Beth Fehlbaum's Blog
May 17, 2015
Louis C.K. and Saturday Night Live
Re: Louis CK's SNL monologue about child molestation. For a man who claims that he lives in service to his children (NPR interview on Fresh Air), I wonder if he would find the topic the slightest bit funny if one of his children were molested. I will warn you, I am PISSED, and I'm not holding back.
(Edit: here's NBC's contact info: http://www.nbc.com/contact/general)
I walked the road to becoming whole after being molested/raped from the age of 8 into my teens. It took SIX YEARS of intensive therapy, and my husband and children walked through hell with me. I had a mental breakdown. Great chunks of my memory of my children's lives are GONE because my mind pretty much melted and I was a zombie through my kids' high school years, esp. my youngest child's. WE ALL PAID A HUGE PRICE for the, to quote Louis C.K., "amazing, fun" experience that child molesting MUST BE for the molester.
If not for the dedication, love, and perseverance of my husband and therapist to keep me alive through the journey, I would not be here. I am not unique except that I survived the journey. I made it through, after several false-starts starting when I was 21 years old, because when it came to facing the truth, I immediately convinced myself that "it wasn't that bad. It's over. He's changed. Mom says he's changed, so...he's changed."
I lived my entire life keeping my mother comfortable--didn't want to upset her, ya know-- and watching her coddle this man who tortured me AND my brother. Once I stood up and said, "NO MORE," my life imploded. When I broke because I COULD NOT PLAY "Let's pretend it wasn't that bad" any more, my family of origin collectively rolled up the sidewalks and put a closed signs on all the windows. (Except for my brother, who had gotten out years before. He is now one of my strongest allies.)
I am aware that Louis CK seems to get off on saying shocking things. He's justified rape jokes in the past. I don't see why anyone appreciates his sick humor, but whatever. He'll not be viewed or listened to in my home ever again.
So, fuck you, Louis CK, and FUCK YOU, Saturday Night Live, for giving Louis CK a platform to spew such ignorant bullshit. Yes, you pissed me off. You pissed millions of survivors off. But the thing that concerns me more than anything else is that victims of sexual abuse/assault who are NOT whole yet might hear your bullshit and question their truths or minimize their right to pursue becoming a whole person because some asshat with a national audience declared that the experience of stealing a child's innocence and making them question their right to their own bodies is "amazing" and "fun."
Any apologists for last night's show who want to dare a comment below, let me save you the trouble: I won't publish your comment anyway, and, by the way, fuck off.
(Edit: here's NBC's contact info: http://www.nbc.com/contact/general)
I walked the road to becoming whole after being molested/raped from the age of 8 into my teens. It took SIX YEARS of intensive therapy, and my husband and children walked through hell with me. I had a mental breakdown. Great chunks of my memory of my children's lives are GONE because my mind pretty much melted and I was a zombie through my kids' high school years, esp. my youngest child's. WE ALL PAID A HUGE PRICE for the, to quote Louis C.K., "amazing, fun" experience that child molesting MUST BE for the molester.
If not for the dedication, love, and perseverance of my husband and therapist to keep me alive through the journey, I would not be here. I am not unique except that I survived the journey. I made it through, after several false-starts starting when I was 21 years old, because when it came to facing the truth, I immediately convinced myself that "it wasn't that bad. It's over. He's changed. Mom says he's changed, so...he's changed."
I lived my entire life keeping my mother comfortable--didn't want to upset her, ya know-- and watching her coddle this man who tortured me AND my brother. Once I stood up and said, "NO MORE," my life imploded. When I broke because I COULD NOT PLAY "Let's pretend it wasn't that bad" any more, my family of origin collectively rolled up the sidewalks and put a closed signs on all the windows. (Except for my brother, who had gotten out years before. He is now one of my strongest allies.)
I am aware that Louis CK seems to get off on saying shocking things. He's justified rape jokes in the past. I don't see why anyone appreciates his sick humor, but whatever. He'll not be viewed or listened to in my home ever again.
So, fuck you, Louis CK, and FUCK YOU, Saturday Night Live, for giving Louis CK a platform to spew such ignorant bullshit. Yes, you pissed me off. You pissed millions of survivors off. But the thing that concerns me more than anything else is that victims of sexual abuse/assault who are NOT whole yet might hear your bullshit and question their truths or minimize their right to pursue becoming a whole person because some asshat with a national audience declared that the experience of stealing a child's innocence and making them question their right to their own bodies is "amazing" and "fun."
Any apologists for last night's show who want to dare a comment below, let me save you the trouble: I won't publish your comment anyway, and, by the way, fuck off.
May 14, 2015
I can't believe I'm even having to do this, but here goes: Dear Potential Employer,
I am stating this publicly, one time: I don't usually talk about my teaching career here, because I keep my author and teacher lives separate. However, given an incorrect impression that seems to be in play, I am compelled to set the record straight:
I was not fired or forced to resign in lieu of being non-renewed. I am choosing to seek work elsewhere for a few reasons, none related to my performance of my job, which, according to my summative evaluation, "Exceeds Expectations."
I am a highly-effective educator, and I get along well with colleagues and administrators. I have strong classroom management skills, excellent content knowledge, and the ability to support students in reaching their goals. I specialize in working with At-Risk students and reaching reluctant learners by developing relationships and rapport with them.
In short:
I have done nothing wrong, and the insinuation that I am on a job search because I was pushed out the door is wrong-headed, short-sighted, and sad, mostly because if that keeps a potential employer from calling me, we could both be missing an opportunity: me to be a valued part of a school, and an administrator from having a highly-qualified, honest, and knowledgeable person on the faculty.
If potential employers have questions, I'd rather have an honest conversation face-to-face with them than not being called for an interview because of inaccurate perceptions.
That's all I'm saying publicly.
April 5, 2015
Denver, Colorado! I'm coming your way!��
Hey, there! I'll be at the Colorado Teen Literature Conference on April 11.
At a Glance:
April 11, 2015 at the Tivoli Student Union Building.
The Colorado Teen Literature Conference is a yearly event held in Colorado to promote and celebrate teen literature. The conference offers diverse sessions thanks to the willingness of knowledgeable librarians, teachers, authors, and teens who share their expertise for the event.
Here's the description of my presentation, WRITING FROM REAL LIFE, which is in Session 3, from 1:30-2:30. Then, I'll be signing BIG FAT DISASTER from 4:00-4:30!
Writing from Real Life
Beth Fehlbaum
Beth will speak on drawing on real life experiences to create contemporary realistic problem novels. She is the author of Big Fat Disaster, Courage in Patience, and Hope in Patience. She drew on her experiences as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse (the Patience books), and as a person with an eating disorder (Big Fat Disaster), to write authentic characters who find inner strength to survive. She will present an overview of the material then take questions from the audience and lead a discussion.
In addition to writing Young Adult Contemporary Fiction, Beth Fehlbaum is an experienced English teacher who frequently draws on her experience as an educator to write her books. An English-Language Arts teacher. B.A. in English, M.Ed. in Education. She is currently at work on her M.A. in English.
Denver, Colorado! I'm coming your way!
Hey, there! I'll be at the Colorado Teen Literature Conference on April 11.
At a Glance:
April 11, 2015 at the Tivoli Student Union Building.
The Colorado Teen Literature Conference is a yearly event held in Colorado to promote and celebrate teen literature. The conference offers diverse sessions thanks to the willingness of knowledgeable librarians, teachers, authors, and teens who share their expertise for the event.
Here's the description of my presentation, WRITING FROM REAL LIFE, which is in Session 3, from 1:30-2:30. Then, I'll be signing BIG FAT DISASTER from 4:00-4:30!
Writing from Real Life
Beth Fehlbaum
Beth will speak on drawing on real life experiences to create contemporary realistic problem novels. She is the author of Big Fat Disaster, Courage in Patience, and Hope in Patience. She drew on her experiences as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse (the Patience books), and as a person with an eating disorder (Big Fat Disaster), to write authentic characters who find inner strength to survive. She will present an overview of the material then take questions from the audience and lead a discussion.
In addition to writing Young Adult Contemporary Fiction, Beth Fehlbaum is an experienced English teacher who frequently draws on her experience as an educator to write her books. An English-Language Arts teacher. B.A. in English, M.Ed. in Education. She is currently at work on her M.A. in English.
March 21, 2015
Truth is Kryptonite
This is a fifteen-page short story that I wrote for a Creative Personal Non-Fiction assignment in the grad school program where I am earning my M.A. in English.
I am sharing it here because I have a message of hope for others who might be walking the same road I traveled, or those who love them. I believe that by pulling back the curtain on what is often shadowed by shame, understanding and healing are possible.
TRIGGER WARNING: If you are dealing with sexual abuse issues, please consider whether my experiences as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse are okay for you to read. There is no explicit content; however, I would be remiss not to issue a warning. As a person who manages Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder through being careful to avoid triggers, I want to encourage all readers to do what they need to do to take good care of themselves.
The first time our superhero savior put stars in my eyes, I was piloting a bumper car and nearly bit through my tongue when another driver blindsided me. I was dazed—frozen in place—and “Superman”—my mother’s new boyfriend, “D”—bounded nimbly across the shiny steel floor, gracefully avoiding zig-zagging bumper cars to reach me. He slid the safety harness off my shoulders, lifted me into his arms, and breathed comfort into my ear.
