More Reasons You Shouldn't Fuck Kids

I got this from the blog that inspired this blog, Reasons You Shouldn’t Fuck Kids.

This is what happens to people who are fucked as kids. It happened to me and I (thankfully) survived, it happened to Butterfly, of Reasons You Shouldn’t Fuck Kids, and it ended Bill Zeller’s life. So many of us feel like we are alone, I mean totally, completely alone. But the honest truth is that we aren’t— there are many, many people out there who have experienced this on some level, but our abusers, the social structures around us, and our peers have silenced us.

That’s why I write this blog— because even though it hurts each and every time I post on here, and even though I have a hard enough time keeping myself together, I know that there are people out there who need to hear this: You are not alone. Someone understands how you feel.

I urge you to talk— whether it’s face to face with another person, anonymously online, or in a public space. There is an absence of voices here. There’s a silence because that’s how our abusers want(ed) it, so we need to fight it by speaking out.

We lost another survivor to suicide today. Bill Zeller, 27 years old, was pursuing a doctoral degree in computer science, having earned his master’s degree from Princeton in 2008. He had a beautiful, bright future, but he could not get over his history of being raped as a child. Like many of us, he thought his trauma would always be his life, his past would always be his present and future. I wish he had known how much better his life would have gotten.

Most survivors have flirted with suicide, including myself, and this is why you shouldn’t fuck kids.

I did not know Mr. Zeller, but I sure do understand the kind of pain that being a survivor of child sexual abuse causes.  I understand feeling so fucked up and ‘otherized’ by surviving the abuse that suicide seems like the most natural answer. Every time one of us loses our battle with suicide, we all lose. When we kill ourselves, our abusers win, and another of us is silenced forever. I beg you, if you are thinking about suicide at all, please, please, please call 1-800-SUICIDE (1-800-784-2843).

Bill Zeller left a suicide note explaining why he decided to end his life.  He asked that anyone who post the letter do so in its entirety.  So, out of respect to a fellow child sexual abuse survivor, I am posting his suicide note in its entirety.

Here is his letter:

I have the urge to declare my sanity and justify my actions, but I assume I’ll never be able to convince anyone that this was the right decision. Maybe it’s true that anyone who does this is insane by definition, but I can at least explain my reasoning. I considered not writing any of this because of how personal it is, but I like tying up loose ends and don’t want people to wonder why I did this. Since I’ve never spoken to anyone about what happened to me, people would likely draw the wrong conclusions.

My first memories as a child are of being raped, repeatedly. This has affected every aspect of my life. This darkness, which is the only way I can describe it, has followed me like a fog, but at times intensified and overwhelmed me, usually triggered by a distinct situation. In kindergarten I couldn’t use the bathroom and would stand petrified whenever I needed to, which started a trend of awkward and unexplained social behavior. The damage that was done to my body still prevents me from using the bathroom normally, but now it’s less of a physical impediment than a daily reminder of what was done to me.

This darkness followed me as I grew up. I remember spending hours playing with legos, having my world consist of me and a box of cold, plastic blocks. Just waiting for everything to end. It’s the same thing I do now, but instead of legos it’s surfing the web or reading or listening to a baseball game. Most of my life has been spent feeling dead inside, waiting for my body to catch up.

At times growing up I would feel inconsolable rage, but I never connected this to what happened until puberty. I was able to keep the darkness at bay for a few hours at a time by doing things that required intense concentration, but it would always come back. Programming appealed to me for this reason. I was never particularly fond of computers or mathematically inclined, but the temporary peace it would provide was like a drug. But the darkness always returned and built up something like a tolerance, because programming has become less and less of a refuge.

The darkness is with me nearly every time I wake up. I feel like a grime is covering me. I feel like I’m trapped in a contaminated body that no amount of washing will clean. Whenever I think about what happened I feel manic and itchy and can’t concentrate on anything else. It manifests itself in hours of eating or staying up for days at a time or sleeping for sixteen hours straight or week long programming binges or constantly going to the gym. I’m exhausted from feeling like this every hour of every day.

Three to four nights a week I have nightmares about what happened. It makes me avoid sleep and constantly tired, because sleeping with what feels like hours of nightmares is not restful. I wake up sweaty and furious. I’m reminded every morning of what was done to me and the control it has over my life.

I’ve never been able to stop thinking about what happened to me and this hampered my social interactions. I would be angry and lost in thought and then be interrupted by someone saying “Hi” or making small talk, unable to understand why I seemed cold and distant. I walked around, viewing the outside world from a distant portal behind my eyes, unable to perform normal human niceties. I wondered what it would be like to take to other people without what happened constantly on my mind, and I wondered if other people had similar experiences that they were better able to mask.

Alcohol was also something that let me escape the darkness. It would always find me later, though, and it was always angry that I managed to escape and it made me pay. Many of the irresponsible things I did were the result of the darkness. Obviously I’m responsible for every decision and action, including this one, but there are reasons why things happen the way they do.

Alcohol and other drugs provided a way to ignore the realities of my situation. It was easy to spend the night drinking and forget that I had no future to look forward to. I never liked what alcohol did to me, but it was better than facing my existence honestly. I haven’t touched alcohol or any other drug in over seven months (and no drugs or alcohol will be involved when I do this) and this has forced me to evaluate my life in an honest and clear way. There’s no future here. The darkness will always be with me.

I used to think if I solved some problem or achieved some goal, maybe he would leave. It was comforting to identify tangible issues as the source of my problems instead of something that I’ll never be able to change. I thought that if I got into to a good college, or a good grad school, or lost weight, or went to the gym nearly every day for a year, or created programs that millions of people used, or spent a summer or California or New York or published papers that I was proud of, then maybe I would feel some peace and not be constantly haunted and unhappy. But nothing I did made a dent in how depressed I was on a daily basis and nothing was in any way fulfilling. I’m not sure why I ever thought that would change anything.

