tw: csa

I am scared that I won’t make it past this month. What do you do when therapy has unearthed that I was sexually abused and neglected as a kid by my family? My heart and head are so shattered because I have been carrying this in my body for so long thinking it was something innately wrong in me. The way I experience sex & intimacy, like I’m a passenger in my own skin just watching, like it just happens to me and I’m fawning over and over to make sure I’m not misbehaving. How the fuck did I overlook that — I’m angry at myself, I betrayed myself, but see it now and won’t look away. Now I am also preparing a formal diagnoses for ASD because an RAADS-R assessment highly recommended it, which would help explain the major masking I’ve been doing since I can first remember and especially during sex. My brother had a disability and I’m thoroughly convinced my mother hid mine and intentionally sabotaged sessions with therapists/psychiatrist to cope with having one disabled son and prevent the validity of another. I always lost time because she needed the room alone with them, even during my episodes. I just want to understand. My top priority is facing and healing the ways I had been abusive or harmful in my close relationships -- actually sitting down and studying, seeing specialists, completely isolating out of safety. I don’t want to be unsafe towards people I tremendously care about. I really need help. I really need a friend. I can’t do this all by myself. I want to repair everything in me and help my loved ones while they heal too. I’m so scared I won’t survive.

tw: csa

today was the first time I spoke about the constant sexual abuse I had experienced throughout my late childhood/adolescence/young adulthood. i shared a part of me that no one has ever seen. i am lucky that my therapist was also a survivor of csa and immediately wanted to help me and understood that there’s no systems in place or many communities that support the internalized shame that follows, the shame that creates more disassociation from self during any kind of physical intimacy and creates more violations of others, no matter how unintentional harm was. oversexualization has shaped me since i was a kid and has kept me in a cycle of abuse that i have been so traumatized from, causing reinjury and to stay in similar dynamics that have led to me being assaulted more times and to harm others close to me with my actions, like digital voyeurism (screen recording sexual acts without asking) in my recent life. acceptance has been the biggest part of my healing and accountability right now. this has led to a full reevaluation of my morals, a deeper understanding and further education of consent and my relation to afabs and their safety, all while working with a specialist/therapist to help guide me towards coming back home to me. I’ve been studying transformative justice for the past year and I really believe in trying restorative acts for loved ones that I’ve harmed and towards people who’ve harmed me. i send love to my family and friends, i want them to heal -- there’s no belief in me that everyone who hurt me wanted to hurt me intentionally or be abusive, it’s clear that sexual/physical abuse and mental disorders like c-ptsd and addiction played massive roles in their choices. and i will never spend my life continuing the penal and carceral system, whether socially like abandonment/outcasting/harassment or through the use of government, because prison, isolation, banishment, punishment are all acts of violation towards bodies, feeding the cycle of violence. no matter how righteous, that will never be the right choice, especially as a queer person of color. it’s all so immense and I really need community/support from friends, but guilt and shame keeps me immobilized with panic that I’m disposable. most days i want to take my life with the weight of it all and that feeling never really leaves, but i’ve been holding on to the thought that maybe i have to be the one who has to end this cycle of abuse my family has been caught in. that has to die before me.

if I die first, please know i tried.