I’ve discovered a new podcast in the iTunes store called “The Mental Illness Happy Hour.” If you go to the web site, you can find all sorts of surveys, which Paul will usually read anonymously on the air. After listening to the show for a few months, I went to the web site and looked at the survey section. I chose the one on shame.

One of the questions was “have you ever been a victim of sexual abuse?” One of the answers was “some stuff happened but I don’t know if it counts.” This is absolutely the crux of the problem that I’m trying to work out. What really happened? What was I supposed to feel that I didn’t? What was I supposed to discard that I didn’t?

I can start with the axiom that she never touched me intentionally. That part I know for sure… however, it is also the *only* thing I know for sure… which, as I’ve said, was brutal because at least if I was being sexually abused, I would have known it was wrong. In this situation, there is so much grey area that it’s the main reason it’s been turning over in my head for as long as I can remember. I have said this before and I will say it again that I have very few memories of my life before she came into it, especially as I get older and my childhood fades away.

The two memories I have of her touching me unintentionally are things that she would never remember in a million years.

We were standing next to each other, and I swear to God I don’t remember how it happened, but she accidentally kneed me in the clit and I had never experienced that kind of fire. I remember it hurt, but I also remember wishing she would do it again… accidentally, of course.

The next time, we were both in a USO show and I think there was fake snow falling. She was trying to brush off my military uniform *in the middle of the performance.* I am hoping that there was fake snow on my ass, because I remember thinking that it was taking a long time to get it off… and then it was over and it wasn’t long enough.

Keep in mind that in both of these experiences, I have already read the college journal that she gave me on my 14th birthday, she is regularly telling me everything going on in her life, age-appropriate or not, and doesn’t seem to understand that if she wants me to leave her alone, she’s not doing a very good job of saying it out loud.

I am trying my dead-level best to keep up with her, but it’s difficult. My mom knew there was something up and banned all contact between us. We went underground and continued the friendship despite what my parents wanted… and I can’t even really say “we” because as the adult, what right did she think she had to cross my parents like that?

The flip side of the story is that she knew I was coming out, knew I would need her. I thought it was the better and safe thing to do to distance myself from my parents… which led me further down the path of being manipulated rather than away from it. Once we were beyond my parents’ control, we could talk about anything and everything.

I did need her, desperately, which is why the grey area is so tremendously large… and I would like to believe that she needed me, too, although I doubt she would put it that way. When we met, her life was in as much upheaval as mine, just in different ways due to our ages. She’d just graduated from college, about to turn 24. I had just graduated from sixth grade, about to turn 13. My life centered around coming out. Her life centered around an abusive alcoholic/weed dealer that I begrudgingly called her girlfriend.

I got to be a part of all of those discussions, and I would wrestle as a 14-year-old over whether she was going to be arrested in connection with her girlfriend, whether she would ever find the strength to get out of that relationship, and whether she would ever see that the one who had the best intentions toward her got the least in return.

I remember that I was standing in line to turn in my band uniform at Clements when I got out the card I’d just received. It was yellow, with gold ink on the inside, which made her handwriting all the more “unique.” The one thing I could read for sure is that she’d left her wife. I instantly regretted opening it at that time because I was just trying to speed up the wait. I was crying and blowing snot all over everywhere. It was the least attractive I think I’ve ever been. My heart was so full I couldn’t help it. The tears of relief started coming and wouldn’t stop. I fell into my best friend’s arms since my abuser was now four hours away. I was just so happy that her life could begin again, and still sad that I hadn’t been there to see it in person. Seriously. I would have enjoyed the chance to throw things and spit in her face, like a statistically crazy lesbian does when someone’s hurt the one they love. It was the best moment, I was so happy and smiley, and I couldn’t share it with her. I had to settle for having it with someone else. I was so in love at that moment, because she’d absolutely fulfilled my hopes and dreams and happiness for her. Her victory felt like one for me, too, because I didn’t have to worry about the drug dealer anymore. I also didn’t care how she felt about me. I knew that even if there had been some shenanigans in our past, that didn’t mean I was all “this is my chance.” It was just a bit of flirtation from someone who wouldn’t hurt me, not an expectation that just because I wanted to be with her was a reason for her to fall in love with me. It doesn’t work that way.