I didn’t realize how deep a hold he had on me and my life until my first relationship. I stupidly assumed that no matter how the darkness affected me personally, my romantic relationships would somehow be separated and protected. Growing up I viewed my future relationships as a possible escape from this thing that haunts me every day, but I began to realize how entangled it was with every aspect of my life and how it is never going to release me. Instead of being an escape, relationships and romantic contact with other people only intensified everything about him that I couldn’t stand. I will never be able to have a relationship in which he is not the focus, affecting every aspect of my romantic interactions.

Relationships always started out fine and I’d be able to ignore him for a few weeks. But as we got closer emotionally the darkness would return and every night it’d be me, her and the darkness in a black and gruesome threesome. He would surround me and penetrate me and the more we did the more intense it became. It made me hate being touched, because as long as we were separated I could view her like an outsider viewing something good and kind and untainted. Once we touched, the darkness would envelope her too and take her over and the evil inside me would surround her. I always felt like I was infecting anyone I was with.

Relationships didn’t work. No one I dated was the right match, and I thought that maybe if I found the right person it would overwhelm him. Part of me knew that finding the right person wouldn’t help, so I became interested in girls who obviously had no interest in me. For a while I thought I was gay. I convinced myself that it wasn’t the darkness at all, but rather my orientation, because this would give me control over why things didn’t feel “right”. The fact that the darkness affected sexual matters most intensely made this idea make some sense and I convinced myself of this for a number of years, starting in college after my first relationship ended. I told people I was gay (at Trinity, not at Princeton), even though I wasn’t attracted to men and kept finding myself interested in girls. Because if being gay wasn’t the answer, then what was? People thought I was avoiding my orientation, but I was actually avoiding the truth, which is that while I’m straight, I will never be content with anyone. I know now that the darkness will never leave.

Last spring I met someone who was unlike anyone else I’d ever met. Someone who showed me just how well two people could get along and how much I could care about another human being. Someone I know I could be with and love for the rest of my life, if I weren’t so fucked up. Amazingly, she liked me. She liked the shell of the man the darkness had left behind. But it didn’t matter because I couldn’t be alone with her. It was never just the two of us, it was always the three of us: her, me and the darkness. The closer we got, the more intensely I’d feel the darkness, like some evil mirror of my emotions. All the closeness we had and I loved was complemented by agony that I couldn’t stand, from him. I realized that I would never be able to give her, or anyone, all of me or only me. She could never have me without the darkness and evil inside me. I could never have just her, without the darkness being a part of all of our interactions. I will never be able to be at peace or content or in a healthy relationship. I realized the futility of the romantic part of my life. If I had never met her, I would have realized this as soon as I met someone else who I meshed similarly well with. It’s likely that things wouldn’t have worked out with her and we would have broken up (with our relationship ending, like the majority of relationships do) even if I didn’t have this problem, since we only dated for a short time. But I will face exactly the same problems with the darkness with anyone else. Despite my hopes, love and compatability is not enough. Nothing is enough. There’s no way I can fix this or even push the darkness down far enough to make a relationship or any type of intimacy feasible.

So I watched as things fell apart between us. I had put an explicit time limit on our relationship, since I knew it couldn’t last because of the darkness and didn’t want to hold her back, and this caused a variety of problems. She was put in an unnatural situation that she never should have been a part of. It must have been very hard for her, not knowing what was actually going on with me, but this is not something I’ve ever been able to talk about with anyone. Losing her was very hard for me as well. Not because of her (I got over our relationship relatively quickly), but because of the realization that I would never have another relationship and because it signified the last true, exclusive personal connection I could ever have. This wasn’t apparent to other people, because I could never talk about the real reasons for my sadness. I was very sad in the summer and fall, but it was not because of her, it was because I will never escape the darkness with anyone. She was so loving and kind to me and gave me everything I could have asked for under the circumstances. I’ll never forget how much happiness she brought me in those briefs moments when I could ignore the darkness. I had originally planned to kill myself last winter but never got around to it. (Parts of this letter were written over a year ago, other parts days before doing this.) It was wrong of me to involve myself in her life if this were a possibility and I should have just left her alone, even though we only dated for a few months and things ended a long time ago. She’s just one more person in a long list of people I’ve hurt.

I could spend pages talking about the other relationships I’ve had that were ruined because of my problems and my confusion related to the darkness. I’ve hurt so many great people because of who I am and my inability to experience what needs to be experienced. All I can say is that I tried to be honest with people about what I thought was true.

I’ve spent my life hurting people. Today will be the last time.

I’ve told different people a lot of things, but I’ve never told anyone about what happened to me, ever, for obvious reasons. It took me a while to realize that no matter how close you are to someone or how much they claim to love you, people simply cannot keep secrets. I learned this a few years ago when I thought I was gay and told people. The more harmful the secret, the juicier the gossip and the more likely you are to be betrayed. People don’t care about their word or what they’ve promised, they just do whatever the fuck they want and justify it later. It feels incredibly lonely to realize you can never share something with someone and have it be between just the two of you. I don’t blame anyone in particular, I guess it’s just how people are. Even if I felt like this is something I could have shared, I have no interest in being part of a friendship or relationship where the other person views me as the damaged and contaminated person that I am. So even if I were able to trust someone, I probably would not have told them about what happened to me. At this point I simply don’t care who knows.

I feel an evil inside me. An evil that makes me want to end life. I need to stop this. I need to make sure I don’t kill someone, which is not something that can be easily undone. I don’t know if this is related to what happened to me or something different. I recognize the irony of killing myself to prevent myself from killing someone else, but this decision should indicate what I’m capable of.

