BECOMING DEPENDENT - DEALING WITH FORCED CHANGE

I am certainly no angel. People often say to meal how brave I am and whilst I appreciate that they are being kind something which I really do appreciate, it isn't really true.

For one thing I do get very down about the limitations my disease puts upon me or I get very angry and break things and shout, scream and swear.  For short periods I even find myself feeling that I have been unfairly given to much on my plate.

I am not going to go over yet again my rotten childhood. Most of you reading all about it and those that don't will search it out if they are that interested.

What has been bugging me a lot recently has been my loss of independence. I can still drive and I drive very well. I can also still knit and I still knit well.  However, I can barely walk and I need John to help me dress. If we are not going out anywhere together then I stay in my lounge clothing which is bright and cheerful at least.

With the use of aids  lot I can take care of myself when it comes to the bathroom and showering I hope that I will always at least keep that part of my dignity.

 I adore music and watching films and TV series.  When John is in London on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday that is all that I do  apart from feed the dogs and play with them and talk with them.

I certainly would like to go back to travelling next year. I realise that we will not be able to do the long distance thousand mile destinations. I have had many friends who have left me to get on with it.  whilst it was painful I am more circumspect in my choices now

HOPE...I CAN'T FIND IT

Every time I feel down the same thing comes up: I have no hope. Yes, I k now how lucky I am to have a husband who adores me and takes care of me. 35 yrs this coming July. I get to listen to music every day on the best equipment, can watch what I like on a 4k TV. (4k meaning resolution not cost!!). I have my dogs to love and who give me great pleasure.

But I have no hope. Nothing to look forward to. Since my disease forced me to stop showing, I have had nothing to hope for. So what if I can still breed a litter. What for? I will only be upset if I produce a stunner. No one will buy it. I don't have the next show to look forward to, the next litter, the next possible win. Nothing. 

It seems I just must enjoy each day I can watching tv and listening to music and reading until I die. The recession has put paid to my hand dyed yarn hobby.

I don't say these things because I feel sorry for myself, or because I feel depressed. I feel neither. I truly cannot find hope. 

HOW IT WAS...OR WASN'T

If you are an adult and I came up to you and slapped you or punched you or kicked you or tried to throttle you, you would know that I did and take appropriate action. No matter what I said, you'd never think for one second that I had not done this to you. Now imagine you are a very young child. Throughout your growing up, you were punched and kicked and throttled and called names regularly. Imagine also you were never hugged or told you were loved. Yet, within hours of being abused you were told you imagined it. It didn't happen. Not just one person told you this. The whole family did. (The other children behaving in ways their abuse taught them OR their lack of abuse and doing nothing about the one being abused.) You dreamed it. You are wicked. That bruise was from when you fell. Starved of love and affection, other adults were able to see that and if they too were abusers, used your need for love and affection to abuse you. Thus you don't see it as abuse and even if you see it as something you shouldn't do, you blame yourself because you were not forced. When the time came and you were forced, well, it was no more than you deserved. So the first 17 years of life, you are told what did happen didn't. That black was white and white was black. Then you are taken away to a safe place. A hospital full of kind Doctors and nurses. At least that is what you grew up believeing. Instead, you found some nurses were abusive. The Doctors told you that your memories of growing up were symptoms of mental illness. They filled you with drugs when you resisted their truth. After a while, you resign yourself to the fact that indeed you were crazy. That you had come from a loving caring home but you had a mental illness that made you believe differently. So if I was ill, why was I treated as if I was bad? Deep inside the real me still existed and knew the real truth. He just didn't know how to live with that all alone. Daeth was the only way to end the nightmare. The result was a coma and proof I was nuts. After about a year, I was finally the patient of a new dr who let me go, and suggested I never went home again and went and made a life for myself. That I did. It has been very difficult. Even today I struggle with my perceptions. It is why I am useless at choosing friends. It is why I keep myself back and don't let myself feel loved. I had got past that, I thought, until my wedding in 2012 and now knowing that more than a few were not my loving friends at all. I had humiliated myself again. I truly believed they cared for me. Hanging on to truth is hard. It's tiring. The constant 'am i good, am I bad' argument in my head all back again. Fear moved back in.