“D” didn’t need a red cape and blue tights to stand out. He was six feet of chiseled brown flesh in pressed pearl-snap western shirts, jeans so stiff that they could stand independent of an occupant, and high-heeled cowboy boots that made him tower over my tiny mother. He was slender with short brown hair, hazel eyes that turned gray when he watched me, and a smile that was more of a closed-mouth smirk. It betrayed no hint of the mouthful of gold-capped teeth that ranged from shiny bright to dogshit dull. “D” smelled like Aramis cologne and cherry cigarette smoke.
He made an entrance just like Superman, too. That man came out of nowhere and landed smack-dab as the center of attention of the ladies in the beauty shop where Mom’s Thursday night singles’ group met. That evening, I imagine my mother merely expected to maintain her Carol Brady hairdo and catch up on gossip, but instead she was more surprised than her friends that this handsome construction worker from West Texas would choose her—a divorced mother of an eleven-year-old scrawny son, Brett, and me—an eight-year-old scrappy tomboy who defended Brett from bullies, to his abject horror.
Four months after “D” saved me from certain death by bumper car, I became his stepdaughter. Even though I was a tough little kid, I was thrilled to finally have a daddy.
Not long afterward, “D” began watching me. I was playing outside and accidentally hit my friend Thomas in the face with a water hose. “D” rushed out of our house, dragged me inside, and began hitting me below the waist. He threw me into my room.
Shocked, I crawled to my mother’s room, pulled her phone onto the floor, and called my grandmother, the woman who held godlike status in my life. We called her Gaga, and the way I saw it, she was all powerful. She sprayed my grandpa’s mouth with green Chloraseptic spray—she called it “snake spray”—anytime he cursed in front of us. She ran off Nicky, the crazy babysitter who locked Brett and I out of our own house one steamy summer day. We pedaled our bikes to the local Dairy Queen and called Gaga, who barreled over to our house in “Bluebell,” her Buick sedan, and let Nicky have it with both barrels. Some people might call her a bitch. But she was my bitch. Gaga could do anything.
Except save me from “D.”
I sob-whispered into the phone, “H-h-he h-h-hit m-m-me!” Gaga was yelling into her receiver, “What did he do? Tell me, baby. What did he do?”
My mother found me in her bedroom, slammed the receiver onto the cradle, and told me that I was never, never again to tell of anything that happened in our house.
Less than a year later, “D” moved us to an isolated house in the country outside Terrell, Texas. Unlike our old neighborhood, there were no other children to play with. My companions were the chickens, geese, dogs, and rabbits. I was an oddball fourth grader, wearing my mother’s clothes because I’d grown too tall and heavy for my own, and we had no money to buy new ones. “D” forbade Mom from asking Gaga and Grandpa for money to help out. I was the only kid in this rural school who wore cowboy boots—my mother’s—because my feet grew too large for my sneakers—and, paired with polyester pantsuits, I was quite the object of taunts. To this tomboy’s sorrow, and to make it all a hundred times more horrifying, my breasts were bursting onto the scene. But even all of those things could not damage me as much as what began in that house on Route 34 in Terrell, Texas: I became emotionally frozen at the age I was when “D” began sexually abusing me.
The “Scout” side of me died.
Although I obeyed my mother’s admonition not to speak of anything that happened in our house, I did write about it. Words on paper began forming primitive Kryptonite molecules, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I was eight years old the first time I crawled over the toys on my bedroom closet floor, pulled a small diary—the kind with a little lock and key—from among my dolls and books, and wrote the words, “Sssh!!!!!! He likes to squish my boobs! Last night in the green chair…”
I was so shocked, I’d pretended to be asleep, and the next morning, when Mom told me that “D” wanted to talk to me outside, he told me, “Slap my hands.” He’d say those words countless times over the next several years: “Slap my hands, Kiddo.”
In my mind, I can still see the words, “Ssh!!!!! He likes to…” written in my childish script, on the pages. I didn’t know what to do with that information. I felt sick on the inside, and dirty, and confused. My father had never been around for me so it’s not like I had normalcy to compare it to, but I hadn’t seen Mike Brady do this to Marcia, Jan, or Cindy.
I don’t know why I believed that the secret I committed to paper was safe within that cardboard diary. Anyone knows the cover can be torn away, but I hid the diary in the back of my desk drawer and carried it with me when we moved from the house in the country—the one with the green chair in the den where I’d nearly fallen asleep in my stepfather’s lap and he’d felt me up for the first time.
We moved back to the Dallas suburbs eighteen months later. I am forty-nine years old now, and I cannot pass through Terrell without becoming physically ill. Landmarks from the mid-1970s, when I lived there, are enough to trigger PTSD flashbacks.
When I was in high school, I pulled the diary from its hiding place and burned it in the fireplace when my parents weren’t home. By that time, the abuse had escalated from touching and leering to sneaking into my room at night to try to turn over my tightly-blanket-wrapped body… to rape. I slept in my closet behind my clothes. It was so hot. I was frequently grumpy in the mornings, and “D” would say, “You’re such a bitch in the mornings, no one is ever going to want to marry you.”
Our house was a power keg. The slightest provocation sent “D” into a rage, and I was subject to hours of drunken lectures about what an ungrateful little bitch I was—particularly if I forgot to thank “D” for working that day the moment he came home from work. He played mind games with me, including the threat he’d been making for years: if I told, he’d leave my mom, and I would have to admit to her what “we” had been doing, which added to my feelings of shame. “Scout” was still somewhere inside of me, but I allowed the cloak of shame “D” placed on me to smother my naturally defiant spirit. “Superman” had decomposed into an alcoholic, unpredictable monster whose physically imposing frame looked like a freight train bearing down when he came at me in a rage. Sometimes my rage became too much to bear and I shot my mouth off, even though I knew the consequences would be horrifying.
I became angrier, the longer the abuse went on. I began talking back to a teacher at school because she picked on a girl who never had her homework because her mother was dying of cancer. One day, the teacher exclaimed, “Who are you, Beth? I don’t even know you any more!”
It might have been that very same day—I know it was shortly thereafter—that my volatility broke through the shame-silencing cloak, and it was either kill myself or try to be free. I couldn’t take it anymore. As I came up onto our front porch after school, “D” turned to me and made some comment. The way he looked at me… the self-satisfied smirk he wore…I told him, “Go fuck yourself, you bastard,” then I dashed through our house to the garage, hopped on my bike, and took off for a friend’s house across town. I didn’t think. I pedaled.
Mom tracked me down in no time at all, and a friend delivered me to my front doorstep. I steeled myself for whatever would come, marched into our kitchen where Mom was ironing, pointed at “D”, and told my mother, “Since I was eight years old, he has been molesting me.”
The only hope I had left was that “D” would follow through with his threat and leave, but instead, he hid in his bedroom while Mom played the judge of who was lying. She went back and forth between us while he denied the truth. She would come out of their room and ask me questions like, “Does he pinch your breast when he passes you in the hall?”
“…No.”
“Well, does he call you Honey Britches?”
“No, why, Mom?”
She said softly, “Because he does those things to me.”
Realization coupled with disbelief started at the top of my head and oozed, thick as honey, over my body and puddled on the floor: my mother was seeing me not as her daughter, but as competition for her husband. His mistress.
She returned to the bedroom and shortly thereafter, I heard their door close softly. My mother returned to where I waited between our den and kitchen. I had not moved from the place I stood when I pointed at “D” and forced out the words I thought would save me.
Mom’s voice was empty. “Okay, he says he did it, but he was sick, and he’s not any more. We’re just going to move on now.” She returned to the kitchen, picked up the iron, and resumed ironing “D’s” pearl-snap work shirts.
I was stunned. Absolutely nothing was going to happen because I told. I felt myself breaking apart on the inside. Later, in my novels, I would give these words to a character to describe what it felt like for her when the same thing happened: “Shards of glass. I was shards of glass.”
Their bedroom door opened again, then a familiar sound followed: “D” thundering into the den. He ran straight at me, stopped just short of knocking me down, stuck his finger in my face, and growled, “You are not mine. You were never mine. “Don’t talk to me. “Don’t look at me. You. Do. Not. Exist.”
And, he did not leave.
Ever.
Mom did The Big Nothing. She did not contact the authorities. She did not hold “D” accountable. She never pursued counseling for any of us—after all, he’d changed—and that was that. She even left me alone with “D” for two weeks while she went on a road trip with my aunt. I shoved my furniture against my bedroom door at night and slept in the back of my closet behind my clothes, as I had been doing for years.
When she returned, Mom asked, simply, “Did he bother you?”
My answer in the negative must have solidified her belief that “just moving on” was working.
I endured about six months of her cold angry silence and “D” ignoring my existence before a switch flipped inside of me and I became The Perfect Daughter. I did the housework, laundry, ironing, cooking, worked for the family business, began calling my stepfather “Dad,” and developed an eating disorder that vexes me to this day. I also kept writing, especially poetry. Writing stories was too hard; I did not have the ability to process the clusterfuck of my life, and it was too overwhelming to allow more than a few words onto a page at a time. I could disguise what I was living through if I couched it in poetry. Keeping the secret was paramount. Don’t make things worse than they already are. I had a boyfriend. I was in love with him. We wanted to be married after we graduated high school. Just make it until you’re eighteen. Then you can get out.
I don’t have any of the poetry I wrote. Like the diary, I destroyed any evidence on the chance that my mom might find it and be upset. My whole life was about keeping her from being sad. I hated it when she cried.
Fast-forward to 2004, when I was 38 years old, 100 pounds overweight, on an express train to Crazy Town, and taking four other people—my husband and three daughters—along for the ride. Simply put, I could not cope with the secrets anymore. Committing them to paper hadn’t done jack-shit to deal with the past.
