In The Beginning

How do you write a peppy upbeat thing on something that is too heavy to have its word spoken in the best of circumstances? How, exactly, does one juggle being ENOUGH in all of the areas, WHILE speaking these words-we-must-not-speak?

Relatable enough. White enough. Clean enough. Even typing it is too repetitive. Educated. Pretty. Christian. Sexy. Motherly. Positive. Trendy. Gentle. Badass. Cool.

Uh, for those of you who have not yet met me: I am not cool. I was never cool; my high school years were spent in the dark room, immersed in silence, red light, and developer. I went to football games so I could sit under the bleachers and not participate in anything evenly mildly peppy. I spoke to no one more than I absolutely needed to.

I am at peace with forever being lame-o. However, that does mean that I will never be cool enough to have my rapist arrested and tried in a court room, to have the sex trafficking ring he is STILL leading actually brought to justice.

So then the question is, how exactly DO I make America jump on the new trend of "Everybody Hates Pedos for Realz Now, Guys," at least for a year or so. America is the ultimate cool jock, throwing those footballs at the smart kids' heads, doing keg stands, grabbing titties and brews.

Nobody wants to tell America his fly is down, nobody wants to offer condolences on Lady Liberty walking out on his drunk, arrogant ass, nobody wants to pat him on the back and ask if he's doing okay. Because America has hurt feelings right now. And nobody wants to risk helping America face that, because America is the perpetual cool guy. Even in its pain, its disillusionment, its monstrous reputation to uphold, its complete collapse of protecting its most vulnerable citizens - America has to stay looking aweeeesome.

Which sucks for America, cuz I've been autistically slicing up cool guys' egos since 1995 (NO REGRATS).

I have been a massive fucking nerd since I was dropped onto this hell planet, and I have no plans to turn back now. I will never master TikTok or Instagram in a way that lets me brand myself enough that hopefully somebody will give a shit long enough or big enough because their own brand is mentioned, at risk of public and corporate embarrassment if they don't, or sees potential to make more money off of a partnership with me. How do you tip the scales in your favor? How does someone who puked before every dance recital, puked before every Barnes and Noble reading, puked outside of book signings, friendly gatherings, and writing conferences - suddenly market herself publicly and with JUST the right amount of...everything?

Well. Whine-fest is over I guess. I mean, obviously, I'm shooting for it. What kind of lame ass life would it be if I didn't?

What is the "it" I am doing? At its base level, trying to have my father and his colleagues arrested for raping me starting when I was 6 months old, to get them out of public and away from all of the families they have been hurting, untouched by the law, for 40 years. On a larger level, I am trying to help expose the national cover-up of a sex trafficking ring that I grew up in, that is still running. Yes. Today. With the same people.

In the utopia I obviously created within my own mind, America would give a single fuck, at all the levels, and clean house for the next generation. The headlines scrolling blue and inconspicuous between fluff distractions about who hates who right now, and why you just gotta pick somebody to hate or else national unity MIGHT occur for a brief second - those tiny, stupid headlines would mean victory:

American woman, scholar, professor, and author presses charges against sex trafficking ring she was raised in, seeks prison sentence for her own father, and all others involved.

FBI Arrests 200 Active Members of National Sex Trafficking Ring

Child Rape Declines by 30% Across America in 2022

Major Networks Stop Pretending Pedophilia is Sexy in Movies and Shows Because America is in a Mood

Women Everywhere find Fybromyalgia, Migraines, Tummy Bloat, Suicidal Ideation Simmers Down After Rapists are Arrested

Men Everywhere Stop Turning a Blind Eye to Kid Rapists; Shame instilled in them subsides; American men stop being assholes; Women have enough brains and brawn with men as allies to start cleaning pedo house; everyone's "Other" dissolves naturally through love of one another without all the culturally-ingrained hatred we have been conditiioned with; harmony is restored. It's a new world. Ta-da.

You'd think it would be easy as that, right? My rapist confessed to it on paper, to a court-appointed psychologist, in a custody battle against my mother. He literally confessed to raping his infant daughter, and the men protected him, from the church to the police to the courts to the psychologists.

Institutions were at fault, sure. Systemic failure happens every day. I'm not so much interested in theorizing on systemic failure as I am in saying:

The. Individual. Men. Who. Raped. Covered. Trafficked. Are. At. Fault.

A ton of different men, from different walks of life, each with a single chance to break the chain of Good Ol' Boys clubs and just be a decent fucking human being.

These men shut my mother up and thousands of women like my mother, tried to destroy her through brainwashing, guilt, fear, gaslighting, killing her pets, beating her children, taking her babies away from her. Chasing her across country. Finding her. Fighting custody battles for my father.

Painting her as mentally unstable, a bitter, spiteful ex-wife who can't forgive her poor husband who made a small mistake and raped his daughters repeatedly beginning in infancy.

But they failed. They did not quiet her, or destroy her, or me.

And now that we are all old and very, very angry, and very, very not "mentally ill and fragile," now I will tell the whole truth. And the whole truth will set me free. But it will string every single one of them up as I tell it.

In the meantime, I am left writing all of this out so I don't go ACTUALLY crazy at the gross, humiliating, yuck-yuck-yuuuuuuck feeling crawling all over my body every day.

And, quite frankly, so that somebody, anybody, can help me answer the questions that are rattling around in my PTSD-laden brain as I try to simultaneously heal, find spirituality, fight the same people, places, and courts that my own mother had to contend with, find peace, drink enough water, rest...oh, and create an enormous fake media campaign using a platform I have no idea how to use, to pitch a very real story under a very fake name and book, in hopes that it will trigger an algorithm to allow my rapist's name to go viral enough that him and everybody else involved is put away for good.

Why is it that huge community gathering halls are being burned down at a rate never before seen? Is it possibly because every child from the 1980s and 1990s eras within the cult have reached mid-life and struggled through enough therapy to start going after their childhood abusers? Is it a last straw for desperate, weak bullies and pedophiles, an intimidation tactic that has worked for half a century now to silence truth-tellers? Could someone qualified to weigh in on that look into it and get back to the rest of us?

Perhaps the best way to get this unraveled for both myself personally, and the world at large, would be to simply rely on my 90s kid trauma-bonded nostalgic ass. Ms. Frizzle's Magic School Bus-style this shit. Could that work? Group project??

Right now, on this planet, within the walled gardens of our country's borders, on this wretched little dust speck we are all standing on, there are 74 million females. If you are reading this, and you are an American woman between the age of 20 and 60, listen:

There are 74 million of us. The men have obviously lost their damn minds this trip around the galaxy, unless someone else can explain to me how I am in this position with my own father, and therefore, as women, we are responsible for being stronger, better, smarter, braver, and, of course, far more resourceful and efficient in every way. We are capable of changing the landscape of the America that our children and our grandchildren grow up in.

We are capable of stopping pedophiles, pedophile culture, and everything sick with it that is fucking everybody up, generation after generation. We are very capable of speaking hard words, like "rapist," like the names of men who have raped you, like the names of men you are protecting small children from NOW. We are capable of doing anything, together, unified, but not while we are feeling disempowered, miserable, depressed, sick, isolated, less than. We are not less than.

We are not even a minority. We are not a second-class citizen. We are NOT the weaker sex. The weaker sex is hurting children at a rate that we could never even try to beat, nor would we ever try. It is not in our nature.

We are healers. We are nurturers. We are warriors. We are lovers. We are protectors. We are soothers. We are hunters. We are gatherers. We are women.

For those weighed down by a half-century of anti-women propaganda: We are nowhere near the weaker sex. And the sooner we acknowledge this, for ourselves, for our kids, for our men, for our world - the sooner we can put aside all of the social and cultural haterade the world has served up to our day-drinking-to-cope asses. We cannot afford to hate each other right now.

The girl world is the strongest of the worlds; the only way they can win - at literally anything - is dividing us. And holy shit, have they succeeded in that. Media, men, fashion, business, motherhood, social class, education, hairstyle - the number of shitty little fucking ways they have destroyed our unity, our strength, our ability to shine, to protect our children, to protect ourselves and our futures is barbaric.

And that. is. super. lame.

But, I mean, barbaric times for barbaric measures. I've been meaning to pencil in a mutiny for a while, so I guess, that's now.

#indigogirls

Thanks for listening. <3 This one goes out to another voracious reader, a media sweetheart turned "suicide slut," a social scholar, political reformer, and giver of zero fucks what she went down in history as: Norma Jean Baker, who submerged herself into a hellish land of Hollywood glamour and FBI suspicion, who wore the white dress and dove in, head first, as a sex icon, as Marilyn Fucking Monroe. And nailed it. Let's all the spend the week channeling all of the Marilyn vibes in our life, shall we?

Cat