Exes and Ohs

I had a dream last night that my ex was in. Not just any ex. You know, the ex. I think most of us have (usually) one of these. Whether it was the one who broke your heart the most, the one who made you the craziest, the one who got away, etc., (or perhaps some combination of all of the above). When I was talking to my wife about my dream and my ex’s resurfacing in my subconscious this morning (he has a habit of doing that every once in a while, and I have yet to concretely figure out why), our fourteen year old came and sat down with us. As we were trying to explain why this particular ex was a bigger deal than any of my other exes, my wife seemed to sum it up perfectly.

“He’s like her heroine,” she told our daughter. I’ve talked about this ex -we’ll just call him J here – with my wife in great detail, so she knew exactly what the dream had stirred up for me and a good idea of where my thoughts were wandering.

I sat with that idea for a few minutes and decided it was probably pretty accurate. While it’s true that my “relationship” with J ended almost a decade ago and I like to think I’ve gotten smarter since then, I got stupid around him, just like people do on heroine. Heroine is not one of those drugs that you can try once and only do occasionally. Smart people check themselves into rehab after doing heroine once.  I was not smart then. It took me a long time to get smart.  One look from him, and I would be gone. I had melted into a puddle on the floor.  I paid for witnessing and sharing in the infrequent bursts of brilliance when his true self emerged by letting him play me and treat me poorly. He broke my heart more times than I remember, and I willingly submitted to it until I decided not to anymore. I used to say that he would be amazing if not for that small personality flaw of being an arrogant asshole. Those moments of brilliance were pretty incredible. It took me a little while to realize I was completely in love with him and then it took me even longer to quit him cold turkey. Even after I had, I would know when he was near or in town. I would know shortly before he tried to contact me (which he did several times, despite my having said I never wanted to hear from him again). The connection I had with him was one for which I have few words. And I knew him. I realized years later after I began studying Witchcraft and Paganism that I have known him life times upon life times before. I’m not sure what lessons we were meant to teach each other and help each other learn this time around, but it feels like we still have unfinished business. I will forever be grateful to him for helping me to find my Fire – because it took a shit ton of it for me to be able to leave him and cut myself off.

So when I woke this morning from the dream with visions of his dark, shoulder length wavy hair, turquoise and hazel eyes, broad shoulders, chiseled cheek bones, and heart-shaped lips in my mind, I just shook my head and chuckled. This was an atypical reaction for me. When I’ve dreamt about him in the past, I’ve woken up angry or frustrated or sad (and, of course, horny). But this morning was different. As I sat with the difference, I realized that, Oh, despite all of the shit he’d piled on top of who he truly was and how much he had hurt me, I was still in love with him. And not the “in love with him to the point where I would allow myself to get stupid again” kind because that is not love. It can get tangled up with love, but it’s not the same thing. And I certainly was not, nor am I now, in love with the shit piled on top of his essence. It’s his essence that I will probably always be in love with.  And the packaging for that essence this time around just flat does it for me. I’m a total sucker for dark hair and light eyes to begin with but add in the broad shoulders, put some wave in the hair, and toss in some sculpted cheekbones, and I’m done. And in that moment of realization, probably for the first time, I did not try to fight being in love with him. I just accepted it. Accepting didn’t mean I had to contact him, to try to rebuild or recreate some kind of relationship with him on any level. I just sat with it and acknowledged that it was.

After I’d gotten myself coffee, I looked him up on facebook for the first time without feeling guilty or like I was betraying myself. He doesn’t look very different. I did not message him or friend request him, much to the disappointment of our 14 yr old. I don’t remember what I told her when she asked why – that might have been when my wife pointed out he was my heroine. As I drove to work, though, I thought about it. The only reason at the moment I would have for contacting him would be an ambiguous curiosity, and while flirting with the idea of doing so in my head is one thing (and mildly entertaining), I’ve decided without clearer intention than that, the only possible thing I could create from doing so would be a hot mess. I certainly don’t need any of those right now. So instead, I will enjoy this knowing that I am still in love and that I can simply accept it. And I will marvel that I can indeed be in love with two people at once (I hadn’t been sure this was entirely possible for me). And I will enjoy this reignited spark of my sexuality that visions of J stirred up. 😉

Universal Truths: Hinduism, U2, and Kushiel

Yesterday was a rough day for me. In the midst of this massive transition/transformation/internal rewiring and reconstruction, it’s normal that not every day is one blessed by epiphanies and insight. Sometimes it just sucks. Yesterday was one of those for me. I felt grumpy, cranky, restless yet with no will to actually do anything, tired, etc.