I had a mental breakdown. When I first entered therapy, I told my mom that I was working on losing weight. I told my doctor, “It’s not my parents’ problem. It’s all mine.”
But when “D” began making creepy, inappropriate comments about my body changing as I lost weight and I was beset with PTSD flashbacks and disassociation episodes, my therapist helped me set the first boundary with my perpetrator that I’d ever had in my life. Together, Dr. J. and I wrote a simple request that read like this:
In light of our history of you abusing me, I am requesting that you stop commenting on my body. If you forget and make a comment, I will remind you to be careful. If you continue, I will remove myself from your presence.
My children knew that I was “having a hard time,” but they were self-involved teenagers, as they should be at that age, and they were mostly impatient with my lapses in memory and weepiness. They had no idea that PawPaw was Mama’s rapist and that Grandma knew he’d done that, but hadn’t helped me. My parents and I were maintaining a game of Charades, and the only choice to be acted out was “Nothing Ever Happened.”
We were expected at my mother’s house on Christmas Eve. I was filled with anxiety at the idea of seeing “D” again and I finally got the nerve to send the boundary-setting letter. It was delivered via Fed-Ex on Christmas Eve. As I walked on the treadmill prior to getting ready to go to our family Christmas celebration, I considered letting go of the handrails in hopes that I would be thrown from across the room, break a few bones, and spend the evening in the hospital instead of facing my parents. Instead, I hopped off the treadmill and emailed my therapist. I was in full-on freak-out mode: “Do you have any idea what I’ve done?! I have to go over to their house in two hours! I received delivery notification from Fed-Ex! What have I done? Oh my God!”
His response was simple: “If they treat you badly, leave.”
Their version of “treating badly” was shunning. My mother, aunt, and uncle spoke to my husband and children, but not to me. “D” hid in the bedroom just as he had on that day when I was fourteen. Mom told my kids that PawPaw was sick.
No shit.
We left within a couple of hours. I was numb, white noise filled my head, and I could barely hear my children asking why everyone was acting so weird.
A week later, my daughters and I met my aunt and mother at a barbecue place for lunch. I took Mom outside and tried to explain why I had dared to acknowledge the painful events of my childhood. From a place of deep brokenness, I choked on my words.
Her voice was cold: “Beth, I have no intention of rehashing the past.”
Soon after, my husband, Daniel, tried to explain to her that I had had a mental breakdown and I was in crisis because of what was done to me as a child and teen. She told him, “This entire thing is Beth’s problem.”
Daniel took me out to lunch after a therapy session to tell me of their conversation, and he wept like a broken-hearted child.
The first year I was in therapy, I was suicidal. I processed my pain on paper, mostly in emails to my therapist, Dr. J., but also in poetry and prose. About eighteen months into the recovery journey we were on together, Dr. J. suggested that I try writing a novel. It took four months of stopping and starting and being stuck on the question of “WHY?” Why did this happen to me? Why didn’t my mom act on my outcry when I was fourteen? Why has she turned her back on me now? Why does she refuse to know the truth?
One day, I decided to imagine what would have happened if I had gotten out of my family home as a young teen instead of remaining there until I married at age eighteen. What if I had gone to live with my biological father? I barely knew the guy and still don’t, but what if…he was someone else?
I began crafting the story of a teen girl who is having the experience of recovering from childhood sexual abuse from a perpetrator stepparent and deliberate indifference on the part of the caretaker parent. That’s how the protagonist, Ashley Nicole Asher, came into being, and Courage in Patience, my first book, was written. Even though twenty-odd years had passed since the late Spring day that I pointed at my stepfather and told the truth, the feelings of numbness and disbelief at The Big Nothing that followed were just as raw and overwhelming for me at age forty as they were when I was fourteen. I never made an outcry to a teacher, but the protagonist of The Patience Trilogy, Ashley Nicole Asher, does, because her best friend forces her to do so. The teacher notifies the authorities, and CPS acts on the report. Ashley is placed with her biological father in a tiny East Texas town, and her life begins anew.
Writing the abuse scenes was difficult. I was overcome with nausea at times, but I found that the more I worked at expressing what happened to me as art—those molecules of Kryptonite on paper were beginning to multiply—I was able to step back from it and be an observer. The first time my stepfather molested me became this scene:
Less than a year after they married, he gestured to me to sit on his lap. I did so, enjoying the idea of having a daddy like my friends did. I got so relaxed and content there, I dozed off. He started rubbing my brand-new breasts. I wasn’t actually all the way asleep, but it freaked me out so much that I pretended I was.
The next morning, a Saturday, my mother told me to go outside because Charlie wanted to talk to me. I approached him like I would come up on a King Cobra, full of dread and feeling like a tightly wound spring. His back was to me as he bent under the hood of our car, changing the oil.
"Mom told me to come out here. Said you want to talk to me," I spoke to the sky as I watched a black vulture circle over something dead.
He mumbled something and I said, “Huh?”
He backed out from under the hood and took a deep breath. “Kiddo, slap my hands.” He paused as if waiting for my response.
"What? Why?" I played dumb, hoping that none of what happened in that chair had really happened. I was nine years old, and I already knew what he was doing was wrong.
"Last night … in the green chair …" Now it was his turn to stare somewhere else.
I tilted my head and my voice was so high it didn’t even sound like me. "What chair? When?"
He smiled that closed-mouth smile from his "model" picture. “Never mind, Kiddo. You can go back inside now.”
My heart pounded in my ears as I walked away from him. The morning sun was blinding and felt hot on my hair.
I never even planned to have Courage in Patience published. Once I finished it, though, I realized that I had been helped so much by the experience of writing it that it might give hope to others on the same journey. The only other person who had read it was Dr. J. He told me it was very good, and since he never lied to me, I knew I could believe him. I found an agent within six months, and a publisher soon after.
Even though I was thrilled to sell my first book, I was so afraid of upsetting my mom and ruining any chance that she might still come around and be willing to know the truth about what her husband had done to me that I asked my publisher to not be completely forthright in my bio. He came up with the story that I knew what it’s like to be an abused child because I’m a teacher and have worked with abused kids in the past. But, honestly: nobody bought that story, because anybody who reads any of the books in The Patience Trilogy can tell that the person who wrote it has lived it.
I heard through the family grapevine that Mom was aware of Courage in Patience and horrified that people might know that she is my mother. The fact that that is the only aspect of the story that bothers her pissed me off, and it was and is a “good” kind of pissed off. It was empowering. I did not write any of my books with a “Fuck You” attitude toward my parents, but I did gain a “This is MY truth, and YOU don’t get to deny it any more” certainty that made the mushy oatmeal in my spine turn to steel.
I thought I was through with putting my pain on paper. I wasn’t. I was still in therapy and trying like hell to accept the way things were (and are) with my mom: we have no relationship, and I couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that she didn’t love me with the same fierceness I feel for my three daughters. I wrote the second book in The Patience Trilogy: Hope in Patience, and I started to be able to accept the fact that my mother refuses to know the truth.
It was excruciating to write; I wept when I wrote the scene in the hospital room, when Ashley’s mom tries to get her to admit that her stepfather, Charlie, who has just been killed in an accident, was a good man. I no longer allowed my fear to silence the person I had become. I publicly identified myself as a SURVIVOR of childhood sexual abuse on the book jacket of Hope in Patience, as well as everywhere else.
At the end of Hope in Patience, Ashley begins dating a boy she’s had a crush on. I explored what it’s like to be a person trying to move on with her life and experience normalcy in the third book in The Patience Trilogy, Truth in Patience (not yet published). I also gave Ashley the gift of a face-to-face confrontation with her mom about Truth and what it means to her in the life she has carved out for herself. I have not experienced this confrontation with my mother.
“D” died in 2011. He fell off a ladder, severed his brain stem, and was kept on life support for a brief time. Everything I know about this is through extended family members. My brother and I were not mentioned in the obituary.
Although I ended therapy in August, 2010, Dr. J. offered to meet with me so that we could form a plan in the event that my mom contacted me since my stepfather was dead. In our meeting, my beloved therapist—the man who reparented me and helped me grow from an emotional age of eight to at least a young adult—told me that he never thought I would Fed-Ex that initial boundary-setting letter to my stepfather on Christmas Eve, 2004. He said that sending that note was the bravest thing he’d ever seen anyone do.
My mother still refuses to acknowledge or discuss what I have lived through. She has told others that she refuses to “bash” “D”. All I have ever wanted is for her, as my mother, to know what I went through on her watch. She refuses. When Mom turned 70 in 2013, I felt sorry for her because she is alone. I mailed her a birthday card. She returned the favor by mailing me a card on my birthday in March, with a note that she would like a new start. I know from other people that my mother has no intention of discussing anything with me that happened prior to our new start. This is not okay with me. I am no longer the type of person who can play “Let’s Pretend Nothing Happened.” I did that for decades, and it nearly cost me my life.
Sending her the card was a mistake. Her response sent me spiraling into a deep depression that kept me down for months and necessitated an additional antidepressant medication. I hadn’t told my family that I was sending the card, either, and my husband made it clear to me that if I pursued a relationship with my mother, I would be doing so on my own. He will never forget the sound of her voice and the ice in her eyes when she told him that the abuse I suffered was all my problem.