So I’ve realized I will never escape the darkness or misery associated with it and I have a responsibility to stop myself from physically harming others.

I’m just a broken, miserable shell of a human being. Being molested has defined me as a person and shaped me as a human being and it has made me the monster I am and there’s nothing I can do to escape it. I don’t know any other existence. I don’t know what life feels like where I’m apart from any of this. I actively despise the person I am. I just feel fundamentally broken, almost non-human. I feel like an animal that woke up one day in a human body, trying to make sense of a foreign world, living among creatures it doesn’t understand and can’t connect with.

I have accepted that the darkness will never allow me to be in a relationship. I will never go to sleep with someone in my arms, feeling the comfort of their hands around me. I will never know what uncontimated intimacy is like. I will never have an exclusive bond with someone, someone who can be the recipient of all the love I have to give. I will never have children, and I wanted to be a father so badly. I think I would have made a good dad. And even if I had fought through the darkness and married and had children all while being unable to feel intimacy, I could have never done that if suicide were a possibility. I did try to minimize pain, although I know that this decision will hurt many of you. If this hurts you, I hope that you can at least forget about me quickly.

There’s no point in identifying who molested me, so I’m just going to leave it at that. I doubt the word of a dead guy with no evidence about something that happened over twenty years ago would have much sway.

You may wonder why I didn’t just talk to a professional about this. I’ve seen a number of doctors since I was a teenager to talk about other issues and I’m positive that another doctor would not have helped. I was never given one piece of actionable advice, ever. More than a few spent a large part of the session reading their notes to remember who I was. And I have no interest in talking about being raped as a child, both because I know it wouldn’t help and because I have no confidence it would remain secret. I know the legal and practical limits of doctor/patient confidentiality, growing up in a house where we’d hear stories about the various mental illnesses of famous people, stories that were passed down through generations. All it takes is one doctor who thinks my story is interesting enough to share or a doctor who thinks it’s her right or responsibility to contact the authorities and have me identify the molestor (justifying her decision by telling herself that someone else might be in danger). All it takes is a single doctor who violates my trust, just like the “friends” who I told I was gay did, and everything would be made public and I’d be forced to live in a world where people would know how fucked up I am. And yes, I realize this indicates that I have severe trust issues, but they’re based on a large number of experiences with people who have shown a profound disrepect for their word and the privacy of others.

People say suicide is selfish. I think it’s selfish to ask people to continue living painful and miserable lives, just so you possibly won’t feel sad for a week or two. Suicide may be a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but it’s also a permanent solution to a ~23 year-old problem that grows more intense and overwhelming every day.

Some people are just dealt bad hands in this life. I know many people have it worse than I do, and maybe I’m just not a strong person, but I really did try to deal with this. I’ve tried to deal with this every day for the last 23 years and I just can’t fucking take it anymore.

I often wonder what life must be like for other people. People who can feel the love from others and give it back unadulterated, people who can experience sex as an intimate and joyous experience, people who can experience the colors and happenings of this world without constant misery. I wonder who I’d be if things had been different or if I were a stronger person. It sounds pretty great.

I’m prepared for death. I’m prepared for the pain and I am ready to no longer exist. Thanks to the strictness of New Jersey gun laws this will probably be much more painful than it needs to be, but what can you do. My only fear at this point is messing something up and surviving.

—-

I’d also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional, dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will be a better place when they’re dead—one with less hatred and intolerance.

If you’re unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially when I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week.

They live in a black and white reality they’ve constructed for themselves. They partition the world into good and evil and survive by hating everything they fear or misunderstand and calling it love. They don’t understand that good and decent people exist all around us, “saved” or not, and that evil and cruel people occupy a large percentage of their church. They take advantage of people looking for hope by teaching them to practice the same hatred they practice.

A random example:

“I am personally convinced that if a Muslim truly believes and obeys the Koran, he will be a terrorist.” – George Zeller, August 24, 2010.

If you choose to follow a religion where, for example, devout Catholics who are trying to be good people are all going to Hell but child molestors go to Heaven (as long as they were “saved” at some point), that’s your choice, but it’s fucked up. Maybe a God who operates by those rules does exist. If so, fuck Him.

Their church was always more important than the members of their family and they happily sacrificed whatever necessary in order to satisfy their contrived beliefs about who they should be.

I grew up in a house where love was proxied through a God I could never believe in. A house where the love of music with any sort of a beat was literally beaten out of me. A house full of hatred and intolerance, run by two people who were experts at appearing kind and warm when others were around. Parents who tell an eight year old that his grandmother is going to Hell because she’s Catholic. Parents who claim not to be racist but then talk about the horrors of miscegenation. I could list hundreds of other examples, but it’s tiring.

Since being kicked out, I’ve interacted with them in relatively normal ways. I talk to them on the phone like nothing happened. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I like pretending I have a family. Maybe I like having people I can talk to about what’s been going on in my life. Whatever the reason, it’s not real and it feels like a sham. I should have never allowed this reconnection to happen.

I wrote the above a while ago, and I do feel like that much of the time. At other times, though, I feel less hateful. I know my parents honestly believe the crap they believe in. I know that my mom, at least, loved me very much and tried her best. One reason I put this off for so long is because I know how much pain it will cause her. She has been sad since she found out I wasn’t “saved”, since she believes I’m going to Hell, which is not a sadness for which I am responsible. That was never going to change, and presumably she believes the state of my physical body is much less important than the state of my soul. Still, I cannot intellectually justify this decision, knowing how much it will hurt her. Maybe my ability to take my own life, knowing how much pain it will cause, shows that I am a monster who doesn’t deserve to live. All I know is that I can’t deal with this pain any longer and I’m am truly sorry I couldn’t wait until my family and everyone I knew died so this could be done without hurting anyone. For years I’ve wished that I’d be hit by a bus or die while saving a baby from drowning so my death might be more acceptable, but I was never so lucky.