The only question I’ve ever had is how the fuck she could unintentionally knee me in the clit – when we were both standing up? How, given the present laws of physics, could that happen? How could it, like, be a real possibility that she had no idea what she was doing? It’s the same thing with the journal. How could she not have known that giving me a journal that included her college sex life would turn me on? Those two questions have been torturing me in my dreams since they happened, always leaning toward nothing being intentional. I was mature enough for this. I could handle this. It was normal.

But I don’t know if it counts.

Yesterday Christine (my priest) preached on the parable of the wheat and the weeds, and the rest of the congregation melted. Well, that’s a bit overstating it, but what I mean is that it felt like everyone else in the room was far away and only Christine’s voice was coming through… like, Christine is preaching in real time but the rest of the scene is in slo-mo. That’s because her sermon preached to the part of me that wrote “Slash and Burn.” In it, I described what it was like to be in an abusive relationship as a child with an adult, and when  that I discovered that truth, at first I wanted to slash and burn all the parts of me that reminded me of her… just like trying to weed a wheat field and setting everything on fire. The question in the pericope is, “how do you get the weeds out of the field without destroying the wheat?” The answer is “you don’t.”

I have gotten many, many, many laughs to myself today as I’ve thought, “so is it wrong to call my abuser my weed?  That way, at least I could fit her into a Zip-loc. Right now we’ve moved from a four-bedroom house in my head to roughly a 1 BR with Den. I’m not done healing, and I won’t for a very long time. That’s the thing with long relationships. The longer they are, the harder they are to get out of your system. We were in each other’s lives for something like a quarter of a century. I’m doing now what I should have done a long time ago, which is trying to resolve those issues so that I am not suckered into giving myself away so easily. She was my first love, and by the way, it still feels weird to call her that even though it’s true.

However, clinically, it makes a lot of sense. For my readers that actually know us, I didn’t meet the woman you did. I met the abused kid, and I tried to comfort and console that abused kid and I ended up falling in love with her over it. I didn’t fall in love with her because of some crazy childhood crush where there was no reciprocity. We became very close in a relatively short period of time and within three years or so of comforting the abused kid in her, I realized that all I wanted was to protect that kid for the rest of my life. My intentions were pure because I was so incredibly young. As she grew, she couldn’t relate to me as an equal anymore because her inner child grew up and I was still, well, I don’t know. Sixteen? Seventeen?

Maybe I’ve been looking at this situation the wrong way. Maybe because I was so much older emotionally than she was when we first met, she’s trying to live up to my standards when I’ve constantly been trying to live up to hers. It’s a nice thought, anyway. It comforts me to think that I might be right, because since I know for sure that I would burn up trying to get rid of our memories, I have to make peace with them.

Amen.

 

Here I sit on a Saturday afternoon, cozy in bed as I type this. Charlie, my sister’s dog that stays with us frequently, is curled up at the end. Enya is playing in my headphones in an attempt to put myself in a writing mood. Dana is mowing the lawn, and it is also going on in the background as I type antiphonally.

Using a music term brought be back around to my voice lesson, and how grateful I am for them. The voice that I thought I’d lost has been found… and now that I see my teacher once a week, I have the chance to perform some amazing repertory that I previously thought “unpossible.” In fact, when I was talking to him about what to sing for church, he said, “How do you do with Bach?” I could only quote another singer, which at this moment I cannot remember but is in the pantheon of singers that I have met between church music and my sister being in the children’s chorus at Houston Grand Opera, but I digress. The singer said, “not well. It shows all my flaws with breath control.” It is so absolutely, completely true that I could not put it any other way. Melismas that go on for three pages are not my idea of a good time.

I will sing Bach, eventually. I will… and none of that wimpy “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” crap. I’m talking Et Resurrexit, people. I’ve done it once before, with Trinity Cathedral choir in Portland, but it was truly a half-ass kind of fumbling in the dark. I figured if I got 40-50% of the notes right, I could hide behind the real sopranos.

My whole life, I’ve thought of myself as “the velveteen soprano,” because when my sister and my abuser were both in my life at the same time, I couldn’t have wanted it more and I couldn’t do anything about it. The attention was on my sister as a singer and me as a trumpet player. I chose trumpet in the sixth grade, and once you’re on the track, it’s moving without a place to unload.

