Dealing With The Darkness

I’m knackered. Beyond that. Multiply that up 100 times and then you’re starting to get there. Knackered to the power of 100. I can’t sleep. Those brief moments I do fall into unconsciousness I’m beset by nightmares of the worst variety. When I awaken there’s no respite, no relief, no ‘oh well it was just a bad dream’ because it wasn’t. These nightmares revolve around actual life events.

My mind and my body are completely out of sync. When the body’s exhausted, the head’s racing. When I’m detached and my mind’s set at empty, resting out there on the ether, the body’s locked in, fully functioning and awake. One rests and the other works, or else they both race together, driven by an insane energy. Their periods of rest have ceased to coincide.

I’m dealing with some really heavy shit in therapy. This is the stuff I’d not planned on telling anybody – myself included. I’d put it in the deepest, darkest, furthest corner of my mind with a great big fuck off ‘DANGER’ sign lest I forget. The mind, like a flight recorder, took it in – took it all in – the beatings, the violence, the pimping, the rapes. My boundaries broken one by one, humiliated, treated like an animal, savaged and increasingly savage. Of course, I did my best to minimize, to forget about it, to deny it, just to survive. I didn’t allow words like ‘rape’ or ‘pimping’ in my vocabulary. The drink and drugs helped and the head injuries too.

But this stuff, these memories, fractured as they are, would simply not be obliterated. Nor will they now, despite my best efforts. That’s 5 years of trying to ignore them, 5 years unable to face them. I’ve been in therapy for maybe six months now and you know what, it takes time. I find trust incredibly, painfully difficult. When people have used and abused you, done things you didn’t even know it was possible to do to another human being without them dying – and then brought you back so they could do it again – it’s hard to have faith in people. When the hand that soothed you was also the hand that hit you, it becomes confused. Safer, surely, to trust no one.

It’s massive that I’m beginning to even try and talk about this stuff.

In terms of sheer volume, this ain’t going to be quick. But things move on as they do and voila! I’ve hit the really heavy shit now. Talking through the other stuff, painful and difficult in itself, I could feel it all around the edges of my consciousness, a foreboding darkness with little darts of movement, closing in. The occasional snapshot of something, like a subliminal message in a movie – there one second but gone so quick you’re not even sure it happened at all. A lingering feeling of deep unease, an inability to concentrate, head and body starting to pull in different directions. Unnamed and unacknowledged as it has been, this stuff has a slippery, nightmare quality. Struggling to look at it directly in my waking moments, small wonder it should be invading my sleep, such as it is.

This is stuff I couldn’t say aloud – even alone - couldn’t bear to think about. I’d do the psychic equivalent of going ‘lalala not listening’ yet it remained, patiently, waiting for a moment of stillness, of quiet, to re-emerge. Bedtime is an ideal spot, hence the insomnia. I don’t want to name it, or even acknowledge it. Too real, too painful, too scary. But it is there and it is real, whether I talk about it or not. It happened. Speaking about it is the only way. When I walled this stuff in and turned my back on it I didn’t realize I’d walled myself in with it, turned my back on myself. It has remained, a threat to my recovery, an unhealed wound thinly covered over.

Head and body are mashed with it all. When I’m sat opposite the therapist I can see him, see his reactions, and I trust him. It feels safe. Comparatively. Afterwards, at home, it’s not so clear. The trust thing kicks in – my ex taught me well not to trust by both his words and his actions. I face the horror of the reality of what I have managed to say and the fear of the rest of it – all the other stuff that I haven’t said. How am I to say it? I can’t. I must! And on. No rest! When I talk, I feel as if I’ve said too much. I oscillate between this feeling, this certainty, and knowing that I haven’t said enough. I feel this massive pressure, this crushing weight of all the horror and degradation just lining up to be spoken, to be heard. My body hurts with PTSD – leg pains! Abdo pains! Wrist pains! Jaw pains! Pains, pains everywhere, and my head hurts too, full as it is with images, feelings, thoughts, emotions. The feelings are so intense, how I felt when that stuff was being done to me, how I still feel, that words seem inadequate. I grope for vocabulary but there is none. And yet words are all I have.

