AND LOOOONG... thanks in advance to anyone who has the patience to read all of this (please be safe!)

How did you once think about life, fairness, goodness, men, women? How has being raped changed these beliefs?

As a little girl

I don’t feel like I had formed an opinion on life, life was pretty good when I was really young. I thought of life as going to school then working, getting married and having kids. But I really hadn’t examined it much more than that.

I was a really big believer that life was at least supposed to be fair. I realized that sometimes, actually, often, it was far from fair, but I felt like, if I was good, good things would happen to me and if I was bad bad things would happen to me. I thought the way all the kid’s books and children’s movies showed life. The “good” person got what they wanted and the “bad” person did not. I believed the “bad person” would end up in jail, or having bad things happen to them in the end and so long as I was a “good person” nothing bad would happen to me.

I thought things like “I was quiet and waited my turn, why doesn’t that mean I get what I’m asking for? That’s not fair, I was good, and why does the person who cut in line to ask get what they want?” I actually remember a particular experience with this when I was 5 quite clearly. I was so angry and couldn’t for the life of me understand why if I were being quiet and good my kindergarten teacher wouldn’t give me what I wanted (a pair of scissors)

When I was a little girl goodness was the be all end all, I wanted to please SO badly. I wanted to do everything exactly right and would beat on myself if I made even the tiniest mistake. I would take even joking criticism to heart. I had “good” and “perfect” mixed up very early on. I equated “good” with quiet, polite, not making waves, being agreeable, allowing myself to be last to those who made more noise.

I thought of men as the ones who went to work and financially took care of the family, that being modeled from my father. But I also idealized men as protective, strong, broad shouldered warriors who defended the “good girl” who probably came from movies and TV.

I thought of women as small, demure, quiet nurturers, domestic by nature modeled both by my mother and by movies.

When I think about it, Beauty and the Beat, which was not even a movie I watched much as a kid, would be a pretty good model for how I saw the world. Beauty, the small, beautiful, caretaker of her father, sweet in temperament, willing to take her father’s place as a prisoner. I forget the guy who was perusing her’s name, large, broad shouldered man. At the end all the “good people” have their curse lifted, the girl falls in love with the right man, because they were actually good people and deserve it.


Once I had been to the hospital

Even before I had gone to the hospital but certainly afterward, I had decided that life was bullshit. You did what you had to do, you looked out for yourself, and then you died. No one was there for me, and I was to fend for myself to make it through, or, better still, die.

I couldn’t understand how my views on fairness, the center of everything I had believed, had been so horribly ripped away. I had been good damn it. I didn’t hurt anyone but myself, I hurt my OWN stinking wrists. I didn’t hurt my parents for not paying attention to me, I didn’t yell, I didn’t do anything mean to anyone. I didn’t even ask for love and they put me away and took away all my rights as a human. I couldn’t go outside, I ate when they said, I saw my family when they said, I went to my room when they said. I had to tell them I needed to go to the bathroom so they could unlock the door. I couldn’t see my friends, I was in complete isolation and I hadn’t done anything wrong! Fairness was the center of everything I believed, if I was good and bad things kept happening to me, if the world is not fair, what is the world about anyway?

I thought maybe I had messed up somewhere in being good. I thought it was because my grades in school were too low, because I lied to my friends because I didn’t think they like me if they really knew me. I tried to be even better, but I couldn’t. Every time I tried to be even more good, it would backfire, I’d wear myself out trying to be good and at best do OK and it would hurt me so badly. I couldn’t understand how I wasn’t perceived as good, I kept trying, and kept getting locked away. If I was really that bad, I was sure I was better off dead, but every time I tried to do that I’d fail, which made me feel I was too bad even to die, I was just needing to be taught the lesson of being institutionalized for my entire adolescence (which I was more or less from 12-16)

I still thought men were supposed to be protectors, but I thought I was too bad to deserve them.

I still thought women were supposed to be comforts, but my own mom would walk away from me, leaving me in the hospital no matter how hard I cried. Even my own mother didn’t want to comfort me. My own dad didn’t want to protect me from having medications shoved down my throat.

After Nepfty

I numbed to life after Nepfty. I was too sad, had too many things going on, that intitally, it just didn’t matter, I suppressed the rape so deep. I didn’t even feel alive, so there was nothing to have an opinion on really. I honestly just felt the deep sadness that actually seems to mimic being dead. I went completely apathetic to whether I lived or not.

Fairness was reinforced by Nepfty raping me. I had fought SO hard to come off the medications that caused me to loose the weight that caused me to have this beautiful figure that caught Nepfty’s eye. But he raped me. I can’t even be good enough to have a man love me when I’m beautiful, which I guess on some level I still had “goodness” mixed up with being that ideal of Belle from Beauty and the Beast. I was skinny, I had achieved THAT part of goodness, I had gone to high school, and college, I had worked, and now I had this pretty body, and I was STILL not good enough. It was not fair, I had tried SO hard.

I still wanted to be good enough, still felt like if I could just be good… but I was a mess and couldn’t be good. And that was why everything went completely to hell, no matter what, I couldn’t get my brain to function correctly, I couldn’t be good no matter how hard I tried to. I still wanted to be perfect.

Now men were officially scary. I STILL believed that they were supposed to be protectors, but I didn’t know which ones were and which ones were bad, they could change, they were potential jeckel and hydes. I wanted one around me who I trusted at all times, it was the only way I could feel safe, well, sort of, I didn’t feel safe anywhere. I felt better. I felt in control so long as a trusted male was present.

Females were still comforters but incapable of comforting me because I was no longer female. I was rejected from being a female. Or rather, I was a low form of female. In my head, I thought I had been raped more than once (I was having problems at the time) so now I was a slut, who didn’t deserve comfort, and women had rejected because no one wants the comfort of a slut.

Now

I know everyone’s life takes different paths, but I still want the one that I wanted as a little girl. I still long for the perfect job, the perfect husband, the perfect family (OK, not perfect perfect, but one that I can be proud of and one that makes me feel warm inside)

I want life to be fair but I know it’s not. I realize that things that happened to me were truly unfair, but not a reflection on me but a horrible snowball of events in the case of my childhood, and a really cruel, awful man in the case of Nepfty.

I still get goodness and perfectionism mixed up. I’m still working to break free of the “don’t rock the boat” be the attractive, demure, sweet angel all the time definition of goodness. Working on knowing that at my core I’m a good person, and being who I am is to be good.

Men are protectors. Perhaps I’ve been brainwashed but that’s what I think. I also realize they are human and don’t necessarily realize my deep desire for protection. I struggle with that as it feels hard to protect myself sometimes. I’ve come to mostly trust men again although at times my nervousness goes up and they just don’t make me feel comfortable.

Women are nurturers although I now have a much stronger sense of who a woman can be. That they can be strong and confident and independent and loving sweet and thoughtful all at the same time. Although my mom is far from loving sweet and thoughtful, watching her divorce my dad and stand on her own, did help me break out of my view of male breadwinner defender of things etc. to see that women are just as capable that way. Living on my own did that as well.

So, coming along, still have a ways to go though… thoughts from my teenager years and post-Nepfty (not to mention the other times I was raped that I will address later) die hard, but I’m trying. I know I don’t have to be “Belle” from Beauty and the Beast or some sort of spin off to fit some Disney-inspired ideal, my, for lack of better terms “who do I want to be when I grow up” is still forming, but has changed