—-

To those of you who have shown me love, thank you for putting up with all my shittiness and moodiness and arbitrariness. I was never the person I wanted to be. Maybe without the darkness I would have been a better person, maybe not. I did try to be a good person, but I realize I never got very far.

I’m sorry for the pain this causes. I really do wish I had another option. I hope this letter explains why I needed to do this. If you can’t understand this decision, I hope you can at least forgive me.

Bill Zeller

—-

Please save this letter and repost it if gets deleted. I don’t want people to wonder why I did this. I disseminated it more widely than I might have otherwise because I’m worried that my family might try to restrict access to it. I don’t mind if this letter is made public. In fact, I’d prefer it be made public to people being unable to read it and drawing their own conclusions.

Feel free to republish this letter, but only if it is reproduced in its entirety.

I’m feeling really messed up this morning. I’ve had this thing stuck in my head for the past few days— something my ex told me over text (i know, texting is lame). 

“Yes, I did resent making changes for you, just a little” (in reference to the problems I have with my body, my skin, my allergies, who knows what else)

and “I’m the kind of person who needs someone who can pick me up, you know?” (in reference sweeping off one’s feet)

But what I’m hearing is “you really are fucked up.” Like maybe I was too much to deal with. What I’m hearing is that I wasn’t strong, manly, non-eating disordered, non-major depressive, or generic heterosexual enough for her. I couldn’t be the strong, dependable person because yes, I am a person who is fucked up.  I couldn’t fit that image of perfection because, like so many other people who have been fucked as kids, I feel like I’m damaged goods.

The message here is that I wasn’t an easy person to love. Because that’s the truth— it’s not easy to love someone who has tons of problems. It’s hard when a normal couple fight makes your partner freak out because they’ve been in abusive relationships where being ignored makes them feel completely worthless.  It’s hard when your partner who is supposed to be the strong one is a big fucking mess.

The bottomline is that I was too complicated. I wasn’t normal enough.

But no. Maybe that’s not what this is. Maybe it’s not that I wasn’t normal. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t an easy love.

Lots of people are raised with this perfect idea of love— that one day, you’ll find someone who will come along and somehow complete you, somehow fit everything you need and be everything you want. It’s supposed to just kind of fall into your lap.

But that’s not how things work when you’re fucked as a kid. No. Whether it happens consciously or subconsciously, we are taught that we’re damaged goods— that no one could ever love us because we don’t deserve it or we’re too fucked up.  And you know what? Maybe those people were right, just a little— because tons of people aren’t interested in you if you’re fucked up. It’s just easier to find someone who doesn’t have all of these problems. It’s easier to find someone who is stable and sane. It’s easier to ignore those people and hope that they find someone else.

But is that really love?

Part 1

a friend sent this to me:

Heres another fucking reason you shouldnt fuck kids.

I always feel like no one likes me. I am always wondering who is mad at me and how I fix it. I constantly feel like I am worthless and a shitty friends and someone can always find someone better - so why wouldnt they? Just leave me in the dust, I would. So why wouldnt they?

Most… times I come off as needy. Or an attention whore. I cant tell everyone “You need to constantly reassure me that I am good and that you like me because when I was fucked as a child I was told I was bad and how could anyone like me after that?” Because that would be crude. I suffer in the present because I suffered in the past.

I alienate my own relationships with doubts that stem from my own reality colored by violence and power at the hands of an adult who just had to win and found that win in a voiceless child.

Here’s a little background about myself:

I am Asian American, physically disabled, male-sexed, transgendered, major depressive, a survivor of sexual abuse, a survivor of poverty, a child from a single parent home, eating disordered, refuse to identify as gay, straight, or bisexual, a survivor of two suicide attempts and several other near-death experiences, and a whole host of other things.

I am now attending college, in my third year.  I’m at a prestigious liberal arts school studying things that I love. I have an awesome job, a wonderful girlfriend, and a (generally) supportive family. I am a skilled writer (let’s be honest— I can write better than most amateur poets out there), and I enjoy singing in the choir here and also occasionally sketching and drawing. 

By all counts, and despite all of these crazy things I’ve dealt with, my life is now pretty awesome. But sometimes, I still feel bad; I still feel fucked up. It’s hard to describe that feeling. It’s like, even when things are looking up, and even when my life is going well, there’s still a kind of sadness— an emptiness that sticks around. Maybe it’s because there’s a chemical imbalance (unproven, i’ve never had an MRI) in my brain.

Or maybe it’s because I was fucked as a kid.

Yes, as I go through this, and I start writing about this experience, it seems easy— almost too easy— to blame every little thing on being fucked as a kid. But sometimes, that’s just how it is.  People who experience war, death, and being fucked as kids experience this. Sometimes, we just feel sad, and we don’t know why. We might be conscious of remembering what happened, and we might not. But it’s definitely playing a part there.  It happens to my girlfriend, and it happens to me too.

Sometimes, we just feel this way— we feel fucked up for no reason at all. It’s really hard to explain this to someone else. People will think you’re ignoring them or you hate them or that they did something wrong, or that you’re bullshitting. But it’s there. 

We never asked to feel this way, but now we have to. We have to because we don’t know how else to feel. We do this because it happened, and we can never take that back. We never asked for it to happen, but it did. And now, when it snows, or when someone says a certain phrase, or when someone plays a certain song, or when we’re in an elevator, alone or surrounded by people, it happens— our brains make that tiniest connection, and suddenly, it becomes very hard to breathe. Suddenly, we’re back there again, and we feel all fucked up and wrong inside again, and we don’t know what to do about it.