SCIENCE SHOWS THAT CHILD ABUSE CAUSES PERMANENT BRAIN DAMAGE

This is not popular. There are grades of abuse. However, when I listen to people, if they know mine, they often say 'but compared to yours it was nothing' and I tell them that pain is pain. It hurts. Abuse causes damage. I have often wondered how people manage to work. Whether it be on a checkout till or as a professor or a doctor or a nurse. I managed my O levels with nine A, 1 B and 1 C. and that was me done. by the time they were finished the damage and the state that I was in could no longer be hidden. It is known that constant moving home and schools is detrimental to a child's health especially to their self-esteem. When we bought this house I was 40 years old and it was my 34th home. Most of those homes happened before the age of 17. It is known that living in a violent household is detrimental to a child's well-being as an adult. It is known that the sexual abuse of children particularly long-term is detrimental to a child's health. I know all of the above and on days like yesterday and today I have to remind myself that I am where I am because of all that. However I am also where I am because of what I have managed to do to make your life regardless. I regret never having had a career or even a job something that I enjoyed doing. I am well aware that there are many people who have jobs that they do not like but they have to do them and I'm glad I'm not in that situation. I am aware also that people see me as being kept by a wealthy man. It could not be further from the truth. If he were wealthy we would not live where we live although we love living where we live. We have excellent neighbours and it is a quiet town and we get no trouble here at all. There was a brief period of homophobic abuse by children but I nipped it in the bud because I happen to know who the children were and I knew that my neighbour new the parents of some of them. I asked her kindly is she would tell the parents what their children were doing. That not only was it hurtful and unkind but illegal. I never heard it again. Even when I was showing dogs I know that that was the rumour that I had a wealthy husband. I reacted to that the way it deserves to be reacting to with laughter and saying how silly these people were and how much we went without in order to be able to show my dogs. Now that I don't show my dogs I know exactly what we went without. Now we didn't starve and I've always been aware that if I compare we've always been in a good situation. It was not so before I met John. I don't want to talk about that. It was a dreadful time. I don't know what I am getting at here. I know many people would think I was really lucky because I can do as I please. If they thought about it my disability stops me from doing as I please which is why I have no social life. I have very dear friends who visit me when they can and I always enjoy them and they always leave me feeling better. I spend my days watching drama via Netflix or Amazon on or DVDs that we have bought and I knit socks while I am doing it. I also read. I read for entertainment but I also read for knowledge especially about science. I read the science surrounding the work that they have been doing on the effects of child abuse on the brain. It is fascinating. It is also quite freeing. Because it shows that stuff that one has felt guilty about has been beyond one's control. It also shows that the things I have considered old about myself are easily explained which is quite a relief. When soldiers come back from war and many of them are badly affected we all see that and understand that and they are often diagnosed with PTSD which we also understand. And we raise money for them so that they can receive the treatment that they need. Indeed I support such charities. Yet when it comes to understanding that children have equally survived a war and are badly damaged by it, very few are interested. Be that people who survived the battle I survived or the battles of war such as is going on in the Middle East. raising money for charities that help people like me is very difficult. I do not know why this is so. I have had people say to me that they cannot deal with that but I don't see why it should stop them giving money to help people who can deal with that. As usual when I started to write I did know what I was going to write about but now that it is in print I don't know what is was going to write about;-)

THERE WERE GOOD TIMES TOO

I was talking yesterday to John about the way that I think about my past. It came about because I learned that  human beings tend to remember the bad things more clearly than they do the good things.

I also felt that in some way I was betraying the abused me by talking about or even remembering the good times also.

Before I was six or seven I lived in a small English village for a couple of years having previously lived in Germany but with very little memory of that. I love that little village. The lady neighbours were always very kind to me and I had a best friend called Alex and another one called Hiroshima and another one whose name I cannot remember who was often sick and I used to take him round big chocolate bars. Those are good memories.

It is also where I saw Hiroshima murdered in front of my eyes. This is why I know that one can have repressed memories because all I remember is the newspaper headline:   The Boy Who Died of Hate.   according to what I was told we were together and there had been some confusion over who had been killed me or him. I ignored really what I have been told but I do vividly remember being shown the newspaper headline because it was on the front page with a picture of him and I was asked who he was and I said me. I do not remember Hiroshima at al Tto Singapore. It was a very exciting place for a child. And even though I was only 8 9 10 11  I was given free rein.  it was considered a very safe place.  I remember being taken into the houses of Indian people who celebrated the Diwali festival and fed food. There was this also pink coloured drink which was disgusting and I drank it very fast which was a silly thing to do because the sooner my glass was empty the sooner they folded up again. But I was a child and naive and it didn't occur to me to not bolt the drink down!  There were lots of wonderful sites in Singapore. The food was fantastic.