Over the past eleven years, my husband, daughters, and I created a new “normal.” Family gatherings are smaller, but I never feel like crap at the end of the evening like I did when we attended big, loud family functions with my mother, aunt, uncle, and stepdad. I am no longer besieged by overwhelming anxiety and a sense of shame. For years, I awoke every morning feeling as if I had done something so terrible that no one would like me, much less love me, if they knew how awful I was—and I didn’t know what I’d done to feel that way. What was I guilty of that was so horrible that it scared me to know it?
I am a fundamentally different person now. As a result of sharing my story through fiction and as myself, I am a member of the RAINN (Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network) Speaker’s Bureau. I have served as the Keynote speaker at National Crime Victims’ Awareness Week and spoken on the subject of Hope in the Hall of State in Dallas. I know, from letters that I receive from readers, that my work as an author extends hope to others and helps them hang on during the worst parts of recovery.
I thought my stepfather was Superman when he first came into my life. He was the father I’d always wanted, saving me from being smashed into by bumper cars. But he revealed himself to be nothing more than an illusion: a broken person himself, an alcoholic rage-addict, and a perpetrator of evil on an innocent child. He used fear and anger to control every aspect of our lives; he physically, emotionally, and verbally abused my brother, and my mother remains allegiant to him even in death.
For most of my life, I was unaware that I had any power at all. I believed that I was stupid and that no one could ever really love me if they knew the depth of my shame; if they knew the real me.
I was wrong. Facing the truth even when it is scary and living through the process of recovery from childhood sexual abuse is what empowered me to know that I am worthy of love. I am worth fighting for. Life is worth fighting for. Truth is the key to inner peace.
It took six years of intensive therapy, a take-no-prisoners, fiercely loving support team of my husband and therapist, and iron-clad determination to make it through the journey to hell and back. Once my children truly understood what happened, they joined my husband and therapist in becoming a titanium circle of support. My healing was aided immeasurably by writing the story of a fifteen-year-old girl who finds Courage, Hope, and Truth in a tiny Texas town called Patience. I am able now to look back and see that that my juvenile scrawl in a diary—molecules of Kryptonite—synthesized into an unbreakable structure, capable of weakening the bonds of evil and smoothing my scars until they faded into the background of my life.
Truth is Kryptonite.
I am sharing it here because I have a message of hope for others who might be walking the same road I traveled, or those who love them. I believe that by pulling back the curtain on what is often shadowed by shame, understanding and healing are possible.
TRIGGER WARNING: If you are dealing with sexual abuse issues, please consider whether my experiences as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse are okay for you to read. There is no explicit content; however, I would be remiss not to issue a warning. As a person who manages Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder through being careful to avoid triggers, I want to encourage all readers to do what they need to do to take good care of themselves.
The first time our superhero savior put stars in my eyes, I was piloting a bumper car and nearly bit through my tongue when another driver blindsided me. I was dazed—frozen in place—and “Superman”—my mother’s new boyfriend, “D”—bounded nimbly across the shiny steel floor, gracefully avoiding zig-zagging bumper cars to reach me. He slid the safety harness off my shoulders, lifted me into his arms, and breathed comfort into my ear.
“D” didn’t need a red cape and blue tights to stand out. He was six feet of chiseled brown flesh in pressed pearl-snap western shirts, jeans so stiff that they could stand independent of an occupant, and high-heeled cowboy boots that made him tower over my tiny mother. He was slender with short brown hair, hazel eyes that turned gray when he watched me, and a smile that was more of a closed-mouth smirk. It betrayed no hint of the mouthful of gold-capped teeth that ranged from shiny bright to dogshit dull. “D” smelled like Aramis cologne and cherry cigarette smoke.
He made an entrance just like Superman, too. That man came out of nowhere and landed smack-dab as the center of attention of the ladies in the beauty shop where Mom’s Thursday night singles’ group met. That evening, I imagine my mother merely expected to maintain her Carol Brady hairdo and catch up on gossip, but instead she was more surprised than her friends that this handsome construction worker from West Texas would choose her—a divorced mother of an eleven-year-old scrawny son, Brett, and me—an eight-year-old scrappy tomboy who defended Brett from bullies, to his abject horror.
Four months after “D” saved me from certain death by bumper car, I became his stepdaughter. Even though I was a tough little kid, I was thrilled to finally have a daddy.
Not long afterward, “D” began watching me. I was playing outside and accidentally hit my friend Thomas in the face with a water hose. “D” rushed out of our house, dragged me inside, and began hitting me below the waist. He threw me into my room.
Shocked, I crawled to my mother’s room, pulled her phone onto the floor, and called my grandmother, the woman who held godlike status in my life. We called her Gaga, and the way I saw it, she was all powerful. She sprayed my grandpa’s mouth with green Chloraseptic spray—she called it “snake spray”—anytime he cursed in front of us. She ran off Nicky, the crazy babysitter who locked Brett and I out of our own house one steamy summer day. We pedaled our bikes to the local Dairy Queen and called Gaga, who barreled over to our house in “Bluebell,” her Buick sedan, and let Nicky have it with both barrels. Some people might call her a bitch. But she was my bitch. Gaga could do anything.
Except save me from “D.”
I sob-whispered into the phone, “H-h-he h-h-hit m-m-me!” Gaga was yelling into her receiver, “What did he do? Tell me, baby. What did he do?”
My mother found me in her bedroom, slammed the receiver onto the cradle, and told me that I was never, never again to tell of anything that happened in our house.
Less than a year later, “D” moved us to an isolated house in the country outside Terrell, Texas. Unlike our old neighborhood, there were no other children to play with. My companions were the chickens, geese, dogs, and rabbits. I was an oddball fourth grader, wearing my mother’s clothes because I’d grown too tall and heavy for my own, and we had no money to buy new ones. “D” forbade Mom from asking Gaga and Grandpa for money to help out. I was the only kid in this rural school who wore cowboy boots—my mother’s—because my feet grew too large for my sneakers—and, paired with polyester pantsuits, I was quite the object of taunts. To this tomboy’s sorrow, and to make it all a hundred times more horrifying, my breasts were bursting onto the scene. But even all of those things could not damage me as much as what began in that house on Route 34 in Terrell, Texas: I became emotionally frozen at the age I was when “D” began sexually abusing me.
The “Scout” side of me died.
Although I obeyed my mother’s admonition not to speak of anything that happened in our house, I did write about it. Words on paper began forming primitive Kryptonite molecules, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I was eight years old the first time I crawled over the toys on my bedroom closet floor, pulled a small diary—the kind with a little lock and key—from among my dolls and books, and wrote the words, “Sssh!!!!!! He likes to squish my boobs! Last night in the green chair…”
I was so shocked, I’d pretended to be asleep, and the next morning, when Mom told me that “D” wanted to talk to me outside, he told me, “Slap my hands.” He’d say those words countless times over the next several years: “Slap my hands, Kiddo.”
In my mind, I can still see the words, “Ssh!!!!! He likes to…” written in my childish script, on the pages. I didn’t know what to do with that information. I felt sick on the inside, and dirty, and confused. My father had never been around for me so it’s not like I had normalcy to compare it to, but I hadn’t seen Mike Brady do this to Marcia, Jan, or Cindy.
I don’t know why I believed that the secret I committed to paper was safe within that cardboard diary. Anyone knows the cover can be torn away, but I hid the diary in the back of my desk drawer and carried it with me when we moved from the house in the country—the one with the green chair in the den where I’d nearly fallen asleep in my stepfather’s lap and he’d felt me up for the first time.
We moved back to the Dallas suburbs eighteen months later. I am forty-nine years old now, and I cannot pass through Terrell without becoming physically ill. Landmarks from the mid-1970s, when I lived there, are enough to trigger PTSD flashbacks.
When I was in high school, I pulled the diary from its hiding place and burned it in the fireplace when my parents weren’t home. By that time, the abuse had escalated from touching and leering to sneaking into my room at night to try to turn over my tightly-blanket-wrapped body… to rape. I slept in my closet behind my clothes. It was so hot. I was frequently grumpy in the mornings, and “D” would say, “You’re such a bitch in the mornings, no one is ever going to want to marry you.”
Our house was a power keg. The slightest provocation sent “D” into a rage, and I was subject to hours of drunken lectures about what an ungrateful little bitch I was—particularly if I forgot to thank “D” for working that day the moment he came home from work. He played mind games with me, including the threat he’d been making for years: if I told, he’d leave my mom, and I would have to admit to her what “we” had been doing, which added to my feelings of shame. “Scout” was still somewhere inside of me, but I allowed the cloak of shame “D” placed on me to smother my naturally defiant spirit. “Superman” had decomposed into an alcoholic, unpredictable monster whose physically imposing frame looked like a freight train bearing down when he came at me in a rage. Sometimes my rage became too much to bear and I shot my mouth off, even though I knew the consequences would be horrifying.
I became angrier, the longer the abuse went on. I began talking back to a teacher at school because she picked on a girl who never had her homework because her mother was dying of cancer. One day, the teacher exclaimed, “Who are you, Beth? I don’t even know you any more!”
It might have been that very same day—I know it was shortly thereafter—that my volatility broke through the shame-silencing cloak, and it was either kill myself or try to be free. I couldn’t take it anymore. As I came up onto our front porch after school, “D” turned to me and made some comment. The way he looked at me… the self-satisfied smirk he wore…I told him, “Go fuck yourself, you bastard,” then I dashed through our house to the garage, hopped on my bike, and took off for a friend’s house across town. I didn’t think. I pedaled.
Mom tracked me down in no time at all, and a friend delivered me to my front doorstep. I steeled myself for whatever would come, marched into our kitchen where Mom was ironing, pointed at “D”, and told my mother, “Since I was eight years old, he has been molesting me.”