That’s why you shouldn’t fuck kids.

I had a knife once, pencil black
faded in my pocket, a lock and clasp,
the pen-tip spring, its dime-sized screw
loosened and loosened with every opening.

Click. I cut
the plant glue tape of christmas
packages and birthday wishes.

Click. I sliced
wild bushes and letters open,
as fresh as sweet sugar cane. But

I didn’t carry that gleaming silver
to split boxes. I held it
to split eyes and finger webbing.
I’ve always known that little fact—
that I am afraid.

But then it came apart, like the bridge they split
in two beside my apartment—the screws loosened,
the springs dripped in snow. I buried
that fear then, like a fallen ocean,
a frozen, cracked acorn to sky.

I am sure that there is someone out there who thinks this— that I’m just being whiny or overly sensitive or dwelling on something for far too long.

Here’s what I have to say to you:

First of all, ignorance of this issue is not an excuse. If you don’t know about sexual abuse, sexual assault, and other forms of inhuman violence, then you’ve chosen not to. Anyone who takes even ten minutes to read up on some statistics can understand this. I reserve my right, therefore, to get pissed as hell at you if you don’t know anything.

Second, this is so common and so horrible that you should have had the conscience—the moral humanity—to go beyond those ten minutes and learn about the experiences of others. If you can’t understand why sexual abuse is bad, then you’re obviously a person who has benefited from the dominator culture which has made it possible. If you can’t understand why we can’t “get over it”, and why it sticks with us forever, then you haven’t learned enough.

Third, our experiences are not limited to singular moments or incidents. Even if it only happened once, or half of once, our experiences with sexual abuse have and will continue to affect every single relationship we ever have with other people, platonic, familial, or romantic. Our experiences bleed into other areas of our lives because we were violated physically, mentally, and emotionally— something may appear to be unrelated to our experience (such as an ant in the house), but it actually pulls us right back into it. There are millions of different ways in which a person who survived sexual abuse can be affected.

Fourth, our experiences are also not limited to single individuals. Indeed, we were abused by entire systems which inflicted emotional, economic, social, judicial, or other violence upon us. We were blamed for what happened and even told that it was justified, and we lost jobs, our children, our livelihoods, were abused more, or made ashamed because the system works for the perpetrators. You call us conspiracy theorists and claim that we’re posing blanket assumptions, but you make blanket assumptions right back and assume that the system is flawless. If you can’t look at basic, factual statistics and figure out that something is wrong here and wonder why, then you’re a waste of human space.

Fifth and last, maybe you should examine why you’re angry or annoyed or think we’re stupid or crazy. Maybe you happen to benefit from these systems, and our very existence proves they exist and are flawed. Maybe our very existence is a threat to your convenient way of life.

We can blame whoever the fuck we want to, and we can do it to any extent we desire. This is our right as people who have survived. You aren’t me, and I’m not you. You can’t know how my singular experience with sexual abuse has affected my life. This is my right to be angry and blame and curse and feel and cry, and you aren’t going to take it away from me because I’ve already lost enough.

As I’ve thought over my experience with sexual abuse and my experiences with survivors, one incident in particular sticks out in my mind.

Two years ago at my college, the theatre department put on a student work— a play about rape, from the rapist’s perspective. Obviously, this was a morally grey piece, with no real conclusion about the rapist as completely “good” or “bad”. 

The situation was one of the “nice guy”, the guy who subscribes to patriarchal, domineering relationships of women, but in the backwards way— the one of chivalry, pedestals, and subservience. This form of patriarchy treats women as if they are fragile, pure little dolls who need protection. Ultimately, however, it makes men angry and resentful of the women who, with their “feminine charms”, can somehow control men in every way. It’s the same kind of patriarchy which believes that men own women and are entitled to their bodies, but instead of forcibly taking it with violence, women are “courted” and bought with dates, gifts, and other similar things. In essence, it’s a kind of forced prostitution trading money for sex (or false ideas of  love).

In the story, the “nice guy” had been head-over-heels “in love” with the girl for years. However, he was always just her friend/”big brother”, and nothing more. He finally told her how he felt, but she didn’t feel the same way, and so he was heartbroken. One night, however, she came into his dorm room drunk, and, in a stupor, said something incredibly vague and maybe not even there about feeling the same way. The “nice guy”, of course, took this as an instant cue of sexual availability, and raped her while she was passed out. The rest of the play focused on his guilt and how he eventually confesses.

Now, maybe we could look at this and see the ways in which unequal, dominator-subordinate/patriarchal relationships damage not only women, but men as well. But there was something strange which happened at the end of the play.

At the end of the play, when the professor asked if “anyone had something to say”, just before the rapist is supposed to confess…a woman in the audience stood up and shouted, “women have the right to say no”.

This woman was from the local rape crisis center. She was middle-aged and obviously very angry and bitter. She was very obviously a survivor of sexual abuse and/or rape. For her, the play was triggering and disgusting—she could not even begin to see the gray areas in morality. For her, the experience of abuse was so terrible that it became difficult to even consider the vague idea that her abuser—and, indeed, other abusers—would be human and regret and maybe even need mercy or forgiveness. In the discussion /talk-back after the play, it felt as if anyone who even vaguely felt sympathy for the rapist was almost a rapist themselves.

This woman was trapped in her experience, and she couldn’t find a way out. It was obvious in that she said women could say “no”, not that men need to hear “yes”.  She was so well-ingrained in the system of abuse— the dominator and the subordinate— that she could not see how women needed the empowering “yes”, not the male, sexually inconvenient “no”.  In following this anti-consent perspective of sex, she continued to perpetuate the very system which hurt her in the first place.