At tame time as I was experiencing all these wonderful things I was being violently abused on a regular basis by my sperm donor and I had also been attacked and sexually assaulted and may be raped by a total stranger in the jungle. The trauma was made worse because the man made me swear that I would not tell otherwise he would slit my throat but when something similar happened to a neighbours girl I spoke up about what had happened to me which when I think about it from my adult point of view I think it was a very brave thing to do. My mother didn't see it that way. She slapped me and told me I was disgusting and how could I have let that happen and why didn't I say anything and blamed me for what happened to the girl next door.

I don't wish to go on with this any more but I have illustrated I think quite clearly that along with the terror there were also these good sunny exciting times. It still feels like a betrayal though to talk about those things, the good things.  I can see another maze saying 'what about me?' Well I think I gave him plenty of attention and I can't look back over my life and only see the dark period Looking back over my life I have only ever seen a big dark cloud but there have been breaks in those clouds  and they formed good memories for me and that me also deserves to be heard.

A DREAM IN TWO PARTS

I decided I need to talk to someone as I don't seem able to see past this brick wall. I have made two appointments with two different people and am waiting upon a third to contact me. I felt better upon waking. I had the weirdest dream. Weird in that it was literally Part 1 and Part 2. I had dreamed I was with friends, no names, and I spilled a staining drink on his expensize greed cords. I said I would take them home and clean them. i did this and the stain came out really well. I then awoke because of Lydia letting me know the neighbours were up. She is so thoughtful like that. Anyway, I went for a pee, got back to bed and part 2 of the dream: I handed him the cords and he examined them. To my shame there was a fold in the cords and the stain was hidden in that. I then awoke properly and got up. This as about 2 hours after Lydia had alerted me to the neighbours. Weird. I don't think I have ever dreamed in two parts like that before. Not sure what the dreams were about. Was abut not looking more carefully? About agreeing to do something I am incapable of? I finished the final series of Perception. It was not a satisfactory ending for me. When I read a really good book or watch a really involving series, I often find myself what the lives of the characters are like now. I know they don't exist but for a few seconds I wonder about their present lives. Either that shows I am bordering on being really nuts, the writer is excellent, or the writer and actors are excellent. I also talk to the characters on the screen. The equivalent of shouting 'he's behind you' at the cinema. I call them names., tell them off, tell them not to trust so and so, she id it or he did it, he or she is a twat, and I can get quite riled. There are shows I cannot watch anymore: Holocaust, slavery, graphic history like The Tudors, burnings, tortures etc I can watch die hard type films cos the violence is fantasy same with the comic hero films. Films about abuse although I do intend watching the new film about the court case fought in the States by victims of RC church.

CALLING YOUOOOOOO

HI-does anyone read this blog anymore? It seems to they don't as there are no comments, or rarely. I have been feeling guilty a long time for not having kept it up as I did. Partly it's has been my illness and partly the immediacy of Facebook. I also think for some reason, my blog at wordpress (www.knitmanskitchen.wordpress.com) is read more. 

If I find many read this, I'll continue. If not I'll stop feeling like I have to and just stick with Wordpress or FB.

I do not feel it is a chore to write about abuse recovery. Far from it. I want to. I want in my small way to help. But I don't want to waste the limited energy I have either.

love
colin

MORBID START

John got up twice because our neighbours get up about 5am and leave their car running to warm it up and then they leave. Not complaining about that. I did that even earlier for dog shows. However it makes Lydia bark. John got up the first time to shut her up and the second time for the same when my neighbours returned at 8:30. I told him to cage the 3 who sleep in the kitchen. This worked and Lydia didn't make another peep.

However, I then fell into a deep sleep and awoke at 12 and all was quiet. I called out to John several times and got upset and panicky when he didn't answer. He didn't have his hearing aids in. I knew this but it is moments like this that I feel the terror of being alone, without my John. Which is why I reject it when people tell me how courageous I am. I haven't ever said the above before. I fear my own demise too. The one trip we all must take alone.

Anyway, I thought that maybe a different sound would alert him so I banged his show heel on the floor. He answered straight away. He came up. He didn't need to ask what I wanted. He didn't say anything. He just held me and soothed my back.

A morbid piece today.