working on it

for as long as I can remember starts for me at about age 4. and from that age or maybe 5, I was being threatened. The threat was often repeated to make sure I was compliant about everything, about his dick in my mouth or molesting my genitalia. I stayed quiet ... quiet and gaining guilt with every molestation. I would estimate from age 4 or 5 until age 13,  I was molested by my brother over 100 times. Some years more than others. and for as long as I can remember it has occupied my body, my memory, a portion of my thoughts every day, and it's effects its residue  its power over me has greatly influenced my behavior, my life, my decisions, it has in a way been my fate.
 
i have always tried to do something about it, always tried to deal with its ramifications both during and after. i have done therapy, meditation, massage, hypnosis, eating sugar fat and salt, smoking pot, reading, even writing and performing. i became an activist and change agent for single moms, women's rights, equality for women, advocate for rape and sexual assault victims, equality for blacks, equal rights for queers, theater for lesbians, and art for everyone.

still it shadows me. still it directs my decisions and i deal with it every single day as it interrupts my day over and over.

therapists ; myron, paul, danny, tom, gerry, alice, suzie, dalton, even a national expert on ptsd who I spent two days with in a convent working on body memory...and two more whose names I have forgotten. those names might be in an old address book in a drawer somewhere, but i don't care enough to go look.

my daughter as a child and a teenager was sexually assaulted on the street ..two attacks. and at age 30 I was raped in my own bed by a dangerous man who came into my house and raped me at gunpoint as kate lay next to me asleep. again i am threatened to be compliant. it just kept coming. but it does every day for women on this planet, it just keeps coming ... i am not alone.

i believe that when i bump up against the blockades I encounter, i keep slamming, hammering, battering away it, until i bust through. the awakening that came at age 12 was to get away, and i did, to boarding school and once  there i was free from the threats but not the fear. a classmate gave me a black molly (speed) to stay awake and study, what it did instead was loosen my defenses, my inhibitions,  and i told a friend what was happening and she introduced me to her therapist. I remember telling Myron I felt I was a whore. he reassured me i was not. i remember everything about that experience, and I can even now feel the comfort I received in those moments of first breaking my silence with someone who listened and told  me i had done nothing wrong.  Because of those two visits with myron I was 13 maybe 14  when i SAID NO and it STOPPED. When i heard the familiar car pull into the driveway, for the first time i protected my self by running to the bathroom and locking myself in. I said no and go away through the door.  he went away. he never tried again.

simply went away. but fear and guilt and shame stayed.