I think I mentioned during some post recently (it might have been one of the many that I’ve started writing and then ended up trashing so if you’ve been actively reading and are feeling confused right now, don’t worry – it’s not you) that I was reading The Bhagavad Gita shortly before we moved and I had to return my library books. I picked up a different copy of it here from our local library within the past week and read the 40 some page preface and the first few chapters yesterday. Reading through the preface, I felt like I was chewing gravel at first – there was so much to take in that was designed to help guide readers in understanding the Gita, but the amount of information and its conciseness were enough to make my brain hurt. When I got to the actual text of the Gita, I resonated with Arjuna’s frustrated and urgent pleas to Krishna to simply give him one straight answer instead of advocating for one practice in a moment and then a totally different in the next. Action? Non-action? Knowledge? Renunciation? Wisdom? Service? Which is it?! At the end of the evening, I set it down, not as frustrated as I’d been in my previous reading of it, but not much at ease either. Terms and concepts swam around in my head in a dizzying and noisy swirl – dharma, karma, non-attachment, renunciation, action, selfless service, etc., and a part of me sighed in sorrow at feeling how far I am from any of those goals.

One of the most incredible people I’ve met on the planet is a man who I’ve had the honor to train with in some shrink practices. He frequently said at the end of each session/meeting that we learned and were taking away with us far more than we realized. This morning, I found that to be true with my reading of the Gita yesterday. Sore from a fitful night of sleeping, I went out on the patio with my coffee and settled in to my meditation time that I’ve just recently retaken up.

As I sat in my chair and breathed, I allowed my thoughts to travel as they would. It went something like this: I had waited until I was awake for 1/2 hr before having my first cigarette of the day. I thought about having quit smoking recently and my lack of long-term success due to not having taken any measures to replace that activity with one that accomplished the same purpose (under the extreme stress of the eviction, I got crankier and meaner and more irritable – particularly with our kids – and so, though I could have continued abstaining, I had no immediate way to fix it, and I started again in order to avoid the wrath of my wife). Would increasing my daily meditation time be beneficial, I wondered?  Then, I thought of the Gita and Krishna’s explanation of renouncing sense-objects (material things and desires). An image popped into my awareness of catching a ball thrown to me by my ego – a sense-object – and my gently releasing the ball from my hands and rolling it away from me. I remembered that, in meditation, the point is not how long one can remain quiet and centered, but rather the committment to and practice of drawing attention back to center after it starts to wander. I recalled that one of the sense-objects Krishna particularly advocated release of was other people. I remembered that when I read that line, I knew that would be a challenge for me. But this morning, as I thought about that, I recalled a section of Kushiel, a fabulous fictional book I read a while ago about a sexual masochist, and the main character’s vow to love her partner with “an open palm.” It was the same thing that Krishna advocated – that non-attachment to others. From there, my thoughts led to how the rest of my family is faring with the stress of everything we have going on right now – in particular my Beloved. I recalled my tendency to take on that which is not mine and wondered if I was doing that with her. It was at that point that something settled within me. Rather amusingly, my mind drew parallels from the Gita to some U2 lyrics, “We’re One, but we’re not the same.” My Beloved and I are One, just as I know (though not yet in my belly) that everyone is One; yet, we are still different people. Just as the Gita pointed out. As I began remembering other snippets of lyrics, I saw further parallels. “Love is a temple, love a higher law, Love is a temple, Love the higher law,” and “One Love…One Life, You got to do what you should.” I inwardly chuckled as I heard Bono singing in my mind about these Hindu concepts and practices endorsed in the Gita – the Oneness of all people, united by the Self that is Divinity; the recognition of a higher law and instruction to focus on that alone; the concept of dharma and how it is important to follow our own individual dharmas (doing what we should).

I have no idea if Bono ever read the Gita. Regardless, what I’ve been noticing recently is the thread of Universal Truth that surfaces in the tapestry of so many different spiritual systems. The semantics might be different (Hinduism and Buddhism call it non-attachment or renunciation, my studies of Witchcraft use the word “surrender,” numerous other paths discuss “letting go,” or giving “it” to god, etc.), but the concept remains the same. After playing connect the dots with these passages of the Gita and everything from pop music to fictional books about sexual masochism and simply sitting in the midst of it all and breathing, I feel much calmer. And when I feel my chest tighten in regards to some outside thing, I am going to try to remember to take a deep breath and simply release that ball from my grasp and breathe again.