That’s what happens when you’re fucked as a kid, or fucked at all without the respect and love you deserve— you get trapped within that place of darkness. You turn on your blinders and, in order to protect yourself and survive, you wipe everyone’s differences down to yes and no, good and bad. But this isn’t a place of happiness; it’s a place governed by an endless feedback loop of experience and re-experience. We want to regain our humanity after having it ripped from our very being, but we only know how to do so by our abusers’ rules.

As I said in one of the first posts on this blog, one of the things which my older brother did to me was try to perform fellatio on me.

Of course, this has fucked me up in all sorts of ways. Almost every time my girlfriend does this to me, there’s that little shadow of a memory which latches on and refuses to let go. Sometimes it’s just a dull ache in my chest, but other times…it’s a double.

Maybe it will make more sense if I explain the double like this. One of the hardest things we—”we”, as in people who were fucked as kids—have to deal with is the way our bodies work, and how they act and react. The human body is programmed to work in certain ways. If you touch a hot stove, it hurts, and if you walk into a river, it’s cold. The problem is that if someone touches or violates you, regardless of  whether you want it to or not, you can’t stop your body from its sensory reactions.

I still remember what it felt like when my brother did that to me. I remember it every time because every time it happens, my body reacts in the same way. It’s programmed to do that— it’s never going to change. This is why, when you’re fucked as a kid, it isn’t something you can “just get over”. It stays with you forever, and every time you are intimate with someone, those same feelings come up and you get all confused and hurt and scared and alone all over again. It’s like the scar I have on my finger from a kitchen accident— I can use knives just fine, but I’ll always remember that pain when I chopped off the tip and it bled down the drain. 

I’ll always re-experience that hurt; it’s been imprinted in my body. Every time I have sex, I will feel those feelings I felt when I was abused again. I can’t trust my body anymore, at least not completely, because it is always putting me back into that place as ten year-old me. And, no matter how wonderful it is with my partner, I will always have that double experience when the sensation is repeated inside my body, just like clockwork.

For some people who were fucked as kids, our distrust of the body turns into hatred. We start to question why our bodies did this us and why they continue to do so. That questioning eventually becomes self-loathing. For many people, it turns into a self-punishing behavior or an eating disorder. Susan Bordo, in her article on Anorexia Nervosa, gives some personal accounts from eating disordered women who portrayed their bodies as stale cages and places to escape from:

The sense of accomplishment exhilarates me, spurs me to continue on and on. It provides a sense of purpose and shapes my life with distractions from insecurity…I shall become an expert [at losing weight]…The constant downward trend [of the scale] somehow comforts me, gives me visible proof that I can exert control.

In doing so however, we buy into that dualism of the dominator and subordinate, or the black and white extremes which our abusers have forced us into.  In our search for security and control, we sacrifice ambiguities.

The logic here is that if we can separate our bodies and control their wild feelings and urges, then maybe we won’t ever be hurt again.  When you’re fucked as a kid, you’ll go to extremes to avoid being in that place again—that place which is worse than hell.  But this is, of course, impossible to achieve without death. It’s no wonder that survivors of abuse are many times more likely to commit suicide— it’s not just an escape from the pain of the past, but also from the pain of the future.

I’m sure that almost everyone has read or heard of this “classic” Greek tragedy. If you’ve already read this, just skip the next two paragraphs.

In short: there’s a kingdom where a prince, Oedipus, is born. Upon his birth, his father, the king, hears a prophecy that his son will one day kill him. Fearing this, he decides to send his son away to be raised by foster parents. When the son grows up, he goes out on his own; along the way, he encounters a man whom he believes to be a bandit, and he slays him in self defense. Eventually, he reaches the gates of a city which is under siege by a monstrous sphinx. He solves its riddle and chases it away, becoming the city’s hero and eventually the new king after marrying the recently widowed queen.

Then things start to get really fucked up— a blind prophet, Tiresias, comes in and says that the city will soon face blah blah blah some tragedy. The gods are pissed off because someone in the city has committed a grave sin and it hasn’t been atoned for. Well guess what? It turns out that the bandit Oedipus killed was the king (AKA his father), and he just married and had sex with his mother.  After learning of this, Oedipus is ashamed of himself and atones by gouging out his eyes and living the rest of his days in misery. Also, his mom hangs herself.

The story of Oedipus is supposed to be some terrible (yet wonderfully entertaining) tragedy. We can’t help but feel sorry for him. I mean, he wasn’t really at fault. It’s just something unfortunate which happened. This is how high school and college students are trained (yes, trained) to interpret the story, but maybe that’s not all it’s about. Maybe we should consider it from a different viewpoint:

1) Oedipus is “destined” or “fated” to end up this way.
2) This fate includes having sex with his mother.
3) Oedipus is disenfranchised (sent off, abandoned, etc) because the ruling class of the patriarchy, the king, holds interest in protecting itself from any threats to its power.
4) The gods, who are magically always right, set this ridiculous chain of events into motion.
5) Oedipus “takes responsibility” for his shameful actions by atoning through self-mutilation.
6) Oedipus literally has no other purpose to his life than to fuck his mom and gouge his eyes out for doing so.

Take a close look at numbers 1 and 2. What’s missing here? That’s right— consent.  Think about it in terms of rape or sexual abuse, especially considering what happens with his mother. Who was raped here? Oedipus. He had no chance in hell at breaking out of his “god given” fate; it was set before he could even eat solid foods. In fact, no matter which way you look at it, it’s clear— Oedipus was raped. Based on his reaction when he learns of what he did, it’s pretty obvious that he would not have had sex with his mother if he knew who she was. 

