4:41pm July 29, 2014

Heh, wow.

When I wrote that post about River Tam reminding me of me as a teenager, someone who actually knew me as a teenager wrote me privately to say basically, “yep, she reminds me of you too.”

I found her really painful in some ways to watch, because she reminds me so much of some really bad times in my life, and myself at my most confused and disoriented. And yet I also found her beautiful to watch, because she had this potential in her that I couldn’t see in myself at the time, but I can see in my past self now.

Oh and in response to the person who talked about the way abuse survivors are pressured to always recover, and recover quickly, I definitely don’t intend to add to that pressure in any way. I don’t think anyone totally recovers from abuse, and if they think they have, then they’re probably not very self-aware. But I do think it’s possible to not be constantly tormented by it – for some people anyway.

Long rambling post follows.

I wish that I knew how to describe how I got to the place I am now, because… I’m not totally happy, but I used to be minute-to-minute suicidal, and that’s totally gone. The only suicidal thoughts I’ve had in years have been when my pain level gets over 9, and that’s different from ©PTSD stuff. And I wish I could somehow draw a map for how to get from there to here, because people deserve to be who they are, people deserve to be happy with who they are, people deserve to not constantly be tormented by something that isn’t even their fault.

But nobody should be pressured to recover for the sake of making other people more comfortable for them.

When I talk about being a ‘damaged person’, I mean it as a role, almost. Like I’m still damaged in a technical sense, but I’m no longer 'the damaged one’ in all my interactions with people. Someone once confessed to me – and I was furious with her – that her entire online friendship with me was because she saw me as a 'broken baby bird’. She became angry with me when she couldn’t fix me by being superficially nice to me on an IRC channel. She threw me off the IRC channel when I confessed to suicidal thoughts, telling me that everyone has problems but nobody should talk about them, and that I shouldn’t ever talk about things like that except to a psychiatrist. And then she did the thing where she said “All my friends warned me about befriending you, but I always have to pick up broken baby birds…” and she could not understand my rage at that point.

And that’s what I mean about being the 'damaged person’. I mean always being the 'broken baby bird’ in people’s eyes. Never just being a human being. Always being 'broken’ and 'damaged’ – not in the sense of having damage happen to me but in the sense of a role that I was forced into whenever I interacted with anyone at all. And for whatever reason that no longer happens to me. I’m still damaged by abuse, nobody who’s ever been abused can avoid that. But I’m not the 'damaged person’ anymore. And I’m glad because being forced into that role in every interaction with everyone I knew sucked donkey balls. Especially because it meant becoming a pawn in a lot of people’s rescue fantasies, and then getting thrown away angrily when I couldn’t be easily rescued.

Oh one thing that really raised my hackles for awhile was seeing people romanticize River’s situation. And like… I am not one of those people who sees people “romanticizing mental illness” under every rock. I’m not talking about… any of what people usually mean when they say that. I’m talking about people who saw her pain as some kind of tragic beauty, and then tried to emulate it in their own lives. I saw people doing that a long time before I ever saw the show, and it made me feel really weird when I actually did see the show and instantly identified, strongly, with her character. And then I got pissed off, because I’d only ever seen her through the eyes of people blogging about her in that context, and seeing her for real on the show was a very different thing. I’d assumed that the show itself had presented her in that light, and it hadn’t. It was just people doing that to her, and… there’s no tragic beauty in that kind of suffering. There is plenty of beauty in who she actually is, but not in her suffering. And seeking to emulate it… it just rubs me the wrong way. I don’t know if I can even explain what I mean by all this, it’s the same people I’ve known who sort of worship self-pity. (By which I don’t mean people who are depressed or mentally ill, and I don’t mean people who are stuck in self-pity and wish they could get out but can’t, I’m talking about a very narrow, specific group of people. If anyone thinks I’m talking about them and freaks out – I’m almost undoubtedly not. The problem with talking about these things is that people who aren’t doing the thing, freak out and think you’re talking about them and that they might be doing something wrong, and the people who are doing the thing, don’t even notice. So I usually don’t talk about things like this, for fear of unnecessarily freaking people out.)

