year, in order to continue to get my birth control, I have to go to the doctor and get an annual exam. A very sweet woman with purple gloves sticks her fingers in my vagina and pushes around to make sure I’m all right inside. When I was 22, I went to the doctor because I kept bleeding during sex; not just a little blood around my period, but bright red gushes of blood during sex as though I were actively bleeding. The very nice woman looked into my vagina like some magical telescope of history, and explained that it was because of my vaginal scaring, and that I should be more careful or specifically disclude sex with men of a certain girth. At the time, it wasn’t really an option because I was in a relationship with a man that pushed me into sex on a routine basis and would instantly play the, “But that means you don’t love me” card if I refused.
Since, I’ve gotten more accustomed to my body’s needs, and it hasn’t been an issue in years. This is a good thing and all. But it still makes me incredibly uncomfortable that someone had to take a metal tool and pry open my body to see what was wrong with me. It still made me sit there and try not to cry as this incredibly well intentioned woman stared at my sex, like he did years ago.
It’s been said that victims of childhood sexual abuse are less likely to seek treatment for medical issues. In my opinion, that’s for many reasons.
We don’t want to go to the dentist because we’re lying on our backs, vulnerable, pinned to the chair by metal in our fucking faces. There’s viscous liquid sliding around in our mouths, usually tasting nasty and making us choke. Those fucking dental hygenists make us feel ashamed and small and helpless with their heckling and their lack of understanding.
We don’t want to go to the gyno or the proctologist or any doctor that deals with our pelvises because gods damnit, that’s my fucking body and no one can violate it now. I’m basically forced by the conventions of society and the fact that I can’t stick a set of metal duck lips up my own vagina to let some other woman (or gods forbid, a man) peer at my body in one of the most exposed and vulnerable ways imaginable. If I could take my pelvis off and put it on a table, I would totally do my own pelvic exams. Hell, I’d probably fuck myself too, but that’s just for the benefit of not having to deal with someone else’s expectations about sex.
We don’t want to go to our general practicioners because we are placing our lives and our sexual health and our psychological health in the hands of someone with immense power over us. If I go to a doctor and she or he disregards my concerns or lectures me on my behavior, what they say or do will affect me more severely than some asshole on the street. Society has made doctors our superiors. They have more weight to throw around and hurt us with. If I go into their office and they force their penis or fingers inside me, there is a fair chance that if I try to say they did, I won’t be believed.
When I was sixteen, I worked in a nursing home in the high school CNA program. There was a patient there who I’ll just call M. for the sake of confidentiality, though at this point, she’s been dead for over ten years. I still take that confidentiality seriously. M had serious disability; she was unable to sit up completely, had almost no function in her arms or legs, and was paralyzed on one side of her face. We had to do essentially everything for her. She was mostly catatonic, and rarely responded to anyone. She was one of the hardest clients we had compared to the men and women who could sit up, roll over, or even better, wash themselves and dress themselves.
One day when I was alone in the room with M, I had to wash her privates, and she began to cry. I could hardly hear what she was saying. So I leaned closer and she said, “Please don’t hurt me there again, Joey.” I dropped the washcloth and cried in a corner for almost half an hour, totally paralyzed, she and I in similar states of catatonia in her room. Finally I picked up the wash cloth again and I smoothed her hair and said, “M, I need to wash you so you don’t get sick, is that okay?” She looked at me with her watery glaucoma eyes, and eventually, she nodded.
For the rest of the time I worked there, I wouldn’t wash her or change her diaper without getting her to nod to me first, and I wrote a formal letter to her floor head demanding that everyone else do the same. I had my brush with what it was like to be a heartless and rushed caretaker, and I know what it’s like to be on the other side. I have hopes that once I have insurance, I’ll be able to find people that will be compassionate and care for me on my terms.
Maybe some day I’ll write a book about caring for an adult survivor of sexual abuse. I’m starting to see how necessary it might be.
