Watching Jaycee

I watched the interview of Jaycee Dugard and was surprised at the similarities between her and I, though our experiences were vastly different.  I can already hear someone shouting “How dare you compare yourself to her, you didn’t suffer as she did.” And they would be right, I know nothing of how she suffered, what she endured.  But this is not a competition to validate pain through who has suffered the greatest.  There are women, and men, who have not suffered to the extent I have, but it does not invalidate their pain.  There are others who have suffered a great deal more than I have, such as Jaycee Dugard, and it does not invalidate my pain.  This is not a competition, never has been, but somewhere along the line we have minimized our own suffering because it was not as great as someone else’s.  It is like saying one hundred pennies has less value than a dollar bill.  I am not comparing what she suffered with my own suffering.  I am simply noticing we share some things in common.

She says she was able to survive the eighteen years she spent captive at the hands of this clearly psychotic man because she refused to let him have her soul.  I remember feeling exactly the same way during one of the beatings from my parents.  She talked about never giving up hope, though I cannot imagine how hope remained alive for her, and I have always had hope.  She says she wrote her book to let other victims of sexual abuse know it is not their shame to bear; the shame belongs to the person who victimized them.  That is why I write about my own experiences.  She says she wants to expose the secrets, and stare down the abuse.  I agree, but I say we must acknowledge it has caused us pain.  I like how she says it better.  We are saying the same things, but I like how she says it.

There are things in her book she acknowledges, but cannot speak aloud.  That is also why I write.  I have written hundreds of journals over the years, trying to give voice to something that is so painful it is unspeakable, even after all these years.  Until recently, those journals were private, but I have been sharing bits of them at a time.  There are things that happened to me I cannot bring myself to say aloud.  Saying them aloud might make them a little too real, and certainly more visceral.  I need that small degree of separation to allow myself a measure of distance between what happened and how I feel.  So does she.  It is how we are able to face each day and live in the moment.  Like Jaycee, I live my life for joy, because the people who hurt me when I was little do not get to have any more of my life. 

The only thing I would have liked to have seen emphasized more in the interview was the lasting effects of her ordeal.  This would not have to come from Jaycee herself, though she did talk about how the sound of the lock turning still haunts her.  Her therapist was a small part of the interview, and she mentioned almost in passing, that Jaycee has had lasting effects from the abuse.  It bothered me it was not discussed because the heartwarming happy images the interview showed of Jaycee did not portray the reality of what that man did to her.  It did not convey what horror she must have endured and continues to endure as a result of his actions.  Until that horror is made known, is realized in a very tangible manner, we can continue to turn our heads away from the reality it leaves behind in its wake.  My impression is that Jaycee herself does not wish to focus on those things that still haunt her, and actually, neither do I.  I want to keep moving forward and grow as a person, and in spirit.  That is what I do most of the time.

The therapist talked about how acknowledging gratitude in your life is important to healing.  You cannot imagine how immensely grateful I am to have emerged from my childhood as the person I am today.  It is also that gratitude which allows me to expose what lasting affects the profound abuse I suffered as a child left.  I consider myself fortunate to be where I am today.  I have seen so many other people who emerged so badly broken, their lives hold little meaning.  I am talking people who became lost in drugs, alcohol, food or shiftlessness as a result of trauma from childhood.  I am dumbfounded I never became one of those statistics.  I am grateful I did not.  It is because they can no longer speak for themselves that I speak of the consequences of abuse.  I tell my story, because they cannot tell theirs. 

I do not live in the past, the past lives with me.  Every night I delay the simple act of going to bed is a remnant of the terror I lived as a child.  Every day I awaken to a bed of twisted sheets and covers is a reminder of what I live out in nightmares I can’t remember.  For no apparent reason, an image of my father sexualized will flash into my brain.  I don’t go swimming because my grandmother molested us in the lake, under the water, by “bathing” us well past the time we could bathe ourselves.  I had to learn to socialize with others because I was not taught those skills as a child.  Learning them as an adult is mostly a matter of negative reinforcement.  That is, I learned when things I said or did drove people away from me instead of to me. And so it is more comfortable for me to be alone, to isolate myself away from social experiences.  I had to learn how to be engaged in life, instead of blunting myself off from it.  I had to learn how to identify what I was feeling, and how to deal with the emotions I had.  Of course the first step in that process was learning to have any emotions at all.  The chronic and severe insomnia is a result of the feelings of vulnerability I have when I sleep. 

I wrote about being raised to live through a series of lies.  It was very hard to learn to live my life in truth.  I married my first husband because he was the type of man my father modeled for me.  My first husband was a copy of my father, except my first husband did not drink.  Everything he did, he did sober.  I battled with anorexia and bulimia until my early thirties, when I finally was able to overcome my body image being linked to my value as a human being.  I almost never look at my body in a mirror, for fear that might trigger old responses.  All I look at is how my clothes fit, and do I look nice in them.  For a long time, I was sexually promiscuous, because my mother modeled my only worth was in my sexuality.  I had to be the center of attention, the life of the party no matter the cost to my personal dignity or reputation.  I did this because I felt invisible, worthless, and the responses from other people was the only way I knew I was real.  Everything I did, I did to excel because I was afraid of being anything less than perfect.  I created a different version of me for everyone I met because who I was had become so well hidden, even I didn’t know I existed.  I become what I thought people wanted me to be.  I will talk about all this and more in greater detail, and my struggle to become the person I am today.  I can admit these things about myself, because I know where they originated from, and I know I have worked hard to put those things behind me.  The shame of the person I became as an adult belongs to the people who taught me to be that way.  They are no more than a ghost in my life today.

There are many things I am not proud of, but I refuse to carry the shame of it any longer.  I admit the nature of the person I was, because too many people are losing their souls living in a manner inconsistent with the person they once were.  Jaycee Dugard and I do share similarities in how we viewed and processed the abuse we endured.  Where we diverge is that by the time of her capture, she knew what it is was like to be loved, she had been taught and modeled social interactions, and most important of all, she knew who she was before she was kidnapped.  She will never know who she would have been had that event never happened to her.  I will never know what possible futures I could have had if I had parents who were functional.  I had to peel away all the layers the abuse covered me in so I could find the person I was, the person I hid so deeply that it took years to find.

And like Jaycee, I want the overall impression of what I leave behind is hope.  The pain does not have to be your constant companion; you do not have to give yourself away in order to receive love, and you don’t have to bury your pain to escape it.  Life is meant to be lived in happiness, not horror.  Our souls are upon this earth to attempt to achieve happiness and fulfillment.  We are meant to be kind and loving towards one another, and to be in service to mankind.  We are not borne upon this earth in order to suffer.  The personal and unspoken suffering adults endure stemming from an abusive past is not a medal to be worn, or a badge of courage.  It is not a hallmark of an irreparably damaged soul.  Our continued suffering does not validate our victimization, it only prolongs it.  The suffering begins to end when we stare it down, as Jaycee put it.  I couldn’t have said it better myself.