Anyway.

I just wanted to clarify what I meant by 'damaged person’, I meant… a social role, not the words literally 'damaged’ + 'person’. I meant someone that everyone sees as a broken baby bird to either be stepped on or rescued but never respected or treated as an equal.

At one point I was a 'damaged person’ in my interactions with pretty much everyone, and now I’m pretty much never a 'damaged person’. The fact that I’ve been permanently damaged by abuse doesn’t mean I’m still put into that social role.

At the same time, even though I think that to some degree, damage from abuse is permanent, I don’t like the fatalism that I sometimes hear in regards to this. Especially with regards to any kind of sexual abuse. A lot of people think they’re helping or supporting abuse victims when they say something like “If you were raped or molested, it destroys you for life.” Which can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, when believed by the abuse victim. (And don’t get me started on how 'victim’ is supposedly a bad thing. 'Victim’ just means you’ve been harmed by someone, it doesn’t mean anything about your personality.) Anyway, sometimes sexual abuse (or any other form of abuse, because unlike a lot of people I don’t believe sexual abuse is automatically the worst kind) does result in someone never being happy again, and sometimes it doesn’t, but you can’t tell who is going to end up which way, not even if someone’s been miserable for over a decade because of it. I was molested from the ages of 11-15, and I think I stopped being constantly miserable when I was 27ish. Somewhere around there. It wasn’t instant, so that’s a vague number. I just one day realized that I wasn’t miserable anymore.

And I think there are things that can make a person more likely, or less likely, to get stuck in a state of misery. (Unfortunately, therapy, and ideas that originate from therapists and support groups, can sometimes make people more likely to get stuck that way. Other times it has the opposite effect. Depends on who does it and how they do it and who they’re doing it with.) But I don’t think there’s ever a guarantee one way or the other, and I don’t think that it’s someone’s fault if they stay miserable. (Although sometimes people’s actions can contribute to their own misery, but that’s different than it being their fault.)

So, yeah, I think we basically agree, but we’re definitely at different places in our life when it comes to our abuse history. And that’s fine. Not everyone has to be happy, not everyone has to recover, not everyone even has to have happiness or recovery as a major goal in their life.

(In fact, I think it’s often more important to concentrate on making other people happy, than to concentrate on your own happiness – to an extent. Sometimes chasing happiness becomes a sort of selfish hedonism that makes people ignore the needs of other people. I saw a lot of that among new agers I knew when I lived in California. They’d claim to be all spiritual, and then they wouldn’t lift a finger to help another person in need, but they were always, always into “self-improvement”. Eurrgh. They needed improving, all right, but not the way they meant it.)

Anyway, at this point I’m just rambling. And I’ve probably said a lot of stuff that could be misconstrued, but… hopefully it made enough sense that this doesn’t happen. I definitely found the “recovery” thing one of the most distasteful elements of the psychiatric ex-patient movement – like everything was about “everyone can and should recover from mental illness” and there was a lot of denial about how some people can’t recover, and how that's okay, and doesn’t mean something horrible about them as a person, and doesn’t mean they aren’t trying, and doesn’t mean they just haven’t tried the right thing, and etc.

I’d far rather people be accepted as they are now. Regardless of whether they ever become who other people want them to be, regardless of whether they 'recover’, regardless of any of that. (And actually a lot of people would be a lot less miserable if that were true.) People aren’t their potential for a certain future, people are who they are. And people can be amazing and beautiful and great even if they’re also miserable and damaged and psychiatrically disabled. And I wish more people could see that, rather than focusing only on “can we 'recover’ them?” (Or, as one insurance company actually put it when it comes to me at the age of 15, whether I was “unsalvageable” or not. They literally said that. I still have the tape of the phone call, somewhere. Who the hell says that about a kid? Or about anyone?)