Surely I know, somewhere I don't Fear anymore

TW: this entry talks about various forms of abuse; if this isn't for you, then you can skip this one. Be safe and excellent to yourself and each other.

I saw a Bumble advert on BART yesterday that made me burst into tears. If I see it again today, and if I remember, I will take a photo of it. It's a very nice illustration, and this is not a slight against the artist who rendered it by any means, but it certainly hit me like a ton of unexpected emotional bricks.

(Not that I am particularly attached to dating apps, or have very much experience with them. My only interaction with them was the one time I made an OKCupid account as an April Fool's joke to catfish my friends.... I am a nice person, and a great friend, I promise.)

As someone who has had multiple stalkers, and tends to attract people who are hyper-fixated on me in ways that are 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Percent Unhealthy, the idea of "putting myself out there" on the internet in that way is not appealing to me.

Something about the advert just socked me in the gut. I thought about it all night, and finally figured it out this morning: this is something that so many other people get to experience and yet is completely foreign to me.  I had the same kind of reaction that I had watching the fan-made video of the Ghost song "Life Eternal." It's nostalgic and sweet (OBVIOUSLY before the hard, HARD left). It made me miss something. Something that I have never been able to experience in a healthy, normal way the way that other people get to. I never got to be a young person who got to do normal ("normal") things or experiences.

I don't date.  I had a nervous breakdown in 2017 and I stopped experiencing most forms of attraction. I am now also almost entirely touch averse. I had spent years healing, and the actions of two very, very selfish people threw all of that work away. I have done a lot of very hard work since then, but the results haven't yielded the progress I thought, or I was promised, I would have. I have accepted that this IS my life now. I think this bothers other people more than it bothers me--it has always bothered other people more than it bothers me. I don't think about it so much, not nearly as much as other people seem to think about it. Or want to talk about it. Or ask questions about it.

I am also repeatedly reminded that I am going to be 36 this year, and that my time is running out (because women have expiration dates, and men don't--obviously!).

I don't understand the fixation other people have with it--like it deeply bothers them that I somehow live my life devoid of something that they have built their lives devout around.

And that somehow, this bothers them more than what got us, or rather, me there in the first place: the childhood CSA/ trafficking/ stalking, the being s3xualized from an early age, being assaulted by two close male friends from childhood, the never being treated like a real, human person with agency or feelings. I have had a very hard knock life, and I have just accepted that this is another hard knock to roll with, no more, no less. There are a lot of other things to worry about (I wish someone would tell that to my friends who, whilst the ice caps are melting and the world is spiraling out of control, only ever seem to care about not having a boyfriend).

What happened to me as a child repulses people away from me--like they don't want to touch the girl whose father did that to her, as if it were something that I had done or that it was a badness that was a reflection of me. Either they are horrified or terrified by it, or it makes them immediately more interested in me, and they try to use it to their advantage through manipulation tactics that are very easily seen through. THANKS to being told I was/am worthless my entire life, I immediately distrust people who say nice things to me.

I am not bitter, and I am only rarely sad. There are just so many more enriching and salient experiences in this world outside of the one type of love that is upheld above all others. That is for other people and it's not for me, and I promise you, that's fine. I have so many more things to worry about. I have so many more things to focus on. I have pets I love, and a beautiful niece (soon to be two nieces!) and nephew who are my entire world. I have some truly wonderful friends. I do get sad sometimes. I am not going to pretend that I don't. I am not going to pretend that sometimes things like certain songs, or that Bumble train advert, don't make me come undone. I don't dwell on the things I don't have, or whine and cry because I don't--trust me, there are a lot of things I don't have. I feel some of those absences more acutely than others.

The constant dehumanization is no joke. More than anything, that has taken a very serious toll on me.

There is only one person that I can think of whom I do not hate, but I do think that they are incredibly silly. They were clumsy and stupid, but they were not cruel or selfish like the others. This person once burst into tears because they could not believe that we lived in a world where I could not be loved. I would go on to be a character in their online comic (this is not a joke, and is a real thing that happened), their long lost star girl that they would never see again. But I wasn't and am not a star girl. I am not an apparition or a fantastic being. I was and am a real girl with real feelings, and I was not and am no lost forever. You (this person), knew how to get ahold of me. But instead of talking to me like an adult, I became a fantasy, without nuance or agency. 

Our friendship was very brief, intense, and tumultuous. The one of few little adventures we did go on still remain two of my most treasured memories. For years I would revisit some of the places that they took me--a sort of a Brigadoon-y, "I know it's not there, I just want to see where it was." They were attractive, charming, and funny. They indulged my whimsy, my need for magic in every day things, my love of things like lights in trees, going to playgrounds at night, cutting capers. This was the only experience I have never had of going on what would be traditionally considered "dates." My grandmother also liked them. 

But when it was over, it was OVER, and it was UGLY. We have never spoken since. They handled it badly, and I handled that worse. I still think about being a character in their comic, again, a figure of myth, a fantasy, without nuance or agency. 

The one thing that I do find myself sad about is that I often find myself as a fantasy, without nuance or agency, instead of a real person who gets her feelings hurt and is too fragile to be that selfish with.

For this very reason, there are almost no photos on my Flickr account from 2016. That is because (outside of the innumerable celebrity deaths) 2016 was a terrible year. This is one of the few days of 2016 I choose to remember. It was raining that day just like it's raining right now. I had my designated faves at a café I no longer go to because it's no longer a "safe" place in my brain.

