I know, I know. I haven’t regularly updated this thing in a while. I’ve been busy. You could say I’ve been traveling, though I’ve not gone anywhere. In the past month, I’ve learned much about life, people, and myself. I’ve gone miles inside myself, exploring hills and valleys until I thought I could go on no more, yet I did. Now I am home. There are many things from my inner journeys I could share–dramatic, profound, possibly previously obvious to everyone but me. I come from these journeys rejuvenated and with a greater sense of who I am and why I am the way I am.
Maybe I should back up a little bit. Anyone who hasn’t been following this blog for a while or who doesn’t know me especially well in person is probably going to read all of that and say “that’s nice,” and traipse off. Yet, I come with a story, a message. I have several stories, actually, but each end the same and each are interwoven with one another because that’s the way life is.
My name is Molly, and I am a survivor. I stand (well, sit) before you not yet a quarter of a century old having survived severe abuse, incest, a tornado, a fundamentalist church, and any number of other things. I want to say with full confidence that I am finally truly happy, but making such claims worry me. Maybe I’m afraid I’ll jinx myself. My therapist says I have a “strong survivor spirit.” I continue to survive depression and post-traumatic stress disorder that occasionally leads to bouts of suicidality. But everyone has their problems, and they say that which does not kill us makes us stronger. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m Superwoman yet.
Last week, I confronted my abuser and informed him that I remembered everything. I spoke at length about the love of Jesus and our parents and how lucky he should think himself, and how wrong he was to use God as a weapon of hate and war. I finally said things I have been waiting my entire life to say and cried harder than I think I’ve ever cried. At the end of all of this, I ended up filing a report with the police for harassment and now he can never contact me again or I will tell the police to go ahead with the harassment charges. After all of this, I called my Dad and told him everything: that I’m gay, that I was abused, that I called the cops on my brother a few hours earlier. All of the things I’d been so afraid to talk to my Dad about because I was afraid he would disown me or not believe me came out all in the span of a few minutes. Then something amazing happened. Dad told me that I would always be his daughter and that he loved all of his children equally, and that he was going to speak to my brother about what he’d said about gays deserving the death penalty, because no one deserved to die. Somewhere in all of this, this turned into a discussion about God. Dad asked me what I thought Jesus’s message was. I told him “That everyone is equal and everyone is a child of God, but some people don’t understand that, so you have to keep on fighting ’cause it’s what Jesus would do.” It was the first time anyone in my family had ever asked me my opinion about religion instead of telling me what they thought I should believe, and I really want to think of it as the beginning of something wonderful between my Dad and I.
When I was a little girl, I was so afraid for such a long time. I feel like much of my life has been lived in fear or in the shadows of silence. This is where abuse lives, in the darkness, like mold, stinking. Last week, I turned on the light and poured bleach all over that mold and watched it slowly die. My brother lashed out from the accusations, of course–the mold does not want to die. He tried to convince the police that I was delusional and should be locked away, but I had his cruelties in writing–seven pages of emails in which he told me gay people should be put to death and horrible things about myself.
The mold made a stain on the floor. It discolored the tile and I’ll always know it was there for so long, too long. I worry it might’ve weakened the hardwood underneath. But I’ll also know to pay more attention and keep that bleach handy so it can’t come back and get so bad, and to keep an eye out for weak boards. Break the silence. Each time you speak about what happened, it gets a little easier. I was told that if I ever told anyone what happened, no one would believe me and that he would kill me. Yet, I sit here quite alive, and believed. All I ever wanted was to be able to be honest about my life and my past. Now, I have that, and that feels absolutely amazing.
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