The only hope I had left was that “D” would follow through with his threat and leave, but instead, he hid in his bedroom while Mom played the judge of who was lying. She went back and forth between us while he denied the truth. She would come out of their room and ask me questions like, “Does he pinch your breast when he passes you in the hall?”
“…No.”
“Well, does he call you Honey Britches?”
“No, why, Mom?”
She said softly, “Because he does those things to me.”
Realization coupled with disbelief started at the top of my head and oozed, thick as honey, over my body and puddled on the floor: my mother was seeing me not as her daughter, but as competition for her husband. His mistress.
She returned to the bedroom and shortly thereafter, I heard their door close softly. My mother returned to where I waited between our den and kitchen. I had not moved from the place I stood when I pointed at “D” and forced out the words I thought would save me.
Mom’s voice was empty. “Okay, he says he did it, but he was sick, and he’s not any more. We’re just going to move on now.” She returned to the kitchen, picked up the iron, and resumed ironing “D’s” pearl-snap work shirts.
I was stunned. Absolutely nothing was going to happen because I told. I felt myself breaking apart on the inside. Later, in my novels, I would give these words to a character to describe what it felt like for her when the same thing happened: “Shards of glass. I was shards of glass.”
Their bedroom door opened again, then a familiar sound followed: “D” thundering into the den. He ran straight at me, stopped just short of knocking me down, stuck his finger in my face, and growled, “You are not mine. You were never mine. “Don’t talk to me. “Don’t look at me. You. Do. Not. Exist.”
And, he did not leave.
Ever.
Mom did The Big Nothing. She did not contact the authorities. She did not hold “D” accountable. She never pursued counseling for any of us—after all, he’d changed—and that was that. She even left me alone with “D” for two weeks while she went on a road trip with my aunt. I shoved my furniture against my bedroom door at night and slept in the back of my closet behind my clothes, as I had been doing for years.
When she returned, Mom asked, simply, “Did he bother you?”
My answer in the negative must have solidified her belief that “just moving on” was working.
I endured about six months of her cold angry silence and “D” ignoring my existence before a switch flipped inside of me and I became The Perfect Daughter. I did the housework, laundry, ironing, cooking, worked for the family business, began calling my stepfather “Dad,” and developed an eating disorder that vexes me to this day. I also kept writing, especially poetry. Writing stories was too hard; I did not have the ability to process the clusterfuck of my life, and it was too overwhelming to allow more than a few words onto a page at a time. I could disguise what I was living through if I couched it in poetry. Keeping the secret was paramount. Don’t make things worse than they already are. I had a boyfriend. I was in love with him. We wanted to be married after we graduated high school. Just make it until you’re eighteen. Then you can get out.
I don’t have any of the poetry I wrote. Like the diary, I destroyed any evidence on the chance that my mom might find it and be upset. My whole life was about keeping her from being sad. I hated it when she cried.
Fast-forward to 2004, when I was 38 years old, 100 pounds overweight, on an express train to Crazy Town, and taking four other people—my husband and three daughters—along for the ride. Simply put, I could not cope with the secrets anymore. Committing them to paper hadn’t done jack-shit to deal with the past.
I had a mental breakdown. When I first entered therapy, I told my mom that I was working on losing weight. I told my doctor, “It’s not my parents’ problem. It’s all mine.”
But when “D” began making creepy, inappropriate comments about my body changing as I lost weight and I was beset with PTSD flashbacks and disassociation episodes, my therapist helped me set the first boundary with my perpetrator that I’d ever had in my life. Together, Dr. J. and I wrote a simple request that read like this:
In light of our history of you abusing me, I am requesting that you stop commenting on my body. If you forget and make a comment, I will remind you to be careful. If you continue, I will remove myself from your presence.
My children knew that I was “having a hard time,” but they were self-involved teenagers, as they should be at that age, and they were mostly impatient with my lapses in memory and weepiness. They had no idea that PawPaw was Mama’s rapist and that Grandma knew he’d done that, but hadn’t helped me. My parents and I were maintaining a game of Charades, and the only choice to be acted out was “Nothing Ever Happened.”
We were expected at my mother’s house on Christmas Eve. I was filled with anxiety at the idea of seeing “D” again and I finally got the nerve to send the boundary-setting letter. It was delivered via Fed-Ex on Christmas Eve. As I walked on the treadmill prior to getting ready to go to our family Christmas celebration, I considered letting go of the handrails in hopes that I would be thrown from across the room, break a few bones, and spend the evening in the hospital instead of facing my parents. Instead, I hopped off the treadmill and emailed my therapist. I was in full-on freak-out mode: “Do you have any idea what I’ve done?! I have to go over to their house in two hours! I received delivery notification from Fed-Ex! What have I done? Oh my God!”
His response was simple: “If they treat you badly, leave.”
Their version of “treating badly” was shunning. My mother, aunt, and uncle spoke to my husband and children, but not to me. “D” hid in the bedroom just as he had on that day when I was fourteen. Mom told my kids that PawPaw was sick.
No shit.
We left within a couple of hours. I was numb, white noise filled my head, and I could barely hear my children asking why everyone was acting so weird.
A week later, my daughters and I met my aunt and mother at a barbecue place for lunch. I took Mom outside and tried to explain why I had dared to acknowledge the painful events of my childhood. From a place of deep brokenness, I choked on my words.
Her voice was cold: “Beth, I have no intention of rehashing the past.”
Soon after, my husband, Daniel, tried to explain to her that I had had a mental breakdown and I was in crisis because of what was done to me as a child and teen. She told him, “This entire thing is Beth’s problem.”
Daniel took me out to lunch after a therapy session to tell me of their conversation, and he wept like a broken-hearted child.
The first year I was in therapy, I was suicidal. I processed my pain on paper, mostly in emails to my therapist, Dr. J., but also in poetry and prose. About eighteen months into the recovery journey we were on together, Dr. J. suggested that I try writing a novel. It took four months of stopping and starting and being stuck on the question of “WHY?” Why did this happen to me? Why didn’t my mom act on my outcry when I was fourteen? Why has she turned her back on me now? Why does she refuse to know the truth?
One day, I decided to imagine what would have happened if I had gotten out of my family home as a young teen instead of remaining there until I married at age eighteen. What if I had gone to live with my biological father? I barely knew the guy and still don’t, but what if…he was someone else?
I began crafting the story of a teen girl who is having the experience of recovering from childhood sexual abuse from a perpetrator stepparent and deliberate indifference on the part of the caretaker parent. That’s how the protagonist, Ashley Nicole Asher, came into being, and Courage in Patience, my first book, was written. Even though twenty-odd years had passed since the late Spring day that I pointed at my stepfather and told the truth, the feelings of numbness and disbelief at The Big Nothing that followed were just as raw and overwhelming for me at age forty as they were when I was fourteen. I never made an outcry to a teacher, but the protagonist of The Patience Trilogy, Ashley Nicole Asher, does, because her best friend forces her to do so. The teacher notifies the authorities, and CPS acts on the report. Ashley is placed with her biological father in a tiny East Texas town, and her life begins anew.
Writing the abuse scenes was difficult. I was overcome with nausea at times, but I found that the more I worked at expressing what happened to me as art—those molecules of Kryptonite on paper were beginning to multiply—I was able to step back from it and be an observer. The first time my stepfather molested me became this scene:
Less than a year after they married, he gestured to me to sit on his lap. I did so, enjoying the idea of having a daddy like my friends did. I got so relaxed and content there, I dozed off. He started rubbing my brand-new breasts. I wasn’t actually all the way asleep, but it freaked me out so much that I pretended I was.
The next morning, a Saturday, my mother told me to go outside because Charlie wanted to talk to me. I approached him like I would come up on a King Cobra, full of dread and feeling like a tightly wound spring. His back was to me as he bent under the hood of our car, changing the oil.
"Mom told me to come out here. Said you want to talk to me," I spoke to the sky as I watched a black vulture circle over something dead.
He mumbled something and I said, “Huh?”
He backed out from under the hood and took a deep breath. “Kiddo, slap my hands.” He paused as if waiting for my response.
"What? Why?" I played dumb, hoping that none of what happened in that chair had really happened. I was nine years old, and I already knew what he was doing was wrong.
"Last night … in the green chair …" Now it was his turn to stare somewhere else.
I tilted my head and my voice was so high it didn’t even sound like me. "What chair? When?"
He smiled that closed-mouth smile from his "model" picture. “Never mind, Kiddo. You can go back inside now.”
My heart pounded in my ears as I walked away from him. The morning sun was blinding and felt hot on my hair.
I never even planned to have Courage in Patience published. Once I finished it, though, I realized that I had been helped so much by the experience of writing it that it might give hope to others on the same journey. The only other person who had read it was Dr. J. He told me it was very good, and since he never lied to me, I knew I could believe him. I found an agent within six months, and a publisher soon after.
Even though I was thrilled to sell my first book, I was so afraid of upsetting my mom and ruining any chance that she might still come around and be willing to know the truth about what her husband had done to me that I asked my publisher to not be completely forthright in my bio. He came up with the story that I knew what it’s like to be an abused child because I’m a teacher and have worked with abused kids in the past. But, honestly: nobody bought that story, because anybody who reads any of the books in The Patience Trilogy can tell that the person who wrote it has lived it.
I heard through the family grapevine that Mom was aware of Courage in Patience and horrified that people might know that she is my mother. The fact that that is the only aspect of the story that bothers her pissed me off, and it was and is a “good” kind of pissed off. It was empowering. I did not write any of my books with a “Fuck You” attitude toward my parents, but I did gain a “This is MY truth, and YOU don’t get to deny it any more” certainty that made the mushy oatmeal in my spine turn to steel.