The emotions take me right back. Like being sucked into a vortex, I leave this body and time behind, revisiting. It’s like I’m haunting myself. The body responds to what the mind’s telling it is happening – it hurts, freezes, sweats, shakes, becomes nauseous, becomes faint. I become lost, split between two places, not fully in either.

But one thing I do know – no matter how painful and scary looking at this stuff is, it is necessary. There are no other options. It’s move forward and deal with it with help as best I can or sink with it. Sink or swim. It’s rough and it’s going to be a whole lot rougher before we’re done but I got in some little practice at surviving. My ex set out to break me and break me he did, but he could not determine the lines along which I broke. For in with the fear and the pain and the weakness there grew a cast iron will to survive. Terrified as I feel with this stuff, he has yet to beat me. Survival is itself a form of defiance. I will pull through this, somehow I will pull through it. What better ‘fuck you’ could I hope for?

Good John Bad John?

The johns want their egos massaged, not just their cocks. If they fantasise about power and force and humiliation, they want to see the fear and shame in you eyes. If they fantasise about being good with women, they want you to say you love being with them, talking with them. If they fantasise about being a great lover, well ...Yeah baby, I love it when you do that... mmm, that feels sooo good... you are amazing... ooh, you've made me cum again...

Maybe not. It used to amaze me that any of the johns I met could have been so stupid as to have thought that what they were doing to me would actually give anyone an orgasm. Hello! Perhaps time to turn off the porn and throw out the notion that fucking any orifice with any thing will make me ecstatic. Plus maybe did you ever think about washing down there before you shove it in my face? Just a thought.

Sometimes they want to be the good guy, in the face of all the evidence. They want to differentiate themselves from your average john, they don't want to be bracketed with the sexual inadequates, women haters and weirdos. I'm not like that! The girls love me cos I understand them, cos I talk to them. The girls love me cos I'm a good lover.

BS!

You kind of think, what d'you want, a fucking medal because you've chosen not to be an out and out sadist today? So you didn't shout at me and beat me up. Hardly a qualification for sainthood. Perhaps you asked me how I am or why I'm here, in a pretence of care (you don't actually want to know), to make yourself feel better. It demonstrates either stupidity or a wilful ignorance of the obvious, that anything I say in this context will be lies for your benefit, to appease your conscience, such as it is. Disobedience and backchat is potentially deadly as a prostitute so I have to say what you want to hear. So I'll tell you I'm here cos I love sex, and I love talking to you and I love being here, love your company and your cock, and pretend I'm not here for the money for the addiction and because of the mental hell caused by the abuse I suffered in my past. And you'll ignore the self harm scars and the smell of alcohol, and go away thinking you might have actually improved my day! Gee, you didn't beat the crap out of me - thanks for that.

If you were really concerned for my welfare, you wouldn't be here, wouldn't be a john. A bit of pseudo-kindness can't hide that.

You're still paying for my body, still demanding a performance, still violating my space, still funding the system that's destroying me one lie at a time. Whether they consciously desire your pain or whether they're after affirmation of their sexual technique, johns are johns are the guys with the money, the guys calling the shots, the ones with the power. They're still there to fuck you, to use you, to degrade you. They still demand you respond in whatever way gets their rocks off, be that abject terror as they hurt you or the little sweet girl playing along with this oh what fun! They don't want you to be you - that's why they're paying rather than with a girlfriend. Even the 'girlfriend experience' is about acquiescing to their every whim. They are paying you in short to be less than human, to have no needs or wants of your own, to be used as they wish, to react as they wish, to say what they wish, your body the blank canvas for their fantasies, however extreme, the words in your mouth their words not yours. If someone talks to you before they fuck you, it doesn't lessen the violation.

The omni-presence of porn of course legitimates the johns' thinking. It teaches them that women want to be fucked in every which way possible, however extreme or painful it might seem. She'll love it in the end, used and abused and covered in cum, smiling for the camera.

You hate them, and they use you, whether that be more or less roughly, with more or less hardcore talk and moves. A lose lose situation, a web of lies designed to massage their ego, make them cum. I can say honestly it didn't do anything for me. Less than that, in fact. Just left a fuck load of emotional scars that are healing much slower than the physical ones. And a burning desire to set the record straight with the johns. They need to get honest with themselves. There's no such thing as a good john.