Daddy's Favourite: An Autobiographical Memoir Of Childhood Abuse

Continuation

It's been three years since I posted here. A long three years it seems. As I said prior, these things can seem like they have just happened and I have known I should make an update as so much has happened since the ENCORE but I've been avoiding it. Not out of any type of self-preservation but more that it all felt so... raw. Like a lanced wound aches with pain, healing psyches ache too, just in a different way. I didn't want to poke or prod it, wanted to let it heal a bit more. But it has. I feel like it won't hurt as much if I write it out.

What happened in the REPRISE is an actual conversation I had with my last therapist. It's been a year and a half since I finished with her but that conversation was a massive turning point in me processing my traumas, handling them, healing from them. But I'm getting a head of myself, that isn't the start, that's the crescendo, the peak of the mountain, the turning point. We need the beginning. Where this all started.

And it started with a book.

It had been recommended to me by tik tok. A young girl moving through her childhood that was fraught with CSA, child sexual abuse. I thought that I was okay with it. I had been strong, you know. Been through therapy, worked through all my issues, I could talk about it freely. I finished the last chapter at work, got into my car to go home, had to stop right halfway home because I was bawling so hard I couldn't breathe. It didn't get better, it got worse and worse and worse. I know now I was in the midst of a triggered episode of CPTSD, panic, and anxiety.

So I called an emergency sexual abuse line. I didn't know what else to do. I had never felt like that before, not that out of control, not that... lost. I could barely speak when they answered and I kept trying to tell them what was wrong but kept choking on the words. It took me nearly twenty minutes of being parked on the side of the highway, bawling my eyes out, before I managed to croak out that I needed help. That I thought I was okay, that I thought it was under control, that my CSA stopped affecting me, but I wasn't. I really wasn't and I needed help.

I was assigned a therapist, free of charge, one meeting a month.

I felt a bit more secure with that, felt better. My intake was set for a few days away and I told myself I could make it there. I set everything out and I decided that no, I really wasn't okay with the abuse and I needed to finally come to terms with it. I was going to put on the metaphorical shining armour and kill the dragon.

Life doesn't work out like that. Not really. These issues can't be slayed in the traditional sense. They have to be picked apart, self-care systems have to be broken, you have to tear down every bit of framework you made just to survive and rebuild it bit by painstaking brick. That book was the catalyst for me realizing I wasn't actually okay. That this was a detriment to how I was living and I needed it to be fixed. I needed to be functional.

If you have followed me for a while, you will see that and understand what I am saying. If you are new and you see this you might question the word usage. Functional? Don't you want to be healed? But when you suffer through traumas you won't ever be fully healed. These issues will follow you to the day you die. But functional, better, these are what you aim for. These are what make it so you can not just survive but thrive. You can be better, to healed, not really, but functional? Absolutely.

And at that moment, I was not functional.

It is not my nature to sit parked on the side of a highway, bawling my eyes out so hard I couldn't breathe, feeling like the world was crashing down around me and being unable to stop it. That isn't who I am. I wasn't functioning. Which, if you are anything like me, you know that being overly aware of your problems, understanding them, is your worst enemy, especially when you can't actually fix it, can't get around them. A lot of therapists will say you are very self-aware and they take that to mean you don't need help, but you do. You just have to find the right one.