Have faith they say……faith.

I have let circumstances control me my entire life. I got hurt at a young age, innocence taken and I let the circumstances dictate my life from that point forward. Letting circumstances dictate a life from age 6 forward can be pretty daunting now looking back. I felt like a coward. I felt like, not only was my innocence taken but my dignity, and my life were taken as well.

Don’t get me wrong. I tried to live. But what did I live with? Flashbacks? Memories? Nightmares?

That was not living. That was merely breathing inside a shell of a body. I felt defeated. Defeated physically and mentally.

I gave up on myself. I stopped caring about me.

As I got older and the teenage years crept in, I began understanding the things that were going on within my emotional and physical self. As confusing as they were, I understood where they came from. I knew the sole cause and could almost pinpoint the moment of change within me.

11. That was the age I changed. Probably because I understood more. I was at an age where I knew about the birds and the bees from school, at least to some point. But I was also at an age that for me, the birds and the bees were nothing new. I knew for years what happened behind closed doors……or in the woods, between rocks, in the grass.

In high school I spent a lot of time in my bedroom, listening to music, or writing. Or even the classic rocking back and forth on the bed. Sounds so cliché. Like watching some horror movie in a mental health hospital with that one patient who kept rocking and rocking with a blank look on their face.

That was me. Why?

Well because….

I could not stop moving.

My mind would not let me forget. I believe sometimes that I tried to shake the memories out. Tried to make them stop.

I wanted to crawl under a rock, into some dark deep hole and I wanted to die, at least mentally.

I wanted everything to stop. The memories, the flashbacks, the nightmares. I wanted an end.

Nighttime I barely slept. I was afraid of the dark. Or more importantly, I was afraid of the things that happened in the dark.

I knew what monsters were lurking.   After all I had been face to face with one only years before.

I had this routine where I slept right after school before supper. I managed to get a good 2, maybe 3 if I were lucky, hours of nightmare free sleep. After that all bets were off.

I honestly prayed, and bargained with God to save me. To make the abuse stop at the time it was happening. After it was over for good, I prayed to forget, I prayed for the nightmares to stop, I prayed for the memories to go away, I prayed for the flashbacks to stop, I prayed for the triggers to not happen.

At 11 years old do you want to know what my biggest fear was and my biggest prayer? I prayed that I was not pregnant. I was terrified that I was pregnant and I was even more terrified that I would get in trouble for it.

Pregnant by the force of some fucked up monster. But not some monster in the dark in some dreamlike place without a face whom I would never see again. This monster had a face, this monster had a name, I knew this monster, and I hated him.

But no one came to save me. Have faith they say…..faith.

I guess the only prayer that got answered was that I was not pregnant.

Because as for the rest, the nightmares still rocked my body, the memories still caused tears to slide down my cheeks and my body to shake, and my God no matter what I did, I could not forget.

That is when I learned I had to save myself.

Because some mythical being was not going to swoop down out of the heavens, wrap me in its wings and warm glowing light and save me.

I am not really an atheist. But I sometimes think that “I grew up and stopped believing in fairy tales”.