I thought I was through with putting my pain on paper. I wasn’t. I was still in therapy and trying like hell to accept the way things were (and are) with my mom: we have no relationship, and I couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that she didn’t love me with the same fierceness I feel for my three daughters. I wrote the second book in The Patience Trilogy: Hope in Patience, and I started to be able to accept the fact that my mother refuses to know the truth.
It was excruciating to write; I wept when I wrote the scene in the hospital room, when Ashley’s mom tries to get her to admit that her stepfather, Charlie, who has just been killed in an accident, was a good man. I no longer allowed my fear to silence the person I had become. I publicly identified myself as a SURVIVOR of childhood sexual abuse on the book jacket of Hope in Patience, as well as everywhere else.
At the end of Hope in Patience, Ashley begins dating a boy she’s had a crush on. I explored what it’s like to be a person trying to move on with her life and experience normalcy in the third book in The Patience Trilogy, Truth in Patience (not yet published). I also gave Ashley the gift of a face-to-face confrontation with her mom about Truth and what it means to her in the life she has carved out for herself. I have not experienced this confrontation with my mother.
“D” died in 2011. He fell off a ladder, severed his brain stem, and was kept on life support for a brief time. Everything I know about this is through extended family members. My brother and I were not mentioned in the obituary.
Although I ended therapy in August, 2010, Dr. J. offered to meet with me so that we could form a plan in the event that my mom contacted me since my stepfather was dead. In our meeting, my beloved therapist—the man who reparented me and helped me grow from an emotional age of eight to at least a young adult—told me that he never thought I would Fed-Ex that initial boundary-setting letter to my stepfather on Christmas Eve, 2004. He said that sending that note was the bravest thing he’d ever seen anyone do.
My mother still refuses to acknowledge or discuss what I have lived through. She has told others that she refuses to “bash” “D”. All I have ever wanted is for her, as my mother, to know what I went through on her watch. She refuses. When Mom turned 70 in 2013, I felt sorry for her because she is alone. I mailed her a birthday card. She returned the favor by mailing me a card on my birthday in March, with a note that she would like a new start. I know from other people that my mother has no intention of discussing anything with me that happened prior to our new start. This is not okay with me. I am no longer the type of person who can play “Let’s Pretend Nothing Happened.” I did that for decades, and it nearly cost me my life.
Sending her the card was a mistake. Her response sent me spiraling into a deep depression that kept me down for months and necessitated an additional antidepressant medication. I hadn’t told my family that I was sending the card, either, and my husband made it clear to me that if I pursued a relationship with my mother, I would be doing so on my own. He will never forget the sound of her voice and the ice in her eyes when she told him that the abuse I suffered was all my problem.
Over the past eleven years, my husband, daughters, and I created a new “normal.” Family gatherings are smaller, but I never feel like crap at the end of the evening like I did when we attended big, loud family functions with my mother, aunt, uncle, and stepdad. I am no longer besieged by overwhelming anxiety and a sense of shame. For years, I awoke every morning feeling as if I had done something so terrible that no one would like me, much less love me, if they knew how awful I was—and I didn’t know what I’d done to feel that way. What was I guilty of that was so horrible that it scared me to know it?
I am a fundamentally different person now. As a result of sharing my story through fiction and as myself, I am a member of the RAINN (Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network) Speaker’s Bureau. I have served as the Keynote speaker at National Crime Victims’ Awareness Week and spoken on the subject of Hope in the Hall of State in Dallas. I know, from letters that I receive from readers, that my work as an author extends hope to others and helps them hang on during the worst parts of recovery.
I thought my stepfather was Superman when he first came into my life. He was the father I’d always wanted, saving me from being smashed into by bumper cars. But he revealed himself to be nothing more than an illusion: a broken person himself, an alcoholic rage-addict, and a perpetrator of evil on an innocent child. He used fear and anger to control every aspect of our lives; he physically, emotionally, and verbally abused my brother, and my mother remains allegiant to him even in death.
For most of my life, I was unaware that I had any power at all. I believed that I was stupid and that no one could ever really love me if they knew the depth of my shame; if they knew the real me.
I was wrong. Facing the truth even when it is scary and living through the process of recovery from childhood sexual abuse is what empowered me to know that I am worthy of love. I am worth fighting for. Life is worth fighting for. Truth is the key to inner peace.
It took six years of intensive therapy, a take-no-prisoners, fiercely loving support team of my husband and therapist, and iron-clad determination to make it through the journey to hell and back. Once my children truly understood what happened, they joined my husband and therapist in becoming a titanium circle of support. My healing was aided immeasurably by writing the story of a fifteen-year-old girl who finds Courage, Hope, and Truth in a tiny Texas town called Patience. I am able now to look back and see that that my juvenile scrawl in a diary—molecules of Kryptonite—synthesized into an unbreakable structure, capable of weakening the bonds of evil and smoothing my scars until they faded into the background of my life.
Truth is Kryptonite.
March 13, 2015
March 8, 2015
Stink-Eye Laundry and Birthday Don't Cares
This birthday post comes to you from my bedroom, at 12:30 PM on Sunday, March 8. I'm 49 today. The dryer is beeping. There are three distinct piles of unfolded laundry in this room, and they're giving me the side-eye, but I refuse to acknowledge it.
The dishes aren't done. My house is kinda cluttered.
It's raining.
I was going to work out, but I got sleepy so I took off my shoes and crawled back into bed.
I tweaked a creative non-fiction piece and submitted it to my Creative Writing class and now I'm writing this post and do you have any idea how NOT me this day is?
I'm, like, a list-maker and I don't know what to do with myself if I'm not working and I suppose you could consider this post KINDA working but it's writing so it doesn't feel like working to me.
This is unusual behavior for me because I took yesterday "off" from worrying about getting things done. Two days in a row? Is this like one of those signs in Revelations of the Apocalypse? Are the three side-eye-giving piles of laundry akin to those Horsemen mentioned somewhere in there?
Actually, I think I'm just tired. For the past two and a half months, I've been going at a crazy pace, working full-time plus taking nine hours of graduate courses for my M.A. in English, and as of ten minutes ago when I submitted the assigned short story, I'm on Spring Break.
Soooo, I figure I'll try to do this type of thing more often--relaxing more, worrying less, feeling less driven.
It's nice!
I would write more, but I do believe I'll take a nap now.
The dishes aren't done. My house is kinda cluttered.
It's raining.
I was going to work out, but I got sleepy so I took off my shoes and crawled back into bed.
I tweaked a creative non-fiction piece and submitted it to my Creative Writing class and now I'm writing this post and do you have any idea how NOT me this day is?
I'm, like, a list-maker and I don't know what to do with myself if I'm not working and I suppose you could consider this post KINDA working but it's writing so it doesn't feel like working to me.
This is unusual behavior for me because I took yesterday "off" from worrying about getting things done. Two days in a row? Is this like one of those signs in Revelations of the Apocalypse? Are the three side-eye-giving piles of laundry akin to those Horsemen mentioned somewhere in there?
Actually, I think I'm just tired. For the past two and a half months, I've been going at a crazy pace, working full-time plus taking nine hours of graduate courses for my M.A. in English, and as of ten minutes ago when I submitted the assigned short story, I'm on Spring Break.
Soooo, I figure I'll try to do this type of thing more often--relaxing more, worrying less, feeling less driven.
It's nice!
I would write more, but I do believe I'll take a nap now.
January 3, 2015
Honestly Relapsed. Honestly Reborn.
I'm going to put myself out in the open now in the interest of making a public declaration of commitment. Think of it as coming out as a relapsed person & holding myself accountable.
I wrote BIG FAT DISASTER, a story about a teen girl with binge eating disorder and how she (and others) perceive of her body, because I was searching for a way to resolve my conflicted feelings about having regained a substantial amount of weight I'd lost in 2004-2006. I'd gone from a size 24 to a size 6 over those two years and I worked for a total of 6 years in therapy (2004-2010), to overcome/learn to manage the scars I have as a result of being sexually abused/neglected/abandoned by my parents when I was a child. I wrote THE PATIENCE TRILOGY over the course of six years when I was in therapy, and seeing the situation through another person's eyes really helped me, so I gave it a shot with my eating disorder, too. Thus, BIG FAT DISASTER.
The first thing my therapist and I worked on when I started therapy in 2004 was stopping me from killing myself with food. Letting go of that crutch--dealing with my addiction to numbing my feelings-- was one of the hardest things I've done, and it is something that never, never, NEVER goes away. Over the past four years, since ending therapy, I fooled myself into thinking I didn't have to remain vigilant about it.
When I started in 2004, I didn't have a "diet" so much as a "plan," and it wasn't prescribed by anyone; it was more like, "I'm figuring out what I'm going to eat each day and committing it to myself and I can do this for 24 hours at a time. That's it. 24 hours at a time. Don't think about getting through tomorrow. Just do it today."
And, I began to lose weight. And, I won't lie, it was both thrilling--because eventually I was able to shop in the Junior department instead of the Plus-Size-- but also terrifying-- because I was exposing myself by letting go of the shell of fat that I felt safe inside of from the time I fell into my eating disorder in my teen years. It's when I allow myself to think that I can have the same relationship with food that non-eating-disordered people have that I fall into it again.