There was one time in the 11th grade where I made varsity choir and varsity band in the same year (and was the first person in the history of Clements High School to do so… or, at least, that’s what Mrs. Buehler told me and I’m going to believe her because it strokes my fledgling little soprano heart.

Anyway, it comes time to try out for All-District, and I make both of them. Turns out, All-Region tryouts for band and choir were on the same day, and thus ended my academic singing career. The All-Region contest was actually for marching band, and we came in 7th. Maybe I should have gone with the choir.

I had a God moment during Jeopardy!, and for once I am not talking about when I tell Dana that I am the Jeopardy! GOD because I got a really obscure question right and she has no friggin’ clue how I managed to pull it out of my ass. I mean I had a real God moment, the kind that makes you pick up your notebook and jot it down so your ADD doesn’t stop you from really analyzing it later. It’s later. The category was “Amen,” meaning that all the questions were words containing the letters a-m-e-n in order. The 100-watt bulb that went off in my head was due to the question, “what is sacrament?”

According to Wikipedia, the catechism included in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer defines a sacrament as “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us, ordained by Christ himself, as a means whereby we receive the same, and a pledge to assure us thereof.” Those are very fancy words, but what do they actually mean?

I have a different take on communion than most Anglicans/Episcopalians because I grew up in the Methodist church, where we practiced open communion. In the Anglican/Episcopal church, it is a Rite to be able to come to the table- you are prepared for it and the chair is pulled out. In open communion, it doesn’t matter what you look like, how you’re dressed, if the curlers are on or off. It doesn’t even matter what age you are. When you go to your family’s house, you eat.

Yvette Flunder has a great sermon about it. We’re all family, and we all show up for this meal with each other once a week. The part that Dr. Flunder leaves out that I am adding is a new take on what miracle actually occurs- you get food anyway.

You get food anyway.

Years before I started dating Dana, I was dating a woman in my church that I really liked, but it was a disaster of an idea from the start. We were just too involved with ourselves to care. We broke up, and the fallout was nuclear in its blast radius. That Sunday, I came to church with the clothes I’d been wearing from the night before, hadn’t brushed my teeth, and had clearly had a very good (or very bad) night. I was a walking accident, and to add insult to injury, I was also crying. I got in line for communion and went to the rail.

I was so sad that if there had been an altar, I probably would have put my head on it… and when my minister reached me, she saw my pain, my distress, my utter disarray… and she gave me food, anyway. The miracle of communion is that everyone who comes to the table is fed, regardless of anything that might divide them. The example is confessional, but our stories are the same.

We are all fallible and irreplaceably human and all have those moments where if the grace of God was placed directly on our tongue we’d have trouble realizing it was RIGHT THERE! RIGHT THERE! WE ARE TOUCHING IT- WE ARE SO CLOSE! What keeps us all from breaking the barrier between “almost” and “really” is our part of the deal- the one where we openly, freely accept God’s grace. In fact, if we’re not open to it, we won’t even accept grace from ourselves, much less God. Receiving grace is opening yourself to the possibilities of the universe and simply saying, “let it be so.”

sacrAMENt

It is so hard to go to work this morning, when what I really want to do is drive over to Wi-phi’s house and smell his hair. Seriously, that could be the end of the post right there. It’s a mixture of baby shampoo and little boy that lingers in my nose long after I’ve left him.

He’s just turned one, so he’s changing every single day and what I’ve noticed is that I don’t have to do anything with him. He’s an explorer in his own right. He doesn’t want help with anything unless he’s in over his head, and even then, he only wants help with what he can’t manage. Heaven forbid if I step in a moment too soon.I have learned a lot about myself in those moments. I am much more patient than I’ve ever been with anyone. Of course he can do it himself! Of course he can! All I have to do is wait. He doesn’t run on my time clock. What I’ve missed in the past is that overwhelming sense of patience needed to let a toddler put on his own shoes, feed himself, etc.On Monday, he took a huge box of blocks and dumped them onto the floor. In that moment, I taught him how to sit there and hand me his blocks so that “we” could clean up his room and IT WORKED.It is so much fun learning that Wi-Phi is his own man already. In fact, now that we’ve conquered pear yogurt, I think we’re ready to take over the world.