Grief, perspective, and compassion

Recently during a conversation about my being poly, I was asked what it was like and how I dealt with being discriminated against by society and/or my family of origin. Any time the mention of my family of origin comes up the first thing I sense in my body is a nauseated churning in my belly, a growing tightness and heaviness in my chest, a rush of thoughts pounding against a gate in my mind I have in place to hold them all back so I can function on a daily basis and manage myself and my behavior in a way that is in alignment with my integrity. Discrimination by society? Given the geographic area and more specific circles in which my world takes place, it’s something that’s inconvenient but deal-able. My family of origin is a whole other ball of wax.

I’ve probably mentioned it before, but to refresh your memories, I was raised in a conservative, Christian family. I adopted my parents’ values and beliefs, held to them, and didn’t question them for a long time. From my parents’ point of view, I was in many ways I imagine, the perfect child for them – a mini version of themselves. One thing I don’t think my parents counted on was that I listened to them and not only the direct lessons they taught me, but the indirect ones as well. So when I would come to them with my problems as a young adolescent and they refused to solve them for me or give me advice other than to talk with me and help me figure it out for myself, I don’t think they realized that they were teaching me some of the most valuable lessons ever: to think for myself, to trust my own wisdom and knowing, and to make decisions for myself. And I don’t think they anticipated my taking that experience of their behavior and applying those lessons everywhere in my world.

I didn’t handle coming out to my parents (any of the three times I did it – Pagan, bi, poly) well. I hadn’t ever really asserted myself to them in terms of any striking differences between myself and them previously, and I think I decided overcompensating and being more forceful was necessary to assure they wouldn’t persuade me out of it. Consequently, I wasn’t concerned for their perspective or their feelings any of the three times. I’d like to say that I improved each time I came out to them, but that wouldn’t be accurate. From the very first time of coming out (as Pagan), our relationship became very strained. That was in 2004. Seven years, a significant number of arguments and tears, and a great deal of silence have passed. Currently, we do not talk about my spirituality, we do not talk about my chosen and forever family, we do not talk about my sexuality, we do not all get together for holidays and birthdays and such. Neither my parents nor my sister or any other extended family members have ever met any of my forever family members, and the likelihood of my parents or sister ever meeting them is slim to none.

So when this question was posed to me and I briefly explained that we did not get along I then allowed that gate in my mind to ease open a little. And when the initial anxiety had come and settled, what remained was a weighty and cold heartache and grief that I have not allowed myself to sit with for a very long time, if ever. I let myself for a moment or two feel the tip of that grief, that loss. A wash of dual images flooded my inner vision in which my parents were on one side absent and on the mirror side present. I envisioned my eventual handfasting to my Beloved and her husband, I saw myself pregnant and giving birth to a child, I saw family holiday gatherings and summer vacations, I saw my parents talking and playing with our girls, I saw anniversary celebrations, birthdays, graduations, etc. And the pain in my heart at both sets of those images – especially the ones which showed my parents happily interacting with the girls (oh, I cannot fully describe in words how much those ones hurt – it’s as if my heart is being crushed in a vice) – and the strength of the loss of what may never be was enough to make me catch my breath and my voice as I was continuing to talk while these images were flooding my mind.

I asked myself internally, then, how I managed that. The response I heard was that I sit with it a little bit here and there, and I simply breathe. And eventually, I put that pain into perspective more and more, and I use it to grow beyond myself, in terms of where I am now. I look at my parents and my interactions with them over the past seven years. I have spent the vast majority of those years being angry with them but knowing I need to let go of that. Now, as I sit with this pain, the idea and act of letting go actually seems possible, and I am starting to feel the beginnings of compassion.

How I lost my voice

From before I can remember, my older sister was constantly teasing me, provoking me, making fun of me, mentally torturing me. And it was always un-provoked. I never did anything to her to instigate her behavior. Lots of people have tales of “sibling rivalry” – that was not what my sister and I did. One time when I was in early high school, we were in the kitchen arguing, and she grabbed one of my dad’s chef’s knives from the knife block. Thankfully, I was faster than she was and made it to my room and locked the door. Another time, I ran after her with a shaving razor. Long before then, though, it started with words. Being about 2 1/2 yrs younger than she, I was no match for her intellectually (even intellectually as a 6 yr old), but I was always stronger. Always.

