“My emotions that first week after the rape were mixed up…..mostly anger. I wanted him to die. And I was upset with myself, with what I could have done….what I should have done. I felt afterwards that I didn’t resist at all. I just sort of stood there and let him do this to me.” Jennifer-Surviving the Silence, Black Women’s Stories of Rape by Charlotte Pierce-Baker

I’m not sure what’s going on with me lately. I’m sad and lonely all the time. I wish I could lay in bed all day and cry.  I’m at work right now and I just feel like breaking down and crying. I’m just not happy anymore…with anything.

I don’t feel like myself at all. I feel like how I felt exactly after I was raped. I’m numb, emotional, lonely, and sad and I just want the pain to end. It feels like I’m walking around in someone else’s skin and I can’t peel it off of me.

I feel like there’s something wrong with me mentally. I don’t want to end up on medication. I know what I’m feeling is now where close to being normal. I know I’m depressed but it goes so much deeper than that. It’s like I’m depressed and happy at the same time. Like one minute I’m happy and excited about life and I can’t wait to change and 10 minutes later I feel like crying and I want to die. That’s not normal but I’m glad that I’m noticing these things.

I don’t want to live the rest of my life taking pills just to balance out my moods. I've felt this way since I was in middle school, it got worse after I was raped the first time. I just keep pushing it back and pretending that everything is ok. I keep feeling like I’m being punished for being raped, like it’s just one more thing I have to add to my list of problems and that I’ll have to tell someone and it’s just one more embarrassing thing. Lmfao as if having the flash backs, panic attacks, night terrors, body memories and Vaginismus isn’t enough to deal with, come on life why don’t you throw in a little Bi-Polar Disorder in there too?

I’m just really tired. I’m exhausted and drained. I keep thinking about my dad and how I have no family. In that year I lost my dad and I lost myself. It hurts a lot……

I just don’t want to fight anymore. I’m just too tired now.

Because it turns out the nature of rape has changed. We can now meet them in circles we frequent for companionship. We see them at the coffeehouse with someone else we know. We could even have them over for dinner and get raped in our own houses by invitation, a friend.

I don’t want to be touched by another man again. It’s just something about men that just turn me off completely. I don’t like them. I don’t really care too much for women either. But when it comes to men it’s like I’m not attracted to them at all. There’s nothing really about them that I find appealing. I don’t want any of their hands on me and just thinking about it really turns my stomach in the worst way.

It’s like every time I look at a man the first thing that pops into my head is, is he going to hurt me? How many women has he raped? How many has he had sex with while they were drink? Would I ever trust you to be around my daughter? It’s like a million questions running through my head at the same time.

I don’t want to date; I don’t really feel like talking to anyone. I’m not in the position right now to start over. I know that if I do decide to start talking or dating again eventually I will have to tell them about my past because of the panic attacks and flashbacks and the issues with sex. It’s like healing a wound and having to open it back up every time you want to get close to someone. I mean really how many times you can expect of that person to keep getting hurt over and over again. I’m tired of people not wanting to talk to me because of what happened to me. I’m tired of getting blamed for what someone else did to me.

I don’t want to have sex again. I don’t like it and it’s disgusting to me now. I felt like this after I was raped too. Like just the whole act of isn’t appealing to me because always in the back of my head is Frank on top of me raping me and I still can’t get that thought out. Being raped is what I think about when the word sex comes into my head. I think I might have pushed myself to like it just to be normal. And it’s not even the fact that I didn’t like it, it’s just that I haven’t completely separated sex from being raped so.........

I don’t want to have sex again but I want to beheld and feel like I’m loved. I deserved to be loved and be held. It feels really nice and it would make me feel happy and wanted. It’s like every man wants sex and I just don’t want it at all. So I’m deciding to stay away because I don’t think it’s fair to me or the other person to be in a relationship with someone if you can’t be intimate with them. After I’m healed I just want to be healed without worrying about having sex. I just don’t want to do it.

 Like I want to be alone but I don’t want to live my life alone, or die alone. That’s been my fear since I was in elementary school. When Justin molested me I started having nightmares. I remember it because in middle school I had a crush on my neighbor but he didn’t like me but I loved him and in the nightmare someone was trying to kill him and I saved him and he still wanted nothing to do with me. I had my own house a really big house with no kids and I was just living there with cats and that’s how I died, alone. It’s my biggest fear is going through this world alone.

 I’m just so worried about hurting other people again that I put myself second and I need to stop doing that. It’s just that when I do actually start to lean on people when I need help they walk away and I’m alone…. again…

But a mother without compassion, who fails to forge a bond with her daughter, provides for that daughter only when it is in the mothers best interest. Her daughter thus learns that she can’t depend on her mother. She grows up apprehensive, worried about abandonment, expecting deceit at every turn.

Therapy is getting harder and harder every day, but not in a negative way. The more I get into it, the more that it uncovers and I have to face it head on. all the things that I have been avoiding for the past 10 years, everything I’ve been trying to sugar coat so that I can feel better, my own personal issues and problems and things that I’ve swept under the rug to survive I’m facing right now. It’s not a bad thing at all; actually it’s kind of like a breath of fresh air. Don’t get me wrong, I still have my bad days but the good days are becoming so much better than the bad ones.

Since divorcing my family I feel free. Like I have no ties to them, they can’t hurt me anymore, especially my “mother”. I’ve took my power back. This whole time I thought I was supposed to take care of her, I felt like the mother until one day I started cooking for just me, and my daughter. I had gotten tired of feeling unappreciated. I would clean up after everyone, and cook 4 course meals every day and i was the only one eating it. One day I just cooked for me  and she came up to me and was like whens dinner ready. I said I don’t cook for everybody anymore because no one eats it. The food I cooked all last week is still sitting in the refrigerator. (By then I had stopped cooking for everyone for at least a week and she didn’t even notice.) Without a second thought, she went up to my “sister” and asked her to cook her dinner. (She went in there and cooked her dinner like she was her slave, my mother just sat there on her ass like a queen on her throne).  It was like no matter what I did or how hard I tried to make her happy or love me, I couldn’t force her to do it. And that’s when the hurt began. But the truth also started to come out also. I had opened my eyes up to her and realized that she doesn’t give a damn about me or anyone else; she only cares what you can do for her. She will die that way too. I’ve already accepted it and that’s ok. I’m an adult now; I don’t have to answer to her. I still respect her until the day she dies, and along with that respect comes my right to divorce my mother and my family.

Yes I said it and I don’t care what anyone feels about it. You don’t live my life, you don’t live in the same house as me and no one will ever understand it unless they have dealt with a Narcissist before. Growing up wasn’t physically abusive as it was more emotional abuse from my mother. I will still never understand why you would tell a 5 year old that you’ll cut off her hair if she flips it again. My “mother” is not a mother. Any woman can have a kid, it takes a real woman to have a connection with that child and want them to succeed in the world. It’s always some half ass excuses with her when you confront her, or shell twist your words and pretend like she doesn’t know what she’s doing. If you get the best of her one time, shell go back and tell everyone you both know how much you hurt her and how she doesn’t understand why you don’t love her when its actually her that hurt and betrayed you.

And the funny thing is, it’s not like I never tried having a relationship with my mother, I tried up until this year and I got sick of her shit. In high school I wrote her letters telling her what was going on with me and what was bothering me and how I needed her. She never responded back, the conversations that we had, she ignored and changed the subject and tried to blame me for her own actions. Or my favorite apology of hers is “if I hurt your feelings then I’m sorry”. I’m telling you that you hurt me so why can’t you say I’m sorry that I hurt you and leave it at that. Every excuse you make after that defeats the purpose of even apologizing. If my daughter keeps coming to me saying she hurt and she needs you there and that I was hurting her feelings but not accepting her then I would stop what I was doing to try and fix the problem.

 This year I even told her why I was upset and the things she did, like leaving the hospital and not being there for me after I was raped and apparently according to her it’s my fault that she doesn’t want to sit in the hospital all night. And of course my Narcissistic sister took my mother’s side saying how when I was in high school I had this attitude that I can do it by myself, I don’t need anyone else’s help. Geez………I wonder where I picked that up from, maybe because I had to do it by myself in school as much as a begged for my mother to be there for me she wasn’t. She didn’t feel like going to any of my graduation activities, she sure as shit didn’t want me to pick the activities I wanted to be in like chorus. Because she doesn’t feel like doing all that driving around( Ummmmm……..news flaws, you weren’t the one driving me anywhere dad was while you stayed at home because you didn’t feel like seeing me