Really? No, not really. I’ve just sat down several times to write today, and can’t think of a title. So I just wrote down the first movie I saw when I turned on Netflix. I thought it made a better title than Tesla: Master of Lightning… but maybe not. Please advise.

Today is the last day of my staycation, and last night was weird. I fell asleep on the couch around 7:00 and woke up at 2:00, wide awake. I’m recovering from not sleeping well, which is not what I wanted to do but apparently what my body says I need. I’m happy to have the chance to just relax while the house is empty and I get to do my own thing.

However, I can’t stay away from Dana and Wi-Phi too long, because I don’t want to waste a day that I could have seen him and didn’t. I realized what a miracle he was all over again when we were teasing my sister about being so overprotective of him. She said, “since we had to wait six months to find out if our kid was going to die, we’re very overprotective.” I will never tease her ever again. Not fucking ever. Even though there were two other people there teasing her with me, I singled myself out  because we had to have a little discussion. I know better than that. I was foolish to forget. I punished myself appropriately and then treated myself to a diet root beer because I was so good while I was being scolded.

For those of you just joining us, that was a hard time for both Wi-Phi and me. Wi-Phi was born with the major valves of his heart reversed, and was going to have to have surgery either in utero or minutes after delivery. He didn’t, but he could have died on the table.

The week before, my abuser said that she’d come to therapy so that we could resolve some of our issues. I told her that we were very emotionally crispy because of the baby and didn’t even want to interact with her if she was just going to leave again.

Things were looking up, and then while Wi-Phi was on the table, she sent me a note that said we were beyond reconciliation… and fortunately, it was just our relationship that died instead of Wi-Phi. I tend to think that I got the better end of the deal.

Zerberting his neck is way easier than trying to zerbert hers.

Our “staycation” has taken a turn for the worse. We’ve missed out on doing local vacation-type things because Dana’s allergy to yellow food dye has blossomed nicely. She is miserable, and rightfully so. I’m doing everything in my power to stay by her side and keep her comfortable. Translation: I am also very into watching Netflix on the couch. While this vacation has turned out differently than I’d expected, turning my brain off and sleeping as much as possible while I can is just what I didn’t know I needed. So, in a roundabout way, thanks to my honey for getting a freak show of a rash to teach me the moral of that story.

I know what her eyebrows are going to look like when she reads that.

That sentence will make her laugh, which is my favorite thing on God’s green earth. Dana’s laugh, if you’ve never heard it, is the kind that lingers in your memory because you can’t remember the last time you heard that much joy coming out of one person. Laughs envelop Dana like water. When I hear Dana laugh, everything else feels far and away… which is the small vacation I get to take for a few hours each day when I get home and she is there.

People have asked me why I don’t write more about Dana, and my answer is always the same- I don’t talk about her in therapy, either, because I never have any problems with her that I need to think about in long form. I don’t need to mull anything over in my mind with or about her, because we are on the same page; we are two very different sides of one gorgeous coin.

If we are struggling with a particular issue, it’s generally that we both have the same questions and concerns, rather than different ones. I don’t really have the ability to compare and contrast how we feel about things, because they are so similar that it comes across well in conversation, but not necessarily on paper.

I mean that in the best of ways, because Dana and I have been married for so long that our stories are tennis matches. We both know our lines. We love being funny together, and we each know that we’re the perfect person for the other, flaws and all.

In short, I don’t write about Dana because I write to research myself, and the part of myself that belongs to her is all. figured. out.

Dana has to be at Wi-Phi’s house around 6:45, and I don’t have to be at work until 9. I’ve started waking up with her, though, so that I’m ready and dressed with a couple of hours to kill. That way, when I get to work, I’ve already had time to drink coffee and really wake up. Perhaps write a bit to you. It’s perfect, and I’m glad I insisted on setting up my day this way.

It really took being moved to graveyard shift to clearly see how badly life needs structure to function. Rubbing against the grain of your circadian rhythm destroys homeostasis. I am so grateful for our global economy, because in my own case, when the UK office opens, no one in our office will have to work graveyard anymore. It is a relief to my mind to know that the probability of ever having to go on nights again is dwindling sharply.