I was born strong. Literally. During that very early test the doctors do on babies when they move the baby’s arms and legs to make sure everything’s okay, the doctor could not get my legs to part (you can imagine how fun it was growing up having that story told and retold countless times, particularly during puberty). When I was three years old, I got a splinter under the nail of my middle finger that went all the way down to my cuticle (this is one of my first memories). It took 5 doctors, nurses, and interns to hold me down on the hospital bed in the emergency room.

So, that was how I fought back against my sister. Literally. I would kick and scratch and smack and who knows what else. And I would get in trouble. After they were finished yelling at me for beating my sister up, and when I eventually had the capacity to explain myself and tell them what she’d been doing, they had one piece of advice and word of comfort for me: Ignore her. Obviously, my parents were clueless as to physiological and brain development children undergo. I mean, you don’t have to be a pediatric neurologist to know that a 5 yr old doesn’t understand “ignore her” nor can she even begin to be able to do so.

I HATED that this was their “solution.” I’m still incredulous that this was their solution. Eventually, as I got older and my sister continued to pick on me, they figured out that she was the instigator and finally began taking my side more often whenever she would complain to them that I’d hit her. “You probably deserved it,” they’d say to her. But the damage had been done for me by that point. And I’ve only just started to put together what that damage was.

My parents taught me to ignore and just “take” someone inflicting pain on me. They taught me that my pain didn’t matter, that it wasn’t significant. They taught me that I would get in trouble or risk not being loved if I fought back against someone hurting me. They taught me that they did not care as much about me as they did about my sister. That my well-being was not so important that she be punished for hurting me.

They taught me to silence my voice.

They betrayed me in their role as parents, protectors.

In telling me to “ignore her,” they were really telling me to ignore myself.  My Self.

I think back to the shitty friends I had in middle school and junior high, and my inability to assert myself to them. I think about the numerous romantic encounters which went further than I’d originally planned for them to go, and my inability to say STOP! I think about every guy who’s ever asked me for my phone number that I didn’t want to give it to, but did. I think about my sexual assault that took place a couple months ago and, though I’m glad I was able to get my STOP! out when I did, I think about my inability to have voiced it sooner.

See, I generalized that lesson of “ignore her” that my parents taught me some 20 odd years ago, and I have been fighting to reclaim my voice ever since. I never knew exactly how it was that it had gotten lost.

Now, having rediscovered the origins of that loss, I am armed to the teeth with rich, loud, ever-present, unable-to-ignore, attention-demanding, wild-woman, straight-from-the-yoni VOICE. And I will never be silent again.

ROOOOAAAAARRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Figuring out what ‘It’ is

Yesterday I was talking with a relatively new, but trustworthy, friend and as we warred and raged against the Patriarchy, we compared experiences of assault. She told me of how she used to be very trusting and of her perfect size 8 that disappeared after her assault (along with her very trusting nature) as she put on a great deal of weight.  She recounted how she seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, though, upon reaching that weight as she no longer was the object of stares, no one felt the need to hold doors open for her, no men followed her into stores or catcalled as she walked down the street.  For her, it seemed that the weight she put on translated to safety.  For her,that weight was It.

In simple terms, It is the aftermath of assault.  It is a shape shifter.  It takes many forms from over-eating to under-eating to a wide variety of obsessions and/or compulsions to constant men-bashing to that extra push needed to shift sexual orientation to who knows what else. Surely, the list seems endless.  As I previously discussed, while It can take positive incarnations (renewed sense of self, confrontation of the Patriarchy, reaching out to others who have had similar experiences, etc.), I think the more negative manifestations of It are more probable, more frequent, and certainly understandable.

When I told her my experience took place only a matter of weeks ago, she commended me on how well I seemed to be doing.  I thanked her and explained I had an excellent support system.  She warned me, though, that whether It comes 10 minutes from that point of time or 10 yrs, It was going to happen.  It was coming.  Her warning carried a sense of foreboding, and I began imagining what form It could take for me.  It would not take the form of any kind of eating problems.  I’ve already dealt with that in my past.  It would not take the form of any kind of obsessions or compulsions as far as I could see.  Even after this happening, that just didn’t seem to fit for me.  All those things, while I can understand them and the reasons they happen, have to do with me.  And this is not about me.  So what form has It begun to take?

