Survive

When you are born into, and grow up in a life of total abuse, you are not like other people.  Your brain is wired differently to others.  How you see and understand reality is completely different to those around you. Your normal is totally foreign to anyone else. And their world is totally foreign to you.  It is chaotic, confusing,  overwhelming and incomprehensible. 

This doesn't stop when the abuse stops.  Your brain still works that way. In time it can be rewired, but that is a very long process, with many years of misunderstanding and pain. These survivors of abuse don't mean to be weird or rude.  Sometimes they have honestly never been taught any other way to survive. Survive,  not live, survive.  Some from birth, must fight every day to survive.  These aren't adults with street smarts, or Bear Grills, with years of expert training. These are babies,  toddlers,  barely able to talk or walk and all they have ever known is abuse and how to survive. 

It stays with you for your lifetime.  You learn to only trust yourself. You are constantly vigilant. You learn the world is a hard and dangerous place.  And you learn that even the nicest people can turn on you in an instant.

 And when these times come,  you can't go into your mind to find a safe place to hide,  because in there is every person who abused you,  every memory of the abuse, sitting, waiting, for you to see them again. There is no safe place in a mind built this way. Only the constant reminder that you have to fight to survive.  Every day.  And if you don't have the strength to fight today....... maybe you don't survive. 

Things my Mother taught me.

Im not good enough

It's always my fault

I make trouble

I exaggerate

She should never have had me

Im slow and lazy

Im fat

Im unloveable 

Im a disappointment

Im weak

Im over sensitive

Im useless

Im not attractive 

How to sew

No Hope

Today there has been no hope. No hope for help.  No hope for fighting for what we need. No hope for the support we need to heal.  When things get hard even the best people start to back away,  make excuses, pretend they aren't involved. Today we wonder if there truly is anyone that can help us heal. 

We have said before that hope is the key to survival.  Without hope there is nothing to live for. 

We don't want to die but we can't live our life void of hope either. 

Something will come up, people say, but they are merely empty platitudes to calm their own fear of hopelessness. 

We don't want to die never having left our mark in this world. We would prefer to see justice,  but that seems impossible. We feel to weak for vengeance.  We feel forgotten,  beaten down,  invisible . Please don't let us die this way.  Please may our life have meaning.  Please.