I hate this photo of me, because I can see in it how physically and emotionally sick I was here.

2016 opened with a peculiar scenario. What I had waited all of 2015 for didn't pan out the way I think anyone had seen. I felt unwanted, lonely, and sad. Then, suddenly, I was presented with the return of an old friend. I was getting attention I had never experienced. It seemed like a fairytale. I think in their mind they saw it the same way--that the girl they had always wanted would turn around one day and say that they wrong, that they weren't in love with that other person anymore, and that this whole time it had always been them.

But it wasn't like that. It wasn't a fairytale, it was a nightmare. A nightmare that broke my heart in ways I didn't know my heart could still be broken.

The cracks had started to show. I couldn't stop the way that my heart felt about the other person, despite their greed, selfishness, and stupidity, and I wasn't "coming to my senses" soon enough. The behaviour became  increasingly controlling and possessive. Just because they saw the failure in someone else's folly did not mean I did not then automatically belong to them. I wasn't a person, I was a commodity being passed around. They made me feel isolated and alone, and only they could be The One. They would ply me with alcohol and coax me into saying things they wanted to hear--that, yes, they were the one, that I was wrong, that they were my only friend, that no one loved me but them. I still remember the exact moment I felt my heart shatter, one violent, drunken episode. I lost one of the few safe, nice memories from my childhood, one of the few happy touchstones. There is a part of me, and I don't mean to sound dramatic, this is just the only way I can describe it, that died that day. It was the anger. It was the anger towards me that I dared still love someone they saw inferior to them. It was the anger directed towards me because I could not give them what they wanted. The other person had, in their eyes, "failed," which naturally meant that I not belonged to them. I felt so dehumanized.

It had seemed that this person was the hero, but instead was the cruelest twist villain I could have never imagined.

I did not love them in the way that they had wanted me to love them. They wanted it, so why couldn't I just give it to them? How dare I not see the error of my ways and the folly of not seeing them as the "obvious choice." Etc.

I think about all of this now, because this year marks the 7 years since this person touched my body in any way. It also marks 7 years since the one that had the imaginary rivalry with touched me. There is that old internetism about body regenerating itself every 7 years and that one day you will have a body that your abuser had never touched. That's about half-true. I have two of what I call "body anniversaries," the last dates these people had touched me. I have one in April, and one in August. I dreamed of these days for years. I dreamed that it was going to feel so amazing, that I was finally going to be free. Instead it just feels empty and meaningless. I was supposed to begin my journey this year to become a single mother by choice to symbolize the end of the 7 years, only to find out that my body is broken, and that I can't. 

I will never forgive the one of them for destroying a sacred childhood friendship. There is no love in my heart for that predation. There is no love in my heart for the violation of the sacred bonds of friendship, the isolation, the manipulation, the anger.

I don't know if I will ever forgive the other of them, either. It's strange to both simultaneously hate someone with every fiber of your being, and still have a secret locked away part of your heart, that, yes, does still love them. They lack the betrayal in such a deep-seeded way that the other one has, but there is still an ugliness in them that I could never love. Aside from their  general stupidity and selfishness, they are greedy. What they did to me was unconscionable and cruel, and then refused to take responsibility for it or give me closure I literally begged for. This was someone I had once loved because they had made me feel safe, and allowed this person to break down walls and barriers that no one before them had ever been able to. I fell in love with them because they had made me, for the first time in my entire life, feel safe. Interactions that were once welcomed and had made me feel safe now  feel mortifying. The unspoken embolden lasciviousness of the up and down looks, and then the sheer cruelty to lie about it later. And the cruelty of others who protected and continue to protect those lies. Greedy, selfish, petulant, deceitful, unconscionable and cruel.

I live most of my life day to day and think very little about  the romantic and dating woe that preoccupies a lot of other people's minds. I am not saying this because I am Not Like Other Girls. I am relaying this because I am trying to communicate that I just don't experience this. I am also not saying that  I am completely immune, because the simple Bumble advert set something off inside me and sent me into a  surprise spiral. I don't know what it is about that ad that caused me to burst into tears, I don't know what about it struck something deep in my core. I guess because I experience so little attraction, and because I have always had things that were more pressing or more urgent to worry about, that that other stuff just seems unimportant. You know, when you've spent your entire life dealing with food insecurity and dealing with break-ins crying because you don't have a significant other is as insipid and stupid as that sounds. Truly.

I had a quantifiable, diagnosed nervous breakdown from the abuse I suffered in 2016 in  March of 2017. But something else happened in 2016; my niece was born.  She was born right before Christmas, and she had broke my whole heart open. I didn't know that I could love someone that much. I didn't know that I could love that way, that deeply. She turned 6 last year, and she continues to teach me every day. She reminds me that life is full of a breadth of beautiful, meaningful, enriching experiences. She sees beauty, joy, and nuance in all creatures great and small. She teaches me the joy of rediscovering things that I let become mundane.  I am paraphrasing Joseph Campbell here, but you have to give up the life you imagined for the life you have waiting for you--you know, something like that. 

Life is full of a breadth of beautiful, meaningful, enriching experiences that don't involve romantic love, or the romantic love other people think that you should be experiencing. There is beauty, joy, and nuance that is just as fulfilling, if not moreso. I am going to allow myself the space to process feelings over the BART advert, but I am also not going to dwell on what I don't have, when the life I have and what I do have has its open arms out waiting for me. Plus, I am about to become an auntie for the 3rd time any day now.