It is me questioning what it truly means to be a woman.  It is some serious concerns about dating from this point on.   More than anything else, though, this is about Them.  Not me.  For this reason, above all else, It is my newly declared war against the Patriarchy.  They are the ones at fault, and I will scream this for the rest of my life at the top of my lungs.  Finding the source of the problem in this case is not a further victimization of myself or women in general (which would not be helpful in the long term).  Instead, it is a means of empowerment.

Righteous indignation

Foxchild over at The Unveiling of a Pagan Spirit told me about an appalling case of injustice in the US court system yesterday. It is the story of Tory Bowen, a young woman who was raped on October 30, 2004. To sum up the case, the judge denied her the right to use numerous words (rape, sexual assault, victim, sexual assault nurse, forced, etc.) when presenting her case in order to “guarantee a fair trial to the defendant.” His reasoning was that the term rape is a conclusion in and of itself which is what the jury is supposed to be deciding. But that is not what the jury is supposed to be deciding, as so succinctly a commenter on Yarn Harlot’s blog put it. The jury is supposed to be deciding whether the defendant raped the plaintiff, not whether she was raped in general. As I read her summarization of the case today, I learned that the initial jury wasn’t even told that the plaintiff (Bowen) was prohibited from using these words, rendering her account of what happened to sound as though the intercourse was just that and implying that it was consensual. The first jury was hung. The second was declared a mistrial after Bowen refused to sign a document agreeing to omit the above words and others from her testimony (doing so, she indicated, would be committing perjury) and no jury was selected because they all seemed to know about the case already. Bowen is more than likely on her way to taking this case to the federal supreme court.

As someone who has recently experienced sexual assault, reading about this absolute mockery of justice made me want to vomit. It also made me want to not be American anymore. It pissed me off righteously at the Patriarchy that is our society. That brings us to the topic for the day. Righteous indignation. That is how I would describe my reaction to not only hearing this story, but to my own assault, which led me to consider some aspects of our society that also make me want to vomit. Righteous indignation. It just kind of flies off the tongue with a leap of fire. I’d like to take a closer look at the ‘indignation’ part of that phrase. Dictionary.com defines indignation as “strong displeasure at something considered unjust, offensive, insulting, or base; righteous anger.” In its root is the word is dignity. The ‘in’ part (or ‘im’, ‘un’, etc.) serves to promote a meaning of the opposite or contrary concept of whatever word follows. So, it seems that in a base sense, indignation is all about revoking or opposing the preservation of dignity. Indignation, then, is what happens, what we feel, when our dignity is revoked, opposed, or obstructed in some way. Add the word righteous in front of it (indicating that we are morally and virtuously correct, and I’ll add divinely so of my own accord) and the phrase becomes a new kind of powerful.

Chatting with my friend foxchild last night, we rehashed my feelings of thinking I could have done something to prevent what happened from happening, and she enlightened me to a notion that had jumped above the surface of my subconscious at some point during the past few days only to dive back below it before I could get a good look: yes, I could have made different decisions, but my making the decisions that I had was NOT the cause of what happened. Yes, it opened the way for the opportunity to exist, but what the fuck is wrong with us all when we think that as soon as that opportunity is open, it will be taken? And I got a snapshot flashback of a conversation with Historical Ex. Let me paint the picture for you. Things were coming to their final close and he commented that the reason he kept being an asshole was because I kept forgiving him, kept letting him hurt me, so he knew he could and “get away with it.” Now, turn that one over in your heads for a minute before going on. My retort was that my ability to forgive him was a strength, not a weakness. He went on to address the fact that shortly after we had reunited that most recent time, we became physically intimate rather quickly – too quickly according to him (at the time, he was NOT being an ass and actually resembled a decent, caring human being, thus, I was more open to intimacy). I stared incredulously at him. Um, if I recall correctly, we were both involved in that intimate situation, we both took part, and therefore we should both take responsibility for it occurring. But no, Historical Ex (like so many men today) was under the impression that he bore no responsibility in the situation. When presented with an attractive woman, it was in his nature as a man to not be able to control himself and therefore, the woman was solely responsible for how far things got.

I realized during my conversation with fox that this notion – this idea of men being really, merely more than animals with instinctual drives that HAVE to be obeyed and cannot be controlled and therefore these creatures are not responsible for any of their actions – has been bred and procreated by patriarchal society over and over again. You’ve heard it before. You know it well. It’s the “boys will be boys” mentality. You run into it every time a man claims not being able to remember to put the toilet seat down. It smacks you in the face every time you hear the argument “well, did you see what she was wearing? She’s asking to be raped.” It’s pervasive. It has sunken deep into the pores and fabric of our society.

