TVtrays
Member
- May 6, 2019
- 99
CW: abuse and rape
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I woke up from a night terror last night. A rape night terror. I took some mushrooms a couple hours ago so this will not be as coherent as usual. That's where I am now in life. I have two close friends, I'm in love with my closest friend. I'm 25, trying to decide between going to college and putting everything I've got and then some into becoming a geneticist or virologist, haven't decided yet, or sparing myself the stress and the heartache and just ending it as soon as possible.
My best friend told me that I can't prove self worth, that I need to find it from withim, which makes sense. Part of the reason I want to go back to school is that it would be a way for me to try and prove to myself that I'm good enough. I want to be able to live with myself and be okay with where I am.
I have a lot of potential, which I've lost in the last several years, living through a cruel and abusive relationship. Through somebody who constantly put me down, made me feel broken, made it out as if she were the only person on the planet who could even understand me, let alone fix me, while she broke up with me, compared me to her new love interest, talked about how she was everything I couldn't be, how it was my fault she ended up with her instead of me because I couldn't fix what was wrong with me. What was wrong with me was magnified by the expectation that I never react negatively to her abuse, that I take her putdowns in stride, that I take responsibility for every single problem that arose in our relationship, lest I face her wrath. She would steal my benzo medications and overdose on them, and go on to blame me for it, saying that the only person who could save her was her new love interest. She convinced me that she was the only one who knew me well enough to truly help me, that I was wholly incapable of communicating my issues and the issues in the relationship properly to my loved ones, so she was the only person in the world I could trust. Half of my adult life as stolen from me. She was slowly killing me, all my friends and family could see it, and they felt almost as powerless as I did to get me out of it. I have blocked her for six months on everything but I get nightmares about her now, too. I've forgotten what she looks like and she is nothing but a blank face to me, but her very essence still haunts me to this day. She put me through hell. The word "hell" means more to me than it ever has before because I now feel as if I've not only been there, but built a life there. It was my home and I grew intimately familiar with it.
Before meeting her, I was just beginning to recover from the emotional, sexual and physical abuse I endured as a child, but my new life with her lead me down a path that ultimately landed me on this site.
I'm at a crossroads.
The acute effects of recent trauma have worn off and I now live with the long term, more abstract effects of the abuse. My abuser is now in my periphery, and my learned trauma responses are all that's left behind. Somehow, along the way, I managed to be raped by somebody who claimed he was trying to help get me away from the turmoil of my home, from my dad, who was a lot more hot-headed at the time, so now I have to deal with feeling dirty and defiled. If you've dealt with something like this, you may relate to the feeling that you just need to bathe. You feel you need to scrub the filth off of your body, but it never comes off. Feeling blemished and used. Crying on the bathroom floor because it will never go away, as hard as you try. You can't be intimate with another person without flashing back to those events. The person, who just five minutes before, you were ready to give yourself to, is now helping you put on a bathrobe and comforting you as you're ugly crying, assuring them that it was nothing they did. I am truly blessed to have somebody who understands this and is happy to help me through it.
I beat myself up for never having completed school, for not having a career, for being where I am, but this trauma is like terminal cancer. It's there, I have to make peace with it, and I sure as hell cannot earn a PhD while it steals every moment of my life, making no distinction between being awake and being asleep. While it robs me of my dreams and restful sleep.
I know intimately well the origins of my struggles and how they affect me and others, yet I cannot figure out what I should do next.
.
.
I woke up from a night terror last night. A rape night terror. I took some mushrooms a couple hours ago so this will not be as coherent as usual. That's where I am now in life. I have two close friends, I'm in love with my closest friend. I'm 25, trying to decide between going to college and putting everything I've got and then some into becoming a geneticist or virologist, haven't decided yet, or sparing myself the stress and the heartache and just ending it as soon as possible.
My best friend told me that I can't prove self worth, that I need to find it from withim, which makes sense. Part of the reason I want to go back to school is that it would be a way for me to try and prove to myself that I'm good enough. I want to be able to live with myself and be okay with where I am.
I have a lot of potential, which I've lost in the last several years, living through a cruel and abusive relationship. Through somebody who constantly put me down, made me feel broken, made it out as if she were the only person on the planet who could even understand me, let alone fix me, while she broke up with me, compared me to her new love interest, talked about how she was everything I couldn't be, how it was my fault she ended up with her instead of me because I couldn't fix what was wrong with me. What was wrong with me was magnified by the expectation that I never react negatively to her abuse, that I take her putdowns in stride, that I take responsibility for every single problem that arose in our relationship, lest I face her wrath. She would steal my benzo medications and overdose on them, and go on to blame me for it, saying that the only person who could save her was her new love interest. She convinced me that she was the only one who knew me well enough to truly help me, that I was wholly incapable of communicating my issues and the issues in the relationship properly to my loved ones, so she was the only person in the world I could trust. Half of my adult life as stolen from me. She was slowly killing me, all my friends and family could see it, and they felt almost as powerless as I did to get me out of it. I have blocked her for six months on everything but I get nightmares about her now, too. I've forgotten what she looks like and she is nothing but a blank face to me, but her very essence still haunts me to this day. She put me through hell. The word "hell" means more to me than it ever has before because I now feel as if I've not only been there, but built a life there. It was my home and I grew intimately familiar with it.
Before meeting her, I was just beginning to recover from the emotional, sexual and physical abuse I endured as a child, but my new life with her lead me down a path that ultimately landed me on this site.
I'm at a crossroads.
The acute effects of recent trauma have worn off and I now live with the long term, more abstract effects of the abuse. My abuser is now in my periphery, and my learned trauma responses are all that's left behind. Somehow, along the way, I managed to be raped by somebody who claimed he was trying to help get me away from the turmoil of my home, from my dad, who was a lot more hot-headed at the time, so now I have to deal with feeling dirty and defiled. If you've dealt with something like this, you may relate to the feeling that you just need to bathe. You feel you need to scrub the filth off of your body, but it never comes off. Feeling blemished and used. Crying on the bathroom floor because it will never go away, as hard as you try. You can't be intimate with another person without flashing back to those events. The person, who just five minutes before, you were ready to give yourself to, is now helping you put on a bathrobe and comforting you as you're ugly crying, assuring them that it was nothing they did. I am truly blessed to have somebody who understands this and is happy to help me through it.
I beat myself up for never having completed school, for not having a career, for being where I am, but this trauma is like terminal cancer. It's there, I have to make peace with it, and I sure as hell cannot earn a PhD while it steals every moment of my life, making no distinction between being awake and being asleep. While it robs me of my dreams and restful sleep.
I know intimately well the origins of my struggles and how they affect me and others, yet I cannot figure out what I should do next.