Since I didn’t take a vacation after my night shift was over, I’m working today and then off until Tuesday just for the hell of it. I really want to go to some fun Houston things, like Space Center Houston, the Butterfly Center, and all the museums. The choir is off for the summer, so we may or may not go to church. For this week, I want to shake up my routine so that I’m thankful for when it returns.

Labor laws aside, as well as my own sanity, sometimes I wish I didn’t have days off. As an ADD person, routine is critical to my survival. Interrupting it for two days sometimes creates more problems than it solves. I try to be diligent about waking up at the same time, taking my medicine at the same time, etc. but still there are times when I feel a quiet unrest because something is missing.

It also says a lot about the work I do that I like the routine so much. I look forward to getting up every morning, and I like how the metrics from the day before come in my e-mail so I have a constant running tally of how I’m doing and upward trends get me verklempt. It’s like getting your report card every morning with a star on it if you do it right. 🙂

Remember that feeling? Remember that feeling of getting back a paper with an A on it? Remember when you got back that paper with an A on it and you didn’t know how in the hell you got it? To me, those were the most fun, because it usually meant that I’d made up a bunch of educated bullshit at 3 AM and they’d bought it.

In the case of my job, though, that kind of trick wouldn’t work, because numbers don’t lie. Numbers put progress (or not) right up in my face- 8×10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back. Some people wouldn’t like it, but I do. I’ve always been the type person who takes the emotional temperature of a relationship every five minutes, and now I can do it without stalking people for information. Thanks, fourth grade graph-reading skills!

As I’m thinking about this topic, it reminds me of something my dad and my sister used to do every morning as she was getting out of the car. This story takes a little setup.

When I was in sixth grade, our parsonage burned to the ground and we lost everything. Some jackass fireman said in front of my sister that the fire started in the attic above her room, and that if she’d been sleeping she’d have been killed… so she didn’t sleep soundly through the night for like, two years after that. She also went through such anxiety that she didn’t want to go to school, so my dad came up with a solution. He came up with a ritual when he dropped her off that they’d say, “lucky day. Gonna getta E today. Wave to me.” At Lindsay’s school, E was the highest you could get (in conduct, anyway). He also gave her a slap bracelet (tight) that she used as a talisman to remember dad was with her in spirit that day.

I get that feeling every morning when I wake up. I’m gonna getta E today.

As an aside, last Christmas I got my sister a silver and pink beaded bracelet at our church bazaar. When she put it on, she said, “this is my new slap bracelet.”

I didn’t know that many tears and that much snot could come out at once, but it was the happiest cry I’ve ever had.

 

My life feels so good right now in a “better than sex, drugs, and Rock & Roll” kind of way. I am elated that Dana and I get a chance to be a part of Wi-phi’s life on such a significant scale. I am overjoyed to have a great job 15 minutes from my house so that I never get caught in traffic, ever, even during rush time. It is mind-blowing to me that I can come home for lunch every day, and take a real break from the cacophony that is my office.

I have the life that makes me want to do more,  be more, accomplish more. It’s a new beginning, because I’m not afraid to engage anymore. I can stand toe to toe with everyone I meet, because I had the realization that I had so many gifts in terms of taking care of people and I was using them on everyone but me…. so they were working…. on everyone but me.

It’s another thing my father taught me. When you live with a pastor, you watch them interact with people every single day, and it teaches you to move in the world with compassion if you let it. I learned the very definition of soft power, particularly after I read a great book called Jesus CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership. It was then that I was able to put together the types of social interaction I’d watched my whole life. Soft power has a way of encouraging people to be who they need to be to get things done, rather than berating them into productivity. I’ve extrapolated that into every area of my life. I try to build up relationships instead of tearing them down.

I try.

I am incredibly human, after all, and I make mistakes all the time. The difference is that now my interactions with myself are building me up, as well. I treat myself with kindness and inspire myself to be better than I thought I could be. It’s uplifting for all of that power and care is coming from me, to me. Light is radiating from the inside.