I am not men-bashing here at all, so please keep that in mind. But what I find most intriguing about this idea is that more men aren’t insulted by it. I don’t know if any men read my blog (I kind of doubt it), but if any men happen to be reading right now, do you realize that society has essentially reduced you to little more than a neanderthal? According to society, you possess no self-control, higher functioning, and great mental capacity. You’re barely better than Pavlovian dogs according mainstream American culture. You’re reduced to being led and manipulated by your genitals and hormones. If I were you, I’d be pretty fucking righteously undignified by that. But then again, according to society, being that I’m a woman and by definition without a penis, I am not burdened by the whims of my genitalia and instead, have the capacity to actually cognitively process complex situations without my behavior being dictated by my vagina.

What is sexual assault?

Unfortunate and unpleasant events that I experienced this past Wednesday night made me realize that I might not know what sexual assault is and has me now asking this question. Womenshealth.gov defines sexual assault as:
Sexual assault and abuse is any type of sexual activity that you do not agree to, including:

• inappropriate touching
• vaginal, anal, or oral penetration
• sexual intercourse that you say no to
• rape
• attempted rape
• child molestation

Sexual assault can be verbal, visual, or anything that forces a person to join in unwanted sexual contact or attention. Examples of this are voyeurism (when someone watches private sexual acts), exhibitionism (when someone exposes him/herself in public), incest (sexual contact between family members), and sexual harassment.

Although I now realize that what I experienced could be classified on the milder end of what seems to be a spectrum covering everything from verbal sexual harassment to rape, a part of me knew I’d been assaulted almost immediately. In thinking about what happened the following day, I felt nauseated and disgusting. I cleaned my entire apartment, changed my sheets, washed my towels, took out all my trash. Showered. Despised the fact that my shower’s water pressure is pathetic and that the hot water doesn’t last very long. I could not concentrate on anything other than how gross and ashamed I felt and how much anger was building up inside of me. I was torn between not being able to think of anything else, replaying the night’s events in my head and physically shuddering and trying to block out every image from my mind as I did.  It made perfect sense to me then that so many assault and abuse victims develop OCD, eating disorders, and other mental health problems.  In fact, I think it’s pretty miraculous when they don’t.

My assault falls under inappropriate touching and unwanted sexual attention. I think the reason I was unsure as to label is as assault stemmed from how subtle it seemed at the time. What began as a seemingly harmless, albeit alcohol-induced massage turned into unwanted and repudiated sexual advances that, if not for my adamant repetition of “No”, use of and threat of additional force, and the two men who were involved having a very minute sense of morality, I could have been raped. And while I’m very glad I wasn’t, my experience brought with it overwhelming feelings of stupidity, shame, guilt, and disgust with myself. What made it worse was that I fucking drove the bastard home the next day(he crashed on my floor).

I received a text message on Thursday from the one I had first met (the other was his cousin whom I met that evening) wishing me a good day. I wanted to vomit. He sent me an email the day after that apologizing for “things getting out of hand” and saying that it had been bothering him a lot. I didn’t respond. I missed a call from him the day after that saying he’d left me two messages and wanted to check in to see how I was doing. I had been working on formulating a response to the email and finally sent it. In it, I asked that he never contact me again.

I’m hoping he doesn’t, but unfortunately, he still has access to my apartment community. I know for a fact that he came to the complex to get his mail (he used to live here but recently moved) over the weekend. Every time I walk outside, I pray that he’s not there. Every time I see a man who looks remotely like him, it makes me want to turn and run in the other direction or hide. The events of that night are what I think about before I fall asleep at night.

I considered contacting the police. Unfortunately, I have no evidence of what has happened. It would be my word against his (probably), and I have no desire to be made to feel even worse than I do. I made numerous mistakes that night that would be brought out into harsh light that I am already too aware of now. Never again will I go out with a man that I don’t know well alone (or with a friend of his) and let him drive. Never again will I agree to go out with a man after having consumed any amount of alcohol previously during the day. Never again will I go out so late at night with someone I do not know well. Never again will I let men I don’t know well into my apartment. I imagine I’ll add to this list.