When I had lost a significant amount of weight and began letting go of wearing over-sized, draping shirts and long sweaters, for the first time in years, men--strangers-- began paying attention to me. I don't know of any woman who enjoys being ogled by strangers, but for me, it sets off PTSD triggers because my stepfather stalked me and watched me when I was a child.
For some reason, at one point when I was showing a significant weight loss, I have a very strong memory of being at a convenience store to fill up my car, and I was walking from the gas pumps into the store, and this man was holding the door open for me. He openly stared at me, looking at me from head-to-toe, and I wrapped my arms across my chest as I had when I was a child and my step-dad looked at me the same way. I don't even remember what I did in the store, but when I got into my car again, I was shaking all over. Nowadays, I am much tougher mentally and that stuff would not/does not have the same affect on me. Even before I regained weight, I had toughened up to the point of adopting and broadcasting an aura that said, "I will not tolerate being messed with." I'm much braver/ballsier than I was when I was still healing. I have much more of a self-concept that is rooted in my intelligence and ability to manage challenging situations than I did at that time. In other words, as Joan Crawford so famously said the movie, _Mommy Dearest_: "DOOOOOOOOON'T FUCK WITH ME, BOYS!" ;)
Over time, I forged a commitment to finding my inner strength in part by discovering (and marveling at) how strong my body could feel when I was working my muscles. I became more strong mentally, too, because I had a kick-ass (beloved) therapist who taught me to be tougher. The person I am today--the one people know so well that they have a hard time believing that I used to be afraid of everything and everyone-- is the direct result of the tough love/reparenting I experienced over those six years from my kick-ass therapist. He's also the person who taught me not to lie to myself.
Several years after my initial weight loss, the pain in my feet became too much for me to ignore, and I went to a podiatrist. I sat in his office and cried because my feet didn't just hurt when I worked out; they hurt ALL THE TIME and crunched so loudly that I could hear it. He looked at my feet and said simply, "You don't have a runner's feet." I'm thinking... "What, just because I have feet so wide that they're shaped like a duck's, these babies aren't meant to pound the pavement?" ;)
Then he took some x-rays and by the end of the visit, I discovered that the running/super hard treadmill workouts (like walking fast on an incline for an hour) that had helped result in weight loss and love of feeling my muscles had had the simultaneous effect of revealing a congenital birth defect in both my feet. (Sadly, my eldest daughter, who also discovered a love of running, has inherited the birth defect as well, and her clue was the same as mine-- pain beginning over her big toe where it joins the rest of her foot. She's being proactive much earlier, thank God.) I won't bore you with details; I'll just say that it was a mechanical issue resulting in jamming and bony overgrowth, creating feet that went "crunch" with each step I took, and eventually I lost the ability to walk without limping. I missed working out and I tried the elliptical since it is so easy on the joints. I was able to do it for a while, until the bone spurs from the arthritic overgrowth were literally catching on the tendons in my feet, and my feet began spasming into claws for hours after my workout.
Depression set in and I reverted to soothing myself with food-- except that I LIED to myself about it and told myself I wasn't eating as much as I was. I just couldn't understand why I was gaining weight since I had not relapsed into prior behaviors such as buying 2 loaves of French bread and consuming an entire loaf by myself; I wasn't eating fast food burgers and fries; I wasn't baking cakes so I'd have the excuse to make frosting and eat it with a spoon; and hey, I'm in my mid-late 40s, and isn't this what happens? Y'all, think of a rationalization. Think of a way I've tried to make peace with my weight gain. Think of the stuff I've told myself, reassuring myself that just because I'm heavy again, it does not lessen my talents or skills or value as a human being. Then pass the pie because by the way I'm also trying to "normalize" my relationship with food and don't healthy people also eat pie? Why yes they do so I'm having a piece or two now. And when nobody's looking, I'm also going to stand over the sink and eat another piece, just like I did in the bad old days and then OH MY GOD what am I doing????
Yep. It's THAT EASY.
Prior to going through therapy, I had nothing but self-loathing and couldn't even believe OTHER people could love me since I was so worthless. I've come out the other side of the journey with tools to combat self-hatred; I'm able to think of things I am good at doing. It was amazing when I realized that the first thought I had upon waking every day wasn't self-hating- and it all had to do with my body/what I'd put it in the day before. THAT VOICE HAD BEEN GONE.
And it...came...back. It didn't just come back; it came back with a vengeance. It was nastier than it'd been before, too, because now it came with a whole new fresh coat of shame at having regained weight. It asked me, "What do you think so-and-so will think when she/he sees you again? You're so fat!"
It came back to remind me that I can't wear the smaller clothes that are now in boxes in a closet. It came back to find me shopping in the plus-size department AND dressing to disguise my body so that I am less aware of having lost what I worked so hard to feel: my body being strong, to match the strong person on the inside.
So this monumental struggle inside myself is what led to me writing BIG FAT DISASTER. It all came from this question: "I'm fat again, so does that mean I'm also worthless?"
BIG FAT DISASTER is the result of that question. (Spoiler alert: the answer is, "NO.")
The challenge is continuing to fight that self-loathing voice.
Over a period of 2 summers, I had one foot at a time repaired and although I mostly don't limp any more, I am still unable to run without painful consequences. (I ran after my grand-dog earlier this week and paid for it the rest of the day.) My left foot healed to the point it is basically normal now, but my right foot has more arthritis in it and is often still painful. The following summer (last summer), I had abdominal surgery for other problems; I had complications with too-low-blood-pressure; THEN I chased that with gum surgery a month later because I risked losing 9 of my teeth if I didn't. Throughout the past three years, there was a lot of sitting because I had no choice but to be still and quiet.
(By the way, I swear to God I am not darkening the door of another hospital for YEARS. At least I hope I'm not.)
Over the past month or so, my beloved informed me that I was snoring like a freight train and that no matter how many pillows he puts over my face, he can still hear me. {Pause to laugh here, because he's totally serious when he says it.} He cannot figure out if it's me or the dog who are louder, but he DOES assure me that it does not matter how he shoves me-- onto my back or onto my side-- I still emit a sound so loud that he has to turn up the volume on the TV in order to hear the show he's watching.
Yeah, yeah, I can acknowledge, sometimes I snore when I'm really tired. But, no, it's more serious than that: a problem I had when I was heavy before has returned: I've stopped breathing in my sleep. I used to have a CPAP machine, but when I lost weight, I no longer needed it.
When Daniel told me that I stop breathing, it got my attention. It also explained why I am SO. FREAKING. TIRED all the time. And I also have to acknowledge that my hips hurt like they used to because I'm carrying around 50+ extra pounds; and I have to admit to myself that the arthritis in my feet is not helped in the slightest by hauling around the equivalent of a sack of sunflower seed, 24 hours a day.
I'm back at square one, y'all: I've gotta stop killing myself with food.
I told Daniel, "My eating disorder's got me by the tail again. I've gotta get it under control."
We agreed that that needs to happen, AND that if I'm still doing the stop-breathing thing after a month of weight loss, I'll go in for a sleep study and get another CPAP machine. (I gave mine away when I didn't need it any more.)
Just like always, Daniel is incredibly supportive and loving of me, no matter what the situation is. He understands that I can only buy Coffee-flavored ice cream for him, because it's the only kind I won't eat. He gets why I boxed up all the remaining Christmas candy and put it on the top shelf of the pantry. (I am able to resist it if it's not at my eye level. When I first began recovery from an eating disorder, however, the only way to keep myself from whipping up a bowl of frosting was to dump all the problem foods into a trash sack and then dump a loaded cat litter box over it. I have, I will admit, dug food out of the trash in the past, to eat it. Lots of people with B.E.D. (Binge Eating Disorder) do that kind of stuff. But even I won't eat stuff that's got cat shit atop it.) ;)
He doesn't ever comment on or--especially important to me-- make fun of my planning out what I'll eat, measuring out amounts, etc. Daniel loves me for me, and even though I've relapsed in my eating disorder and I'm born again in my awareness of it, I'm grateful that I am also able to love me. I'm glad that I'm not so far gone that the lessons I learned in therapy have been lost on me. I'm grateful that there is not one person in my life whose love or acceptance of me hinges on my appearance or on living an inauthentic existence.
Which brings me to today. I'm six days in to resuming the way I eat when I'm managing my eating disorder in a healthy way: I have a plan every day, which includes an hour workout on a recumbent bike, which I can do without my feet hurting. In order for this to work, I have to remain diligent, deliberate, and mindful, 24 hours at a time. The entire thing is mental. If there's one thing I learned out of all the others in therapy, it's this: behavior comes before feelings. And as a person whose eating disorder is rooted in soothing uncomfortable feelings, that is key. I won't lie to you: it is hard. Living a life of honesty with oneself usually is.
I wrote BIG FAT DISASTER, a story about a teen girl with binge eating disorder and how she (and others) perceive of her body, because I was searching for a way to resolve my conflicted feelings about having regained a substantial amount of weight I'd lost in 2004-2006. I'd gone from a size 24 to a size 6 over those two years and I worked for a total of 6 years in therapy (2004-2010), to overcome/learn to manage the scars I have as a result of being sexually abused/neglected/abandoned by my parents when I was a child. I wrote THE PATIENCE TRILOGY over the course of six years when I was in therapy, and seeing the situation through another person's eyes really helped me, so I gave it a shot with my eating disorder, too. Thus, BIG FAT DISASTER.
The first thing my therapist and I worked on when I started therapy in 2004 was stopping me from killing myself with food. Letting go of that crutch--dealing with my addiction to numbing my feelings-- was one of the hardest things I've done, and it is something that never, never, NEVER goes away. Over the past four years, since ending therapy, I fooled myself into thinking I didn't have to remain vigilant about it.
