People Gave Me Things

I'm not sure where to begin with this post. I have been in hell here. It came to a head Friday morning in one of those awful meltdowns that ended in an emergency call to the therapist. I think I'm okay now. And I don't mean that in an "I'm ready to throw myself off a bridge, but I'll be fine" kind of way. I mean it in an "I still feel kind of bad, but I feel other things, too" kind of way. The images and the nightmares that have been torturing me are coming from a time when I was very small. They are also linked into when I was ten years old in the fourth grade. It was then that these images first began to stalk me. I still can't talk about the content of the images. There was a barrier in the way that I had to deal with first. Maybe I've cleared it. Maybe. The images, though originating from earlier trauma, started after an incident at school. This is an excerpt from what I wrote to my therapist about it when that part of things started clicking together in my head:



...I was especially afraid after I told you about the second therapist I had and what he did. You remember reading that, don’t you? Well, there is something else, but I haven't told you. Same deal, only it was the school psychologist. I was in fourth grade. He was new to the school and he called all of the students down to his office in small groups so he could meet everyone. I suppose he was screening to see if anyone needed services. Only that was not what he was really screening for. He was trolling for victims. He chose me, so I guess he knew what he was doing. He settled on a very small group of girls in my class. There were three or four of us as I recall. He called us down to his office after he had met the children and settled in with the faculty. We were called down to his office a couple of times and he asked us lots and lots of questions about our lives and our families. He seemed nice. I liked him and I trusted him, so I answered whatever he asked. It made me feel special that he paid attention to me and wanted to talk to me. I thought he liked me and the other girls in a nice way. I thought he liked us the way our teacher did. The last day I ever saw him, we were again called to his office. That time, he told us we were going for a walk. One of us mentioned something about it being against the rules to leave the school grounds, but he said it was only against the rules to leave without permission from someone at school, and that it was okay since we were with him. He lied. We went for a walk. The school was on the same street as my house. I don’t recall if it broke up or retained the same street name between my house and the school, but both locations shared the same wooded area as a backyard. For the life of me, I can’t remember what we talked about on that walk. I do remember feeling uncomfortable after we got too far away from the school. We stopped at the edge of the woods. I don’t remember what we did there. I think we just stood there for a few minutes. I got the feeling he wanted us to go IN the woods. I said something or other about how we should go back to school and he said something or other and we eventually started walking back.

It wasn’t too many days after that when he called me and the same other girls to come downstairs to his office again. Only that time, our teacher refused to let us go. She seemed upset. She told us to stay in our seats and she went across the hall to talk to another teacher and I heard a little bit of what she said to her in the hallway because my desk was close to the door. She said something about the same group of little girls too many times to his office in too short a time - and for what? She didn’t know for what. She said something about something being wrong about the situation. I can’t remember for certain if anyone asked me any questions, but I remember that the new school psychologist disappeared in a hurry. The teacher knew about people like him and she stopped him. Someone listened to her and believed her and then he couldn’t hurt us. But I still got hurt.

It was after that when images similar to the ones that are stalking me now first started. He stirred up something from when I was little and I had no way to talk about it. Even if I had been able to figure out what was wrong, who was I going to tell? The school psychologist, maybe? I was NOT a dumb kid. I was a SMART kid. I kept my freakin’ mouth shut. I kept my mouth shut and I played with my Barbie and Ken dolls in the Barbie CAMPER.
Camping was a Barbie doll orgy. Over and over and over. All camping, all the time.

None of the teachers could have known about the Barbies, but I think someone at the school realized that some kind of damage might have been done and I think they tried to help me. I don’t remember if anything different happened with the other girls, but the school librarian suddenly ‘adopted’ me. I went to the library a lot and I was her little friend who helped her with the books and got to read stories to the little kids when I finished my classroom work. She helped me so much. She was very nice to me and she let me check out more books at one time than what was normally allowed. She said it was because she knew that I loved books and was a very fast reader and she knew that I would take extra special care of them for her. And I did. I took very good care of them. I had an orange crate and I filled it up at the library every week and my sister helped me lug it home. I took the books home and they comforted me while my mother stared hateful daggers and my father beat me and threatened me. They were there for me in that house where my father hit my mother and my mother fucked anything with a dick and my father wore her wig and waved his naked penis at me and laughed like a maniac about it.

Do you remember the dream I told you about in a recent email where you came to the door of an apartment to bring books to some little girls? They really needed those books. The apartment was the one I lived in on the army housing base at that time. I saw myself there when you came to the door. It was me and I was about ten years old. The other girl was much smaller. I only saw her from the back, but I knew who she was. She was waiting for you. I think she knew you would come...



I was so afraid to tell my therapist about the school psychologist and what happened to get those images going back then. There has been so much trauma and sometimes I don't know what is coming from where. Sometimes I am terrified that I won't be believed. Worse, I was scared that he would be afraid of me. I was scared that he would think I was a liar who goes around making up false accusations against men. And therapists. I can't even begin to explain how terrible this feeling was and what kind of hell it plunged me into. It made me not even want to be alive. I was drowning. Even my own husband was afraid, which made me more afraid than I already was. I was drowning fast. Then... the therapist swam out to get me. He didn't leave me and he believes me. He believes me and he is not afraid. Now I'm much less afraid.

I was in danger and my teacher gave me safety. I was alone in misery and the school librarian gave me friendship. And books. She gave me books. I was drowning and my therapist gave me air to breathe. And books in my dreams. He gave me hope. And my husband? Well, the man must truly love me not to ditch. This is a really rough ride.