Raw Wounds

Inspirational song: Try a Little Tenderness (Otis Redding)

This is a rough time to be a Twitter addict. Also a trying time to follow Facebook, news apps, television, magazines, newspapers, or to talk to your friends about current events. The trending topic this week has opened the floodgates on pain and grief and anger that many of us have been sitting on for years. Some people — men and women, but mostly women — have exposed the rawest of nerves and spoken openly about past abuse for the first time. Some came clean about it last year with the MeToo movement. A fresh wave of exorcisms have come this week on the hashtag WhyIDidntReport, with its twin WhyIDidReport. Some people are finding healing and power in the telling. Others are triggered and brutalized all over again reading what others went through. Still more are still minimizing their own experiences, because it wasn’t as bad as some of the stories we are reading.

I fall into that last category. Friday I took several deep breaths and wrote a comment on a thread by Meredith Salenger about my own experience when I was 18. I can’t believe that I hit send on it. I haven’t said a word about it in at least 25 years. I almost felt like a phony for writing it, because I wasn’t physically injured, and so many other stories were way worse. Yet to this day I still have after effects that I know are undeniably linked to that night. I can’t swallow food or drink if someone is touching me. If someone tries, that memory comes back, and I have to bury it again.

I’ve been needy for days, since all of this fresh hell was stirred up. I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to be in the lonely purgatory where I live. But my stuttering attempts to express what’s happening to me are missing the mark. Or maybe they’re just being ignored.

Please be kind to people in your orbit right now. You don’t know what is going on in their heads. Walls are paper thin and the demons we keep hidden are breaking through them. If all of this is affecting you, please take care of yourself, and ask for help if you need it. I hope you get it.

I don’t know what sort of picture goes with this kind of blog post. So I will fall back on the best kind of picture, my very favorite sort. Harvey was “helping” me cut out muslin on the floor. He’s muslin colored, so maybe he felt like he blended in. Just those blue eyes popping out for contrast.