Living with the Aftermath

I haven't written for a while... I've been struggling just to survive of late. The feelings and memories from my past have overwhelmed me and threatened to take me under.

I feel like I'm absolutely going through the wringer.

Fighting to get help, seeing the GP, ringing round to try and get a therapist, and battling, just battling so much with getting out of the house, with letting people in, letting people close enough to see me in my pain, as I am, shaking, crying, low.

It's hard to trust people when you've been so hurt by them, so letdown, in the past.

It's scary to let myself be loved, because it shows what happened to me so clearly as unacceptable. If I matter, if Angel matters, is worthy of love, then I can't try and keep the abuse at arms length anymore, can't tell myself any longer that it doesn't matter because I don't matter.

It means acknowledging and feeling just how hurt I was, am, by the beatings, by the violence, by the rapes and gang rapes, by being sold and photographed and filmed and used as entertainment, treated as less than human, for the pleasure of others.

It hurts.

So many images! So many flashbacks! Horrific, in graphic multicolour, in my head, in my sleeping and waking, my body aching and shaking and retching and reliving, as it tries to deal, tries to heal.

If sex industry defenders, defenders of pornography and prostitution, could only see inside my head, and see the pain and damage it has caused me, and continues to cause me everyday, 3 years later...

I'm afraid to even watch the telly because chances are, there'll be some humourous or flippant reference to violence against women or objectification of women.

I'm so scared . Just doing the only thing I can do and hanging on in there right now.

Warzone

And I find myself in that place again. At war with myself, at war with my body, body and mind at their most conflicted. Even my mind's in conflict, a series of bickering, fragmented voices all vying for attention, clamouring to be listened to, acted on. Logic versus feelings, addict versus values, inner critic versus my more forgiving, compassionate side.

It's hard to see anything beyond me, beyond this, images and scenarios replaying before my eyes, difficult to hear the voices of friends when the voices battling in my head drown them out. The world clatters on around me but I am lost and disoriented, inhabiting the past, and terrified of the future.

The only constant is fear.

I shake and my heart races and my thoughts race, chasing themselves round in circles, round and round, picking up momentum, getting more confused. The words start to run together, I'm losing my words, and I feel like I did then, and it's terrifying and it's everything and it's nothing and it's dark and it's tangled and twisted.

A knot in my stomach.

A tightness in my throat.

A choking breathlessness.

Can't think. Can't speak. Can't move.

Terrifying. Despair, blackness, hopelessness, pain, lostness, powerlessness.

I can't connect. Lonely on my own, lonelier in company.

Even when it stills, when it calms, it's ever present, lurking in the background, an ominous presence, threatening to blot out a fragile grip on reality.

Then, existing through the pain, through the violence, caught in the cycle, I named this place The Pit. I used to think, once you're in there, ain't no getting out, baby, not ever.

I had revised my opinion.

But now... I reconnect like I was never away.