PTSD

The darkness was healing. Not being able to see anything around me, being able to enter a state of imaginary beings and happy thoughts. Unicorns and rainbows, future goals and thrilling travels. As I’d get lost in my imaginary world, reality would creep in when I’d snap back by a pull or a tug or the haunting scent of drugs I despise till this day. An eight year old child. Who goes through that? I’d often find myself wondering.

See, during the day it was cartoons and cereal in the front living room of what I never realized was a run down neighborhood filled with drug dealers and addicts and the occasional mom and pop grandparents who were also raised there. As a child I thought this was how people lived, I knew no better. I saw no better. My parents weren’t the type to let us in on what the world was really like. “Guys don’t lie”, I remember telling a teacher once. Boy, was I in for a rude awakening!

As night would fall, grandparents in bed, no adults in sight… He’d catch me coming out of the bathroom. In the darkness where I could lose myself in an imaginary world, it’s all the positivity I had in those moments. The kisses, the filthy touches and my mind racing, wishing an adult would rush in and save me. When no one ever did he started to convince me this was normal. This is just what life was and what I was viewed as, a piece of meat good for nothing better than to be touched in ways I couldn’t comprehend. I was a child! He was years older and made to believe these things were okay to do within the family. Made to believe that if you find someone attractive you do as you please with that person and for the women, you don’t say no.

I didn’t learn the word No until fairly recently. Twenty-One years later, here you are reading my pain. Perhaps trying to help yourself through your own.

I get it, I’ve been there. I still go back just about every night……

The floor creaking as I’m trying to sneak out of the bathroom unseen, unnoticed. The dark tones that over-laid the shadows from the appliances as my eyes would try to adjust and run back to my safe haven, the couch and a blankie in front of my grandparents room.

Caught! Yet again! No! I can’t get out! I can’t scream, my body is frozen, I can’t move!

I feel his hands touch mine, the fright sets in. “Go somewhere else,” I’d tell myself. “Think of the ponies you’ll be riding one day.” “Imagine yourself with loving parents that’ll one day keep you safe, this isn’t happening!” My mind wouldn’t stop until it was over. Trying not to gag on the scent of the drugs he’d been doing just moments before.

Here I find myself years later again at Twelve with something like Stockholm syndrome for this same individual. As I continue to write my stomach twists in knots and I become sick with disgust. Those who knew brushed it off as something normal. Called me a liar the day I finally grasped a bit of sense to speak up. I was blamed, told that I was the one looking for this treatment.

See what people fail to realize is that sometimes a woman doesn’t know how to speak up because she is automatically assumed to cry wolf. Women are automatically blamed and viewed as the simple excused harlots they later paint us out to be.

Who are they to tell us what we feel, what our realities are? What they view isn’t always what the situation is. People tend to obsess over their own insecurities; they fail to see what is right in front of them. The stray cat dying of hunger, The homeless man searching for warmth on a cold winter night, the innocent child living in the same home getting molested every chance the pervert could get his grimy time with. The things that must have happened to this same pervert because no one else was watching him either. No one else was concerned with how their neighbor is coping with their pain. My advice, for those who’d like to receive it. Take time to ask the child down the hall if they’re okay. Parents take time to realize what you do could result in your children’s future PTSD with haunting memorable scents. We can all learn from our pain and that of others. We can grow and learn to heal.