[editor note: potential intro, will likely rework, currently needs finishing]
There are moments of difficulty in your life when you can’t quite make sense of something, but you know it’s important, so you hang on to it. Growing up in the way that I did, the stream of things that didn’t make sense was endless, and I was both aware of that, and aware of how slippery my own memory is.
You’d think that the nature of the abuse, with its constant barrage of emotional violence, would make it easy to remember: If it happens all the time, there must be plenty of experiences to mentally catalogue, right? But that’s not how it goes. When your mind is constantly screaming at you over the clearly present danger, then eventually, screaming is all there is. And with your defenses always up, adrenaline constantly pouring through you, living in a fog of doubt and dread, there’s very little space left for conscious and considered pondering.
It’s the difference between dipping your feet in a stream on a bright sunny day, vs. drowning in a river, frantically trying to find something to hang on to.
This is compounded by the fractal splintering of multiple realities, as you obsess over snapshots of timelines to practise your defenses; split further by the public performances of wellness, themselves under constant scrutiny and threat of retribution if any part of the temporary “you” fails to live up to the impossible standards of someone who’s completely obsessed with hurting you.
I knew that without concentrated effort, that haze — of confusion, constant defense and split realities — would steal away my understanding, erasing the tiny fragments that I’d struggled to hang on to, the proof that all this was happening, the certainty that the horror was real, that they were wrong to do what they did, and that it wasn’t normal for me to be hurting so much.
But after a lifetime of this, of clinging on to the spiked shards of a broken mirror that had stopped reflecting who I am, I wanted out. I was ready to let it go.
And I had, mostly. I’d already decided that having a bad upbringing wasn’t going to be part of me anymore, and to achieve that, I’d have to let go of the ugliness that had lived inside me for most of my life. All that old guilt, and fear, and especially anger. I felt it was time to move on. Which meant intentionally losing some memories. Ones I’d fought so hard to keep. So I let myself forget.
It wasn’t until much later, when I’d began to recover and reconstruct myself, that I realised that the effects of my experiences still lingered; the trauma left untreated, despite the exact causes being lost to the transience of my abandoned memories.
And it wasn’t until then, either, that I realised that my sister, and my Granny, and others too, needed to know about the paths I’d taken. I had to recover what I could, and try to make sense of it all. For them. For you.