Erasing abuse…

This is a post I debated most of the day about writing after reading this blog entry from Jim C. Hines about Marion Zimmer Bradley and her abuse of her daughter and defense of Walter Breen, her husband who was a pedophile. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to drag this topic back out because I feel like I’ve beaten it to death in past posts. But there’s part of that post that speaks about people willing to defend abusers if they’re famous writers, and that raises in me a need to address the point and expand upon it. Because as we’ve seen with the Steubenville rape case and with the case of Penn State and Jerry Sandusky, it’s not just writers who can be given this kind of treatment. All someone needs is a little power or authority and suddenly people who claim to hate child abuse will begin to question the victims, or when that is not possible, to defend the abuser.

I’m reluctant to bring this back up not because I’m polishing my image lately, but because there are people who have written to me and told me never to talk about this. It’s apparently embarrassing to them that I should talk about things that fill me with regret and guilt. But the thing is, I cannot ever let this go and act like I’m Saint Zoe. For a long time, I had a problem taking the compliment, “You’re a good person,” because deep down I knew I would never be worthy of that praise. It doesn’t matter to me how many good deeds I do, or how much money I give to charities. It doesn’t matter that I suffered sexual and physical abuse starting from a very early age. All that matters is, I ended up being an abusive person. I’ve cleaned myself up now, and I never let myself forget how easy it is to slip into old mental traps that might excuse my past. I don’t go into them.

The thing I’ve noticed is how much people want to make abuse go away so they don’t have to talk about it or think about it. Abuse victims are encouraged to not talk about this stuff because it’s so upsetting to other people. Abusers who reform and feel regret are told not to talk about it either because that’s supposedly normalizing deviant behavior. Both the reformed abusers and the victims could teach the general public how to recognize the warning signs that someone else was being preyed upon, but the general public has never wanted that education or that responsibility. “Am I my brother’s keeper” are just empty words even to the most devout people. We keep our heads down to avoid reality as much as possible, and when someone asks us to look up and see the danger signs that a predator is among us, we tell the person warning us not to make trouble.

There was a time when I thought that I could find a venue to speak out about what happened to me; how I was first abused by other kids, how I was eventually blackmailed into even uglier crimes, and how my grooming led to me becoming abusive. People I talked to praised me for coming out, but always there was the underlying message, “And now that you’ve come clean, you don’t ever have to talk about this again.”

But I do. Because I didn’t clean up and become a better person in my childhood. I just buried all this poison inside me, letting it build and build until I became toxic and dangerous. I didn’t really clean myself up until I was 28. It’s been eleven years since then, but there’s rarely a day that goes by that I don’t remember that I was an abusive person. Somewhere out there are a group of people who I can never forget because they were my victims. I don’t know if they will ever come forward to talk about me, but if it happens, I have to prepare myself for that inevitability. And if that happens, I don’t want anyone jumping on whoever comes forward like my reputation is some precious commodity to be defended. It’s why I keep talking about these things, because I want people to know these things happened, and that I think it’s okay for the people I abused to speak out against me. I don’t want them to feel ashamed of what happened to them. I don’t want them to keep the burden of this secret hidden and eating away at them.

As a child, I was both a victim and a predator, and I lived with all these secrets. I hated it, and I wanted to be out of the closet in every way possible. I wanted to take all my skeletons and show them to the world so they could see how messed up some of us had life. I wasn’t alone in being so messed up. When I was nine, I had three girl friends who took me in and gave me protection from the bullies. It sounds so wholesome when I leave it at that, but one of those friends had explained to me one time why she preferred an adult lover over letting a boy her age mess around with her, and her friends were in complete agreement about it. Over time, I came to realize she’d probably been groomed by her abuser to think that way, and I often wish I could see her again to find out if she ever recovered.

I think about these things a lot. I think about the people I abused, and I wonder if they ever came out and talked about what happened. I wonder if they recovered and went on to lead normal lives. But I can’t seek them out because I fear them. I’m afraid of opening old wounds that they may have already gotten over. But I can’t get over this. I always end up picking at those old scars, bringing fresh regret and sadness. I can get over my own abuse. I can forgive the people who used and hurt me, but I can never forget that I let that abuse turn me into someone ugly and monstrous. I can never get over what I did, because I worry it might lead to a relapse and a return to old habits.

Maybe, as people say to me, this is a sign that I have become a better person. But one of the reasons I can never stop talking about it is because I keep seeing signs that we as a society have not evolved to the point where abuse is not a taboo topic. We still silence the victims and push them into closets. We still shame them into silence when we should be listening to them and learning how to prevent future abuses. And yes, it is everyone’s responsibility to police one another. It doesn’t matter if the victim is a little girl or boy, if they’re teens, or if they’re adults. It doesn’t matter if the abuse is sexual or violent. What matters is, we need to be able to listen and learn so that one day, we can help save others.

So that’s why I have to keep tearing open old wounds. I don’t like it, and I don’t like how some people react to me, like I’m burdening them with a problem they want nothing to do with. I often feel like this is a lost cause, and that people in my time won’t learn to be more empathic to the suffering of others. But I keep talking about this because I hope that one day we can get this taboo out in the open and eradicate it rather then letting it fester in the dark as we’ve done for countless generations.