(Heart of Stone – Britt Nicole)
I am absolutely loving this song this season. I do like Christmas music…year round…but I do not like all Christmas music all the time. I prefer just a little bit of Christmas music all year complemented by non-Christmas music.
I love the raw but hopeful message in this song. I love that the song seems to understand that hard things in life don’t just disappear. I have actually read a lot of blog posts along those lines recently and it is SO validating. It really helps to hear that other people also struggle with after effects of abuse (or other hard things like a difficult diagnosis or a major loss), still living in fear and shame and self-worthlessness and captivity when the chains have been released. It’s kinda like a caged animal that stays inside the cage once the door is open choosing the uncomfortable over the unfamiliar. I am free, but I don’t always live that way. When I became free I was fighting so hard to just to make it through that the excitement of freedom was lost. I had been looking forward to it for so long, but that light at the end of the tunnel had gone out and what should have been thrilling fell flat like a deflated helium balloon. I had been told so many times that I couldn’t do it and would never be good enough that when I faced so much rejection I believed it again and that was the thick fog separating me from most anything else in the world. I was broken and not so sure anymore that what I experienced was abuse and not just the hard reality that I was really not worth it.
I have worked really hard at overcoming those thoughts again and re-learning my value, but there are definitely days that those thoughts and feelings sneak back in and I feel completely worthless. The past couple days I have been back there and praying for God to help me write the truth in my heart again. I definitely am feeling a sense of alliance with the other people who are struggling to reconcile the joy of the season with the pain seasoning our lives. It is the time of year when we are expected to live life with a smile, but sometimes by the time I can curl up alone in my room, the smile melts into tears. The coming of the holidays doesn’t mean that the pain never happened. And grief has no calendar. People expect you to get over it and move on in some timeframe, and maybe you will feel a little or even a lot better at the end of that time period, but it isn’t over, and grief isn’t a straight line from point A to point B. I might feel on the top of the world one day and be struggling the next. And I have been lucky enough to have incredible friends who supported me for a very long time, but it is definitely true that the support runs out long before the deep well of grief dries up. Yes, if I expressed a need I could most likely find someone willing to at least attempt to fill it, but when I am the most broken I am the least able to access help. When I am doing well I can most likely explain a very reasonable contingency plan, recite a list of potential resources, and be confident in my ability to get my needs met. When I am struggling I lose a lot of my communication skills and critical thinking abilities. My fear brain dominates and that cute little emergency blueprint is about as useful as the fish and bread in the child’s lunch before Jesus multiplied it for the thousands. It would take a miracle for it to be worth anything. I might know I am not in a safe place, but my drive to protect people as a protective mechanism for myself keeps me from sharing too much or from being completely transparent about where I am. I have always been protective of people, but learned to take it to more of an extreme level when I quickly figured out that CS was less hurtful when I put my developer strength to use. Developers can see the teeny tiny bits of good in people and are willing to invest significant energy into helping people recognize those areas and growing them. That does not mean that it is my fault that I got hurt because I didn’t do a good enough job, and it also doesn’t excuse her behavior. Another lesson I had to learn…
It is hard when something happens that completely changes your world and no one really even knows enough about your world to know the true extent of what happened. I was allowed to tell people that my lifelong dream had died and the light at the end of my tunnel burned out. I was not allowed to tell them about the abuse and how this pain was intimately linked to the time I spent being told I wasn’t good enough and would never be wanted. And to be honest it wasn’t *just* the actual abuse making me feel worthless. At school there were also people who thought that because I didn’t handle escaping from the abuse in the most responsible way possible that maybe I didn’t really deserve to be a pharmacist. That also hurt. I was never told who voiced those opinions, and to be honest, I am not sure I want to know, but I wish I could sit them down and help them understand what they were doing. They were essentially engaging in victim blaming. Yes, from the outside it does seem like there were more responsible ways to handle the situation, but when you are in an abuse situation, you are not your best self. You are not thinking clearly. You need a way out, and when you get desperate you might take off running in the first direction you see without really thinking about where it might take you. That is why so many people stay in abusive relationships. They might be terrified of escaping and what that might mean (raises hand). They may have already tried to escape but the attempts failed (raises hand again). Escaping is a brave bold act that will be wonderful in time, but in the shorter term can also bring a lot of loss. At a time when I was broken and scared and hurting and in need of support and encouragement, these people were critiquing my escape attempt and pointing out how it could have been enacted with more finesse. I needed someone to listen to me and to believe me. Instead people blamed me for being hurt. For some people at school that meant sides were chosen because the princess told her friends they couldn’t be friends with both her and me so if anyone was seen being kind to me it was socially unacceptable, so for most people any small act of kindness had to occur in secret which was really hard when these people were the ones with whom I had previously had tightly knit relationships. That hurt. For one mental health “professional” in particular it meant not being willing to believe that a counselor could be abusive and instead choosing to believe if I thought that then there must be something wrong with me – but he couldn’t figure out what it might be. This is why I became so vocal about victim blaming. Victims are people with feelings. We have already been trampled. We need your support, not your scorn.