But wait a second! Oedipus’ mother (note how we never seem to remember the woman’s name) was raped too. She didn’t know that the man she was marrying and having sex with was her long lost son. Yes, she probably corroborated with the king to give Oedipus away, but she didn’t deserve what happened to her. It doesn’t matter if you’re a mass murderer—no one deserves to have their entire being violated and torn to pieces.  She was raped, and that’s never right in any sense. The story, however, tries to give some kind of fucked up justification for it as an honor killing.

This is where it gets really fucked up. Essentially, we had two people who were raped by being forced into having sex with one another. But who forced them? The gods. Yes, the gods— the magical, omnipotent, flawless gods who one day decided, “Hey, life is boring. Let’s set up this Oedipus guy and his family for tragedy. Everyone will talk about how fucked up it was for centuries to come.”  Interestingly enough, the gods are not questioned in this story, even once.  It’s obvious that they set up this family for a ton of ridiculous shit— hell, they may have even manipulated them into these situations. Yet for some reason, no one ever wises up and says “What the fuck guys. The gods are total fucking jerks.”

This is where the Oedipus story gets even more fucked up. First of all, we have this all-powerful group of fuckheads who decided to rape two people. Often, our abusers are those who hold positions of social, economic, or physical power over us. It is these positions which give them the power to control us, and they also protect our abusers from any questioning or accusations (such as a child accusing a parent or a student versus a teacher).  Here, too, we have the conveniently absent skepticism of the gods.  We never ask why no one questions the gods, but it’s pretty clear— no one wants to be raped like Oedipus and his mother.  This threat of harm by the dominator over the subordinate has been seen thousands of times in history, whether it was black lynchings, the rape of black female slaves, LGBTQ killings, or vitriolage (acid attacks and disfigurement) of women in asian and middle eastern countries. This is what happens in a culture where sexual availability and entitlement is the law— the body of the subordinate is controlled through violence.

The trauma of being raped (whether physically or mentally) is too much for Oedipus and his mother, so they resort to self-harm. Anyone who has survived sexual abuse can tell you right away that one of the largest challenges they have to overcome is to stop behaviors or thoughts of self-harm; these can be thoughts which prevent happiness in exchange for safety, or coping mechanisms such as eating disorders which block out or attempt to control the emotional stress. Again, the blame is dumped on the survivors, with the message being: “got raped? too bad. go kill yourself.” In Oedipus, it’s not the rapist who is at fault— indeed, the person who was raped is expected to atone for whatever backwards, conveniently privileged shit society tells them they did, such as wearing skimpy clothing, making eye contact, or smiling at the attacker.  It’s like someone stabbing you in the eye, and the cops first asking you if you did anything to piss the other person off.

But this isn’t where it ends—oh no. What’s worse is how we are taught this story. American, European, and other Westernized cultures love to fawn over the “civilized” achievements of the Greeks and the Romans.  It’s no coincidence that these societies were male-dominated and anti-consent.  It’s simply in the interests of powerful men to have easy access to women whenever they want. In fact, Plato’s model for The Republic featured a common pool of women separated and organized by good blood and bad blood, AKA a male-privileged, sexually convenient form of eugenics. No one ever mentions this, but it’s right there. Ideas like this— ideas that condone old men having sexual relationships with their adolescent students— which continue to influence modern thinkers in the west. 

We don’t want to admit Greco-Roman culture is by definition rape culture, and we are taught to admire it.  Indeed, we focus on the architecture and the plays and poems over the actual content and meaning of the ideas. We are taught that Oedipus is a masterwork—a classic work of literature with infinite, timeless value— when it’s really about how Oedipus and his mom were raped for the entertainment of the gods, thrown away like pieces of trash, and how the gods were adored for doing so. In the face of these rape-convenient undertones, it’s no wonder that survivors of sexual abuse continue to blame themselves for doing some false, double-standard wrong. It’s no wonder that people still view rape as formed around the absence of a no instead of the absence of a yes— our western society is based upon a rape culture which is force-fed and even admired within our schools.

edit: After reading Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Patriarchy, I discovered that there’s an even more obvious example of this in The Odyssey. When Odysseus returns, after killing the suitors, he makes the “servants” (all women) who were unfaithful and slept with people besides himself clean up his bloody mess…and then he hangs them, one by one.  This is something that is typically cut out of school readings, but if you find an unabridged version of The Odyssey, it’s right there. It’s a pretty obvious example of male privilege in that Odysseus can own many women but the women can be with many men.  See for yourself (560-590).

In the past few weeks, my girlfriend, who is also a survivor of sexual abuse, has relapsed into her past. Her abuse happened primarily during the winter, and so, every year, when winter comes around, she has to face those same feelings again. This means that we are less intimate, and when we are, we make sure that we both feel comfortable and safe. I am not a person who believes that just because you’ve had sex once, it suddenly means every time after is automatically consented for. So it’s not a problem for us; we work with this need for safety, and it ends up making us stronger.

Sometimes, this problem is impossible to cross. The other day, I wanted to kiss in the closet in this apartment. What I didn’t know was that some of the abuse my girlfriend experienced was in closets.  It is unlikely that we will be able to try this anytime soon—when you’re fucked as a kid, you have to avoid certain situations because they bring up painful memories and feelings. This is called a “trigger’. It’s like when you get a nasty cut on your hand when you’re little— even after it’s healed up, that scar still aches when the weather changes.

