LIVING IN COLOUR

I get very tired of those people who moan about the Internet and how bad it is for people especially social spaces like Facebook. These people clearly are able-bodied and have such lives that they have no time to discover new people and new experiences and new intelligence. I first came upon the Internet in 1997 in July. My life changed completely as a result I have travelled from Norway to Barcelona to Budapest to Stockholm to Denmark all over Germany France Belgium Holland. I would have done none of these without the Internet. I started my line of Lhasa apso because of the Internet. On a much more serious note on days like today where I am barely able to move what the fat could I do with myself? Just sit and watch telly and listen to music and feel lonely. No instead I am able to communicate with real people through this medium. That is all that this is it is a medium through which people are able to reach out to each other. Yes the place is full of Dick heads but you soon learn to worm them out all you tolerate them. On an even more serious note I have found that by writing my blog and being open about the effects of childhood abuse both physical sexual and emotional upon children and adults has been the most rewarding thing I have ever done. Without this Internet I could never have done it. It started out as an anonymous blog and just as a way for me to vent and to write about the abuse to make some sort of chronological sense out of it because I lived in firmly different countries and was abused in each one of them. My memories consist of which country are losing and which abuse happened. That is how I remember things. It is perfectly natural. If you ask me about Singapore the first thing will come to mind is being accosted and worse in the jungle. I have been into detail on my blog but I'm not going to do so here. However I also have some very exciting memories of Singapore the point I'm trying to make is that for all people who have been abused this is how we remember things. It is always marked by the abuse it is insidious it effects absolutely everything. In fact it is more wise to say that it infects absolutely everything. It infects the way that we react to people today. It can appear to others that we have been traumatised by something minor that has happened this week old today but which for a survivor it is not the little thing that has been the trauma but rather that the little thing has brought up something far more dramatic. Hence our reputation for overreaction. It has nothing to do with being a drama queen it has nothing to do with wanting attention. It just happens and we have no control over it all very little control over it and it takes a long time to learn to control it. There is no way of getting around it we are most definitely weird people but one always have to remember why. And one has to realise that the weirdness is our way of coping it is our way of keeping hold of our shattered selves. perhaps people do not truly understand that at the moment of the abuse a child psyche is split into 1 million pieces and those pieces will never ever come back together. They may form and a semblance of being a joined up whole but they never are. Instead our lives are an act. No I do not mean that we pretend to be somebody else although to the unrecovered survivor that is exactly what we do. We pretend to be many different people and the people that we pretend to be very much depends on those people around us. Carly Simon sings a song in which she says that she isn't necessarily the person you think you see and she will be whoever you want her to be. To me this describes the succinctly what I'm trying to describe. today I do not do that I am who I am. My friends understand this and they know that there are days that Colin is completely different to the Colin of yesterday that he is still essentially Colin and he will come back to being the Colin that they know and love. These are my real friends those who truly accept me as I am. Writing as I do not just here but on my blog has brought me so much personal satisfaction that I could never have dreamt it be possible. I have had professional people, those whose job it is to work with abused children, write to me to tell me how much reading me has helped them understand their clients better. I have been told that they often think of me when dealing with a particularly challenging child and they wonder what Colin would want in this particular situation. I cannot tell you how this makes my heart feel to know that just by writing how I feel and what I think can have such an effect. I have also had mails from people who have told me that on the day that they found my blog they had decided to end their life but that reading me gave them hope that the terrible pain that they were suffering could indeed get better. This is all that this is about. Be abused person just wants the pain to stop. The pain is not just the pain of the rape all the violence. That pain is over very quickly. It is the psychic pain that stays and eats away at 224 and was a day seven days a week 365 days a year without a break. I am living proof that despite the most devastating effects of abuse one can end up with a happy life. It is never a good idea to compare abuse. We all react differently to different abuse or even to the same abuse. The abuse that I suffered nearly destroyed me physically and mentally. Even when steps were taken to make sure that I could never physically and my life again, it was knowing that John would have to live with always wondering if he had done enough. This is what kept me alive. I knew that I could not do that to him. And I can tell you that I continued to waste my life to end right up until the end of 2007. The last few months of 2007 were the most agonising I have ever experienced but I came out the other side truly understanding that the abuse had never been my fault and it had not even been about me. I had not been abused because of who I was I had been abused because of who my abusers were. Since that day I have lived in colour whereas prior to that I lived a monochrome existence. I know that every time I open up and I talk about how I really feel at any given time I am helping myself but at the same time I am fully aware that I am also in the very privileged position of being able to help other people. I have come to realise that this is the purpose I have two my life. Regular readers of me will know that I have often struggled with the point of my life. I am completely dependent upon John and upon medication. I may be a survivor but I cannot function on my own. Much of my physical condition can be laid squarely at the feet of those who abused me as I grew up. This to is yet another affect of childhood abuse. However I do not dwell upon that. Instead I have come to realise that I do have a sense of purpose and that I do have a reason to be living. And it is my writing. Through my writing I am reaching out to other survivors and on any given day what I write may help another survivor to get through another day and learn something that will eventually lead them to not just getting through each day but actually living each day. The difference between existing and living. existing is just trying to get through another day from waking up to going to sleep with doing as little harm as possible during those waking hours. Trying not to starve oneself or purge ONESELF or cut oneself or maybe even to avoid harming somebody else. This is not living this is a living hell and existence it is a monochrome existence where all one feels his pain and whose only goal is to stop feeling pain. It was many years into my recovery before I realised that there was possibly more to recovery than just the cessation of pain I began to realise that I could actually enjoy life that I might actually feel joy and that it was okay to feel happy that there was no guilt in feeling happy. Of course this was a slow process and it came bit by bit. Despite the physical challenges I still have and the mental challenges, which will never go away, I do indeed live a life in full colour. I FEEL.. I I feel laughter I feel joy I feel silly I feel pain I feel tired I feel my body from which I was switched off for many years. Will that is enough for me now I had no idea that this was what I was going to write when I started and I wonder how many of you got this far today has been a good day because despite the fact that physically I feel terrible I have not fought it and I have still had a productive day just sitting in my arm chair.