I am now a sun after spending so much of my life as a moon. Moons are beautiful, intensely so… but if the sun turns, how well do they fare wandering in the dark? They’re there… will always be there… but invisible to the naked eye.

Dear Wi-Phi,

As of this writing, I have 36 years under my belt. You have one. We’re both in a better place than we were last year. I was discovering some truths about myself that I didn’t want to face, and you were being evicted from your apartment. Together, we’ve grown. We’ve laughed. We’ll both look back on this year and realize how important it was to our development.

Yesterday, I got to have lunch with you and my whole body smiled. I came home and you were curled up with Dana on the couch, a living Norman Rockwell moment of overwhelming emotion. You’d gotten a haircut since the last time I’d seen you, and your little-boyness came out, the reminder that you’re slowly becoming a man right before my eyes… and I’m becoming an aunt right in front of yours.

Your laugh is mischievous, infectious, and healing… because I feel good about myself when I can impress you. It’s “The Dana and Leslie Show” when you’re around, because what makes you laugh is different than what makes us laugh, and we are straining our comedic muscles. It’s good for our development lest we want to take it on the road.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the things I should impart to you as an adult in your life. There’s all kinds of cultural stuff, from Doctor Who and Regular Show to Star Trek and Star Wars. It’s deeper than that, though. I think about modeling, and what that means as I have you in my life to such a large degree. When Dana agreed to be your nanny for the summer, I didn’t realize how much it would make our friendship grow, too. I want to be the best person I can be, because the decisions I make now are going to influence the decisions you make later. I don’t want to screw it up, but at the same time, right now your expectations are incredibly low. As long as we feed and water you, you’re fairly self-sufficient.

Seriously, I have never met a baby like you. It’s like you’ve been born with the spirit of a Buddhist priest, never expressing anger or frustration unless something really is wrong. There’s no crying just because, and believe me, we appreciate it. We are also low maintenance. Like you, if we’ve got on a clean clothes and we’ve been fed, we’re good, too.

You’re making noises now, a lot of them, like you’re trying to learn words but your mouth gets stuck. You don’t get frustrated, though. You just move on to a new syllable. You also love to “read” and we are waiting breathlessly until you are old enough to take the quotes off and join us in the sea of literature that has amassed in terms of the books Dana and I want to pass on to you. Trust me, you won’t like all of them. But you’ll like some of them. And whether or not you like what we like is irrelevant. You are so loved that there is nothing that would ever divide us, If anything, I’m inspired by you.

I should have said “Dudeist Priest.”

Love,

The AuntieLeslie

 

Hi all-

Dues are up for my web site. If you’ve read something memorable here, leave it in the comments even if you do not choose to donate. The box is on the right, and any amount means everything. It will keep “Stories” going for another year, where I will continue to seduce you with the world’s most introspective spectacle… which works as a double entendre, because writing is the lens through which I see the world.

Besides, I know I’m your dirty little secret. Text means you can read me at work. And you do. My traffic spikes during the work day.

SPIKES.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend who has been a long-time supporter of “Stories…” Two of them, actually. The first comment I got was, “I’ve been enjoying your blog a lot lately.” I took the compliment in, but I still wanted to talk to someone else who’d been there since the beginning, but not because I needed validation that the compliment was real. I wanted to see something deeper. Have I changed since this started?

Her response was thoughtful ~ “it doesn’t vibrate with pain the way it did last year.”

No, it doesn’t.

I told her that this blog was never meant to be static… that it would change as I did. I thought some more about it (of course I did), because the comment was so completely what I needed to hear that it gave me a lot of pause.

There has been a lot of pain over my lifetime, but nothing that I couldn’t handle. They call it going through hell for a reason… eventually, you come out of it. This blog was meant to start out as a dark tunnel and progress toward the exit, as if I was emerging from something, because I was. That “something” was all the years of lies I’d let myself believe. It was all of the years that I marched forward with no evidence that anything was going to happen, much less “something.” It was learning new sets of expectations that I set for myself, instead of letting them be set for me. It was a shot in the arm to move myself, because the waiting was killing me.

I could never put my finger on what I was waiting for until I realized that I wasn’t waiting for anything. Of course I had my own wants and needs, but I was used to having them completely ignored… so, in reality, even though I thought there was a “something,” there was always a “nothing.”