Like some more of the lyrics in the song say “I may be safe, but I’m all alone.” Abuse can be isolating. Escaping can be isolating. Silence is exactly what the abuser wants…and silence was mandated as a condition of remaining in school. I understood that the silence was mostly to cover their butts which was ultimately supposed to be good for me because graduating from a school with an awful reputation makes it hard to get a job, but to be honest my school already had such an awful reputation that I don’t think it was going to make much of a difference. I was never really sure whether to be offended or flattered when people interviewing me expressed surprise about finding me a good candidate considering my school. Yeah, I wasn’t too impressed with my school, but I still didn’t necessarily want outsiders dissing my school…Anyway, the point is that silence is incredibly difficult. We were not meant to live this life alone, but forced silence effectively kept me from going out and finding community to be able to share the burden. Imposing silence took away any possibility of obtaining support if I was going to follow the rules. I wouldn’t have wanted to risk having to start my education over by fighting against the rules, but of the many oppressive ridiculous and unfair rules and restrictions placed on me, I think one most definitely worth pushing back on would have been that gag order. Knowing me, they would have known that giving me the ability to share wasn’t going to make it headline news or anything. I am not one to shout *anything* from the rooftops. It would have allowed me to access support. It could have helped prevent someone else experiencing what I did, or validate their experience having already gone through it. I was already very alone and had lost almost all my close connections at school and the silence served to separate me further. But I was scared and the only option seemed to be to sign the papers as is (except for the typos I insisted on correcting). I wish when their end was changing I had pushed harder for mine to change too, but I’d been pushed down so many times that I barely asked before I just accepted the no and mourned more loss.
I don’t want this post to be a pity party. I don’t want this to be about poor me. I think I wrote this because I have experienced how much it really helps to read other people’s vulnerable stories. It is so validating to hear about other people who have gone through or are going through painful experiences. Even if the experience is not identical, the shared similarities have value. It is a wonderful reminder that I am not alone. If I can give that same comfort and validation to even just one other person then this was worth it. And I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer. I really am doing a lot better. Again to quote the song, “Life ain’t been a bed of roses,” but being completely separated from school for the past 7 months has been really helpful in my healing experience. I haven’t had to worry about CS’s interference. I haven’t had to wonder whether this person with whom I am interacting is treating me differently than he/she otherwise might because he/she is one of the ones who didn’t want me to return to school. I do really miss a lot of people, especially my advocate, and the group of teachers/staff members who might not have known what was going on but took me in and gave me a safe place and the support and encouragement I needed, but to be honest the separation from certain someone is probably more healing than having support but having it with the risk of her presence. I am hoping that I will be able to make a trip back to that city someday, and I think that after this separation that I might even be ready to face her without running away in fear. For a long time I really wanted a reconciliation meeting, and I really thought that would help me heal and probably be very good for her as well. When everything fell apart I lost that desire, mostly because I was very obviously in no condition for that kind of meeting to be successful. Now that I have had this time of separation, I think that a reconciliation meeting would be too little too late. I don’t really see a good reason to stir that pot and rekindle those memories now that I have been healing on my own. I am not scared of her anymore because she doesn’t have power over me anymore, but I think even if she initiated that I would be hesitant to agree even given the presence of a neutral party to ensure my safety, because I would have trouble believing this wasn’t just an attempt to get another chance to break me. I know people can change. I know that God wants us to be people of the second chance and extend grace and forgiveness to those who have caused us pain, but I give out so many second chances that I feel like maybe this is a time I should say no and protect my heart.
A journey through trauma & triumph 