When I started in 2004, I didn't have a "diet" so much as a "plan," and it wasn't prescribed by anyone; it was more like, "I'm figuring out what I'm going to eat each day and committing it to myself and I can do this for 24 hours at a time. That's it. 24 hours at a time. Don't think about getting through tomorrow. Just do it today."
And, I began to lose weight. And, I won't lie, it was both thrilling--because eventually I was able to shop in the Junior department instead of the Plus-Size-- but also terrifying-- because I was exposing myself by letting go of the shell of fat that I felt safe inside of from the time I fell into my eating disorder in my teen years. It's when I allow myself to think that I can have the same relationship with food that non-eating-disordered people have that I fall into it again.
When I had lost a significant amount of weight and began letting go of wearing over-sized, draping shirts and long sweaters, for the first time in years, men--strangers-- began paying attention to me. I don't know of any woman who enjoys being ogled by strangers, but for me, it sets off PTSD triggers because my stepfather stalked me and watched me when I was a child.
For some reason, at one point when I was showing a significant weight loss, I have a very strong memory of being at a convenience store to fill up my car, and I was walking from the gas pumps into the store, and this man was holding the door open for me. He openly stared at me, looking at me from head-to-toe, and I wrapped my arms across my chest as I had when I was a child and my step-dad looked at me the same way. I don't even remember what I did in the store, but when I got into my car again, I was shaking all over. Nowadays, I am much tougher mentally and that stuff would not/does not have the same affect on me. Even before I regained weight, I had toughened up to the point of adopting and broadcasting an aura that said, "I will not tolerate being messed with." I'm much braver/ballsier than I was when I was still healing. I have much more of a self-concept that is rooted in my intelligence and ability to manage challenging situations than I did at that time. In other words, as Joan Crawford so famously said the movie, _Mommy Dearest_: "DOOOOOOOOON'T FUCK WITH ME, BOYS!" ;)
Over time, I forged a commitment to finding my inner strength in part by discovering (and marveling at) how strong my body could feel when I was working my muscles. I became more strong mentally, too, because I had a kick-ass (beloved) therapist who taught me to be tougher. The person I am today--the one people know so well that they have a hard time believing that I used to be afraid of everything and everyone-- is the direct result of the tough love/reparenting I experienced over those six years from my kick-ass therapist. He's also the person who taught me not to lie to myself.
Several years after my initial weight loss, the pain in my feet became too much for me to ignore, and I went to a podiatrist. I sat in his office and cried because my feet didn't just hurt when I worked out; they hurt ALL THE TIME and crunched so loudly that I could hear it. He looked at my feet and said simply, "You don't have a runner's feet." I'm thinking... "What, just because I have feet so wide that they're shaped like a duck's, these babies aren't meant to pound the pavement?" ;)
Then he took some x-rays and by the end of the visit, I discovered that the running/super hard treadmill workouts (like walking fast on an incline for an hour) that had helped result in weight loss and love of feeling my muscles had had the simultaneous effect of revealing a congenital birth defect in both my feet. (Sadly, my eldest daughter, who also discovered a love of running, has inherited the birth defect as well, and her clue was the same as mine-- pain beginning over her big toe where it joins the rest of her foot. She's being proactive much earlier, thank God.) I won't bore you with details; I'll just say that it was a mechanical issue resulting in jamming and bony overgrowth, creating feet that went "crunch" with each step I took, and eventually I lost the ability to walk without limping. I missed working out and I tried the elliptical since it is so easy on the joints. I was able to do it for a while, until the bone spurs from the arthritic overgrowth were literally catching on the tendons in my feet, and my feet began spasming into claws for hours after my workout.
Depression set in and I reverted to soothing myself with food-- except that I LIED to myself about it and told myself I wasn't eating as much as I was. I just couldn't understand why I was gaining weight since I had not relapsed into prior behaviors such as buying 2 loaves of French bread and consuming an entire loaf by myself; I wasn't eating fast food burgers and fries; I wasn't baking cakes so I'd have the excuse to make frosting and eat it with a spoon; and hey, I'm in my mid-late 40s, and isn't this what happens? Y'all, think of a rationalization. Think of a way I've tried to make peace with my weight gain. Think of the stuff I've told myself, reassuring myself that just because I'm heavy again, it does not lessen my talents or skills or value as a human being. Then pass the pie because by the way I'm also trying to "normalize" my relationship with food and don't healthy people also eat pie? Why yes they do so I'm having a piece or two now. And when nobody's looking, I'm also going to stand over the sink and eat another piece, just like I did in the bad old days and then OH MY GOD what am I doing????
Yep. It's THAT EASY.
Prior to going through therapy, I had nothing but self-loathing and couldn't even believe OTHER people could love me since I was so worthless. I've come out the other side of the journey with tools to combat self-hatred; I'm able to think of things I am good at doing. It was amazing when I realized that the first thought I had upon waking every day wasn't self-hating- and it all had to do with my body/what I'd put it in the day before. THAT VOICE HAD BEEN GONE.
And it...came...back. It didn't just come back; it came back with a vengeance. It was nastier than it'd been before, too, because now it came with a whole new fresh coat of shame at having regained weight. It asked me, "What do you think so-and-so will think when she/he sees you again? You're so fat!"
It came back to remind me that I can't wear the smaller clothes that are now in boxes in a closet. It came back to find me shopping in the plus-size department AND dressing to disguise my body so that I am less aware of having lost what I worked so hard to feel: my body being strong, to match the strong person on the inside.
So this monumental struggle inside myself is what led to me writing BIG FAT DISASTER. It all came from this question: "I'm fat again, so does that mean I'm also worthless?"
BIG FAT DISASTER is the result of that question. (Spoiler alert: the answer is, "NO.")
The challenge is continuing to fight that self-loathing voice.
Over a period of 2 summers, I had one foot at a time repaired and although I mostly don't limp any more, I am still unable to run without painful consequences. (I ran after my grand-dog earlier this week and paid for it the rest of the day.) My left foot healed to the point it is basically normal now, but my right foot has more arthritis in it and is often still painful. The following summer (last summer), I had abdominal surgery for other problems; I had complications with too-low-blood-pressure; THEN I chased that with gum surgery a month later because I risked losing 9 of my teeth if I didn't. Throughout the past three years, there was a lot of sitting because I had no choice but to be still and quiet.
(By the way, I swear to God I am not darkening the door of another hospital for YEARS. At least I hope I'm not.)
Over the past month or so, my beloved informed me that I was snoring like a freight train and that no matter how many pillows he puts over my face, he can still hear me. {Pause to laugh here, because he's totally serious when he says it.} He cannot figure out if it's me or the dog who are louder, but he DOES assure me that it does not matter how he shoves me-- onto my back or onto my side-- I still emit a sound so loud that he has to turn up the volume on the TV in order to hear the show he's watching.
Yeah, yeah, I can acknowledge, sometimes I snore when I'm really tired. But, no, it's more serious than that: a problem I had when I was heavy before has returned: I've stopped breathing in my sleep. I used to have a CPAP machine, but when I lost weight, I no longer needed it.
When Daniel told me that I stop breathing, it got my attention. It also explained why I am SO. FREAKING. TIRED all the time. And I also have to acknowledge that my hips hurt like they used to because I'm carrying around 50+ extra pounds; and I have to admit to myself that the arthritis in my feet is not helped in the slightest by hauling around the equivalent of a sack of sunflower seed, 24 hours a day.
I'm back at square one, y'all: I've gotta stop killing myself with food.
I told Daniel, "My eating disorder's got me by the tail again. I've gotta get it under control."
We agreed that that needs to happen, AND that if I'm still doing the stop-breathing thing after a month of weight loss, I'll go in for a sleep study and get another CPAP machine. (I gave mine away when I didn't need it any more.)
Just like always, Daniel is incredibly supportive and loving of me, no matter what the situation is. He understands that I can only buy Coffee-flavored ice cream for him, because it's the only kind I won't eat. He gets why I boxed up all the remaining Christmas candy and put it on the top shelf of the pantry. (I am able to resist it if it's not at my eye level. When I first began recovery from an eating disorder, however, the only way to keep myself from whipping up a bowl of frosting was to dump all the problem foods into a trash sack and then dump a loaded cat litter box over it. I have, I will admit, dug food out of the trash in the past, to eat it. Lots of people with B.E.D. (Binge Eating Disorder) do that kind of stuff. But even I won't eat stuff that's got cat shit atop it.) ;)
He doesn't ever comment on or--especially important to me-- make fun of my planning out what I'll eat, measuring out amounts, etc. Daniel loves me for me, and even though I've relapsed in my eating disorder and I'm born again in my awareness of it, I'm grateful that I am also able to love me. I'm glad that I'm not so far gone that the lessons I learned in therapy have been lost on me. I'm grateful that there is not one person in my life whose love or acceptance of me hinges on my appearance or on living an inauthentic existence.
Which brings me to today. I'm six days in to resuming the way I eat when I'm managing my eating disorder in a healthy way: I have a plan every day, which includes an hour workout on a recumbent bike, which I can do without my feet hurting. In order for this to work, I have to remain diligent, deliberate, and mindful, 24 hours at a time. The entire thing is mental. If there's one thing I learned out of all the others in therapy, it's this: behavior comes before feelings. And as a person whose eating disorder is rooted in soothing uncomfortable feelings, that is key. I won't lie to you: it is hard. Living a life of honesty with oneself usually is.