Always.

For instance, she told me that when I was 18, I was welcome to come and live with her and go to Portland State. She wanted to get me out of the Bible belt as quickly as possible. At the same time, she told her partner that she thought that when I was 18, I would “just go away.”

The dissonance was always there, and I was blind to it. As I have crawled out of the dark tunnel and into the light, I began to look at the same situation with new eyes, and you are the ones that gave me the ability. If there’s anything I owe to this web site, it is gaining sight that I’d otherwise lost.

He had me on my back in less than a minute. Well, maybe that’s exaggerating a bit much, but within the first ten, that’s for sure. I felt completely safe as he put a book on my stomach and asked me to make it go up. When I’d come in, there was a dark color to my low range, and he was trying to help me lighten up. He took the tension out of my shoulders, my throat, my chest… In short, I realized how far I’d come as a singer, and how far I still have to go.

My abuser has a gorgeous voice, and it tickled me that I still tried to fit in some of her appoggiaturas and other stylistic choices, such as forgetting the words and making them up, along with forgetting how to count in the middle of a phrase and making up the rhythm, too. My abuser may be my abuser, but she also taught me what it was like to fly.

The more I got warmed up, the higher I went. My B and C floated off and I fell in love with my voice teacher a little bit… As sopranos do when someone shows them the way to an even higher range.

Then my voice teacher and I started working on options for solos at church. First, we did “The Lord is My Sheperd,” by John Rutter. I wish I could remember the name of the other two, because I was so familiar with the Rutter than I wanted to sing something else to strain my brain. I chose the melody that got stuck in my head immediately like a mind worm.

I had to choose something I like and can get comfortable with, because once I’m in front of the congregation, there are so many things to think about that the words need to be muscle memory.

Even metaphorically, the book has to move.

Slowly, I’m learning to change the channel. But there are still days when the left-over issues between the abuser that lives in my head and my present consciousness start duking it out. Yesterday, it wasn’t even at my initiation. It came from Dana asking me how I was doing- just a general update.

I told her that I thought I was doing a lot better, I said, but there isn’t any moment of any day that I forget what happened. I don’t think about what she did to my sexuality- she never touched me herself, but inserted herself into my life so that when I did start thinking about love and sex and all of those thing with women my own age, I felt like I was cheating on her and I got the impression after I talked to her that night she was jealous and angry… but probably not because she was jealous it wasn’t with her. I think she just realized that our lives were moving apart, and there was nothing she could do to stop me from aging. That’s only conjecture on my part, but I remember plainly sitting on my top bunk with my Mickey Mouse sheets, journal in hand, as I told her I’d lost my virginity. Her voice seemed strained, throat as tight as a cassock three sizes too small as she said, “welcome to the girls’ club.” My reaction (of course) was to try and make her laugh so that the awkward moment between us would pass. It killed me that I thought I’d done the wrong thing, that I should have waited. It was too much cognitive dissonance in my head to hear her sadness and NOT wish I’d waited. The next time we saw each other, all was forgiven, but I’ve never forgotten that still, small voice.

However, as I told Dana, there was a bigger implication with her abuse. It made my mother’s, my father’s, and my sister’s voices all fade into the background so that I couldn’t hear them clearly anymore. I was isolated into thinking that I could only trust my abuser, which is generally what abusers do in the first place.

The reason I’m so much better than I was is that I’ve finally made the connection that I have a lot of work to do on myself, because all of the people who were supposed to be primary in my life haven’t gotten a chance until now.

I’ve also gone through the guilt I laid upon myself for even publishing all this. I honestly and truly didn’t want to hurt anyone, but I knew that the moment I breathed anything, there would be people all over me to hear more. I have been pleasantly surprised that no one has wanted to know anything, and I have been free to complete my own analysis of myself without any sort of interference. It’s a wonderful thing to have space… because now I really know what I think.

The next feeling I have to explore is that when I became an adult, I didn’t explore all of these questions *then.* I’m not the type of person that is afraid of conflict. I guess you just don’t see abuse unless you want to. That’s my only advice to myself as I continue to figure this stuff out.

…and as I continue to learn that my own story matters just as much as everyone else’s.