I've been working through a lot of things lately. To make a long story short, this past April I wound up in counselling (something longtime readers have probably seen coming since the inception of this blog). One day I'll probably post that story here -- it's all written out and waiting for the right time.
Through counselling, though, I've had to face the issues that I knew were haunting me and even a few that I had nearly forgotten were there... obviously the year 2015 is in there, as well as the youth group I attended as a teen, the trauma surrounding the birth of my youngest brother, and the loss of two of my best friends in the world (one to a significant move, one to death). But in our collective digging, I've begun to revisit my home life during my teen years...
I remember things being difficult at home in those years. The reason I stayed at that horrific youth group was to escape the horrors of home. But while the treatment I received at the hands of the Christian youth remained fairly fresh in my memory, the details of my life at home had not. I was in survival mode for the better part of ten years and did not have the luxury of properly encoding the memories... I was too busy trying to survive.
As a result of some of the things that have come up during counselling, I decided to go back through the draft archives of this blog and see what I had written and never published. I had originally started this blog as a place to escape (however temporarily) from the difficulties of my life at home, so I knew some of those drafts would probably touch on it.
What I found made me feel a bit sick, even though I had already lived it. I had wondered, sometimes, if I was exaggerating when I recalled those days in the counselling sessions. I wondered if perhaps I was being melodramatic -- I am, after all, an artist. But the posts I found proved that I was actually not doing those days enough justice. Things had actually been worse than I remembered them to be.
It's funny how much you can justify. It seems incomprehensible to me that someone would simply stay in an abusive situation and not attempt to get out -- yet I did that very thing. I knew even at the time that something was wrong, but I didn't realise until last week how wrong things really were. I once heard another domestic abuse victim (abused as a child) say, while talking about his experience, "I thought it was normal. I didn't know anything else. What is normal, anyway?" (It was actually hearing about that experience that made me realise that perhaps my own childhood experience had been at least borderline abusive.) Although I knew innately for years that my experience was not ideal, I thought perhaps it was just me being my melodramatic artist self reading far too much into things and being far too sensitive. To realise that it was all real and that something was at least as wrong as I had suspected... that's still kind of a blow. I'm still absorbing it.
As such, I don't really have a proper ending to this post. But I wanted to warn you all that this is where I am right now. Future posts may expand on this.
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