Earlier today, I woke up and, because we had so much sex the day before, I felt sore. I asked my girlfriend if she had had sex with me when I was asleep, and she said yes— without a condom.  If we were a “normal” couple of people who had never been fucked as kids, then the following freakout would have centered around the lack of a condom. For me, however, this brought up all of those old fears of being touched at night.  A simple joke which would have been borderline funny for someone else put me back into that situation as powerless, ten year-old me.  When you’re fucked as a kid, your partner can’t joke about these things— no matter how well-intentioned.

When you’re fucked as a kid, even simple, ordinary couple things can be a challenge. It’s not enough to just be there in the relationship—you have to try hard to make each other comfortable.  But that’s the thing—we should never have to work extra hard to be intimate and safe. Intimacy and close relationships should have been natural for us, and we should be able to handle these situations without falling apart and crying on each other. I shouldn’t have to worry that, when we’re having sex or touching or even just kissing, that I’ll remind her of the people who have hurt her before, and she shouldn’t have to worry about the same for me. But no matter how much we heal, this worry will always be there.

That’s what happens when you’re fucked as a kid—it leaves a tiny, almost invisible mark of fear and pain in what should be beautiful and unburdened.

I had some trouble deciding whether or not to turn comments on, but I came to the conclusion that it’s better to have some open dialogue here. The whole point of this blog is to fight silence, so I’m not going to let my fear of trolls or other bullshit stop me from having discussion and interaction with reasonable people.  Also, I’ve set it so that all comments must be approved first.

Additionally, you are welcome to ask me anything you want, and to submit your own experiences or ideas as well. There are links at the bottom of the page, or you can go there by appending /ask or /submit to the end of the URL.

Do you remember that book and film, The Outsiders?

In the book, the main character is Ponyboy, a sweet, innocent young boy who is drawn into this conflict between his gang and another rival gang.  There are outsiders fighting outsiders, and to top it off, Ponyboy is an outsider within his own group by virtue of his innocence.  But it’s not necessarily bad— his friends protect him and make sure he isn’t harmed.

Now let’s change the story a little. What if The Greasers were actually a bunch of men who had survived rape? What if Ponyboy was the one kid who wasn’t raped by someone, but molested or touched by someone close to him? Is his individual experience any “better” or “worse”?

Sometimes, when I’m writing these posts, or when I’m considering my identity as a person who survived sexual abuse, I start to think of the other people—women and men—in my life who also faced similar struggles. I am amazed that C, a girl I once met in therapy, managed to overcome being raped as a child and, after confronting her attacker in a court testimony, went on to live on her own and attend college.  I am in awe of the strength of my friend R, who survived rape and now lives his life day to day with a smile on his face.  I believe in the courage of S, the girl in my Women’s Studies class who, after being raped, carried the child of that rape in her body until it miscarried in the second trimester. There are dozens of these stories in my life and in the relationships and friendships I have with others, and many more which I’ll never even know were there. 

I go through all of these faces and these stories in my mind, and then I realize that I was lucky. It’s a horrible, morbid thought— I am thankful I was never raped or touched more than a few moments. 

I am thankful that I am not these people.

And then my sigh of relief turns into one of shame— I am ashamed of myself for even thinking such things.  I am ashamed that I, a person who got to keep his purity and give it away when he wanted to, have made such a big deal about some stupid thing that happened twice when I was ten.

But this is all wrong.  What happened to me was wrong. Yes, it wasn’t as bad. But it doesn’t make it any less horrible. I named this blog “More Reasons You Shouldn’t Fuck Kids” because yes, I was fucked as a kid.  It wasn’t in the literal sense, but I was certainly fucked emotionally. If I wasn’t fucked, then I wouldn’t have tried to kill myself. If I wasn’t fucked, then I wouldn’t have gotten a 2.3 GPA in high school and barely gotten into college because I couldn’t handle learning about everything all at once.  If I wasn’t fucked, then I would have stayed with K because I wouldn’t need someone who understands what I’ve been through.

What happened to me was fucking horrible. There’s no other way to say it. But it wasn’t as horrible as being raped. It was horrible enough to completely annihilate my sense of self and my body, but no— it wasn’t as bad.  I tell myself that I don’t belong in the same category as those people who were actually raped and fought tooth and nail to keep themselves together.

I tell myself that my experience didn’t matter.

That’s one of the traps of sexual abuse, you see— it makes us feel and think in extremes.  Insignificant little things, like an ant in the house, can be a serious attack on our personal sense of security. We were violated in unimaginable ways, so now we overreact because we are terrified of being hurt again— of returning to that place where we were powerless. 

In this space, there isn’t any room for grey area—the threat to our being was so grave that we can’t risk being in that same situation again. That’s why it’s incredibly difficult for us to accept our attackers as human beings; if we do that, then it means they could come back and hurt us.

At the same time, it means that the abuser is just like us, and we are just like them. I go through this reaction of being thankful for not being raped because I’m afraid to admit that I’m a part of this group. It’s a denial that what happened was really that terrible. This denial is also coupled with this weird fear that I don’t “belong” with those other people who have experienced “worse” things than I have.  In short, it makes me an outsider twice over.  A person who was molested may think that they could never relate to someone who was raped, and a person who was raped once may feel like their experience can’t even compare to someone who was raped multiple times.

But this is exactly what our abusers want us to do— they want to separate us so that we can’t fight back. It’s the same reason why we’re locked in places or shut out from the world.  They made us think in extremes so that, instead of working together, we would all be overwhelmed by what happened and they could continue to abuse us.  Audre Lorde, in describing female competition between black women and white women for black men, called this a “horizontal” movement, fighting amongst one another, instead of a “vertical” one which would challenge the social structures of racism which made black men scarce.  The same happens here— we discount our experiences or we try to see whose was “worse” when we should really be looking at the fact that it was all terrible, and that we can all relate and understand each other.