Broken by guest @Nikki_Blue1
Image courtesy of Serge Bertasius Photography / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Four years ago, my life was picture perfect. I was a suburban housewife with two beautiful children who wanted for nothing. The house was perfect, the cars were perfect. Hell, even the dog was perfect. It seemed as if I had it all, but on the inside, I was unraveling.
When I was just fifteen, I fell wildly in love with a boy who eventually hurt me in ways I’d never imagined possible. But I loved him and believed every promise he made it would never happen again, knowing inevitably that it would. I rode the addictive highs and lows of our volatile relationship for over three years before breaking up with him one last time. That decision nearly ended my life.
I flailed through the years that followed, never sharing with anyone the horrific details of what I’d run from. I used alcohol to numb the pain and my sexuality to replenish the control that had been taken from me time and again. The satisfaction from each conquest was fleeting and I was left unfulfilled.
Eventually, I met and married a man who I knew would never approve of the things I’d done, so again, I hid away vital parts of my life. By doing so, I lost a little more of myself every day, but as I grew unhappy in my marriage, fragments of the person I’d fought to conceal clawed their way to the surface from the depths of my subconscious. With her came chilling memories of the life I’d buried long ago. I guess you could say my painful past had come home to roost, demanding to be acknowledged, and how I did it would become the catalyst that blew my life apart.
In a roundabout way, I tried to include my husband in my awakening, but he forbade me to write BROKEN, the tale about the rebellious, teenage girl who had been physically and emotionally abused by her high school boyfriend. He scoffed at me, saying it was a terrible idea for a book. According to him, things like that didn’t happen, especially not in upper middle class society. I rolled my eyes when he left the room, wondering if there were also unicorns and cotton candy clouds in the sugarcoated world where he’d been raised. I may have even flipped him off when he turned his back. What he didn’t know when he closed the discussion was I’d begun days earlier, saving the word document I’d named Raspberry Chocolate Mousse among the plethora of dessert recipe files where I knew it would never be found.
The moment the garage door closed in the mornings when my husband left for work, I sat down to write, always listening for it to open again. I wrote until the children woke and after they left for school. Every spare minute I could find I wrote, ripping scabs from the wounds only I could see. I sank into a very dark place as they bled into words across the screen. The pain was excruciating and there were times where I wondered if I would survive it, collapsing to the floor with my knees to my chest as I prayed again to God to relieve my anguish. So many times I wanted to throw in the towel, but something inside pushed me to hold on as the memories threatened to hack me to pieces. After nearly a year, I was able to stand again. I stood taller, stronger, but good as I felt, I didn’t realize my newfound strength had yet to reach full throttle. It was just warming up.
By reliving every moment in vivid detail– the bad and the good –I gained clarity. I’d called out my demons by name, associating my fear of the dark with the car trunk my high school boyfriend had locked me inside of that rainy night, and I related my anxiety during storms to the thunder clapping around me while I lay in the gloomy space. The dread once brought on by rumbling skies waned to a slight jump every now and then, but to this day I fear what I cannot see in the shadows. Still, though, the reasons for my sexual behavior had not been found. I continued to wonder why promiscuity had felt so natural from a young age, and why I’d had a penchant for rough sex. Still, I felt defective.
With a finished manuscript, I took to social media to connect with other writers while I waited for the rejections from literary agents to roll in, and soon after, they did. I received a few requests for the full manuscript, but they were all returned with a common theme– the violence and sex between the two teenagers was too closely related; it fetished it. They asked if I was willing to change the tone of the story, but I refused to pretty it up for mainstream media’s acceptance. Doing so would have meant changing what happened to me and that was impossible. That was when I decided self-publishing was the route I would take, all the while, keeping my life secret from my husband, again. Dishonesty in my marriage was a dance I’d mastered.
While learning the business of self-publishing, I stumbled into a group of small press and self-pubbed BDSM erotica writers. I was drawn to their wicked humor and frank discussions regarding sex. They were like-minded and for the first time in my life I felt like I fit somewhere. At that point, I had little understanding of BDSM and definitely didn’t consider myself a player, so when their snarky conversations switched to kink related stuff, I retreated to the sidelines. As I did, “fetish” moved to the forefront of my brain. I asked myself, and many others, why the rejections included that particular word, and what I learned answered every question I’d ever had. I won’t go as far to say trumpets sounded as angels sang from the heavens above, but my self-revelation was nearly as glorious. I knew I wasn’t defective– I was kinky, and had been from a young age. It was then my life made sense. All of it. Even certain aspects of the physical abuse I’d suffered through long ago fell into place; why I was drawn to the type of men I had been in the past.
More empowered than I had ever been, I took back the last bit of control I’d been drained of by divorcing my husband. He still doesn’t know about my past or who I truly am, but he briefly met the strong woman I’d begun to evolve into as our marriage fell apart, and as expected, he didn’t like me.
When I set out to write BROKEN, I had no idea it would turn my life upside down, making it right again in so many ways. The first draft helped me face wounds I thought would never heal, but they have. The second draft– written with all of the missing pieces– made me whole.
About the Author:
Nikki Blue is the sex-positive co-founder of Vagina Antics, a 2013 Top Sex Blog and has written for SexIs Magazine. Thanks to her project ADD, Nikki is currently working on the second book in her memoir-fiction-Women’s Fiction-memoir-BDSM erotica-memoir-New Adult-memoir-BDSM-New Adult, erm, memoir series, and cataloging her shoes by heel height. She is a southern social media whore who still refuses to admit she watches The Real Housewives of Anywhere. She is known to have big hair, a filthy mouth, and horrible taste in movies.
BROKEN: A Memoir of Sorts | Website | Facebook | Twitter
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