Call and Answer

Five letters. That’s all it is. It’s not that the word is long or difficult to pronounce. It’s all the baggage the word carries.

Abuse.

Funny how difficult it is to say, isn’t it, when I’m describing something about myself. It’s the lump in my throat as I work up the courage to admit it - to myself, first.

I was abused.

I don’t really feel like I own that word. After all there are so many other people out there with stories that make mine look normal in comparison. I remember, then, being told that one person’s suffering does not negate another’s. Pain isn’t ranked.

I had an abusive childhood.

No one would believe me. I was fed (too well, some might say - and they are wrong), clothed, sheltered, sent to school. It wasn’t like I grew up in a shack. I remember telling other kids that said they wished they had my parents, that they didn’t know what my parents were like at home.

I was emotionally neglected.

I try not to think about it, the plummeting feeling of being canceled on again, the stomach twist of being yelled at in the car every morning, the heavy stone of giving advice on workplace conflicts and marriage troubles, the double-edged cut of sneaking chips - candy - anything I could eat that would make things a little brighter even for a moment.

My parents were emotionally abusive.

I want to say it’s not true. Maybe I imagined it? - except who would imagine a childhood so lonely by chance, or even design. My best friends were a guinea pig, stuffed animals, and books - not people and certainly not them.

My parents abused me.

Deep in my core, I know. This was not how growing up was supposed to be. Despite that, I have to deal now with the scars that take unusual shapes and the habits that no longer aid my survival. C-PTSD, they say.

I am a survivor of child abuse.

Trying to form new ways of talking, communicating, learning that asking for help is okay. Being an adult is so strange when the skills I’ve been taught my whole life are the opposite of what I need to thrive. How to eat, how to approach others, how to believe in myself. 

I refuse to let their abuse win.

I don’t think they treated me so by design. That would require a deeper level of self-awareness, and they don’t like therapists. Funny, that - the ones who have tended the lighthouses on the shore of mental health for me are Scylla and Charybdis for them.

I will triumph. 

I do not want to just survive.





Note: Scylla and Charybdis are monsters from the Odyssey that live on either side of a narrow strait; one is a multi-headed creature that eats men, and the other is a whirlpool that devours any ship unlucky enough to get too close.