When I think back on things I did – letting them into my apartment, going out so late, going out with people I don’t know well after I’d had several drinks already, letting them drive instead of meeting somewhere – I question what the hell I was thinking. A large part of me answers, “You weren’t.” But, we are always thinking something. I believe I was thinking that, to a degree, I was invincible (which is ridiculous in and of itself seeing as I’d just read The Gift of Fear and learned that 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted). I could control myself and/or the situation. I was powerful. And yet, in imagining I was more powerful than I really was, what I actually did was give any power I had away. And who’s to say how power is to be executed? What made me think that power meant overcoming two men who might get the wrong idea? Why couldn’t power have been wisdom to keep me from entering a potentially dangerous situation? How I had limited, you, power!

I’m still processing what happened, and I know that this processing will continue for potentially a long time. I’m considering seeing a counselor because I could foresee this spiraling into something I would like to prevent. I know this will affect how I view men and relationships and dating, though I’m not entirely sure how.

Raised with fear

In the foreword to Doreen Virtue’s The Lightworker’s Way, Louise Hay writes that we are born knowing we are perfect, whole, and complete, but forget as we grow up. She cites one of the possible reasons for this forgetting: being “raised by parents who had learned to see life through fearful eyes” (p. ix). In reflecting on my childhood, I think that this is a somewhat accurate description of the way in which my parents saw life, saw me, and raised me.

I love my parents very much. I accept them for who and where they are in their personal evolution and recognize that they have acted and continue to act in what they think is the best way. They are conservative Christians and tend to see the world in black and white. Their faith is the core of who they are and they rebel against and condemn most things that conflict with it or that they see as not fitting in with it. I think that what they identified as my “sensuality” at an early age scared them, and consequently, they didn’t know quite what to do with me. As a result, sensuality and sexuality were repressed in the name of religion. I remember being in the church parish hall when I was a young adolescent and my mother telling me that I had this aura (kind of surprising that she used this word as she was very anti anything occult) that attracted men 15-50 yrs old. I don’t think that she intended to make me feel badly or different, but that was what happened. I felt like some sort of freak and like I was dangerous. I picked up on her fear and became afraid of myself and terrified of losing control of myself. The solution was easy – keep going to church.

Eventually, enough space developed between me and the oppressive religion that was restricting me and convincing me to be afraid of myself. I had been taught that I could not control myself – not that I shouldn’t because that would imply possessing the capability of doing so. Ironically, the power that the Church had over me was only that which I gave it. I knew this enough to take it back, but having been raised to see in black and white, if the Church wasn’t controlling me then I thought nothing could. As a result, I gave in to my primal urges that had been confined for so long and began a downward spiral laced with a curious and exploratory free-love motif reminiscent of the 60s and 70s.

While my parents might have raised me to be afraid of and distrusting of myself, they instilled in me some very positive values and capabilities, one of which was practicality. This practicality has stepped in and helped me numerous times, of which this was one. I knew I was out of control and knew I needed to separate myself from my situation in order to change. My salvation came in the form of my first professional job. In another country. A bit extreme, maybe, but I honestly think I needed it at the time. I was to begin working at a church where I would be in charge of a youth group. Not exactly fitting given the way in which I’d been living my life, but my plan was to reform and give my power back to the Church. When I arrived, though, and began to pick up where I’d left off years before, the landscape with which I found myself surrounded seemed out of proportion and nonsensical. Answer-less questions I had been taught to accept as faith now needed desperately to have real answers. Pockets of blaring hypocrisy and contradiction stood out like vibrant neon against the black and white background. I clutched the reins of my life in my confused and nervous hands and wondered at the change in scenery. Had it been like this before? Where I looked for peace and solace, I found politics and bureaucracy. where I looked for Spirit, I found doctrine and dogma.

Thankfully, I came to find the peace and solace for which I was so desperately searching in the face of a spirituality I had been taught was akin to the most egregious practice in the eyes of “god” – Paganism. Suddenly, I was now fully capable of being responsible for…myself. Sexuality was no longer something of which to be afraid or controlled. It just was. Thinking back on how my parents had treated me, I think things would have been very different if they just hadn’t made such a big deal of it.

Fear leaves an impression that fades slowly. Learning to live without being afraid of myself, or of that which I am capable is very much a work in progress. I have come a long way, and yet, I continue to notice little thoughts that come into my head that catch me off guard. This deprogramming, like many changes we consciously make to our lives, seems like something that I will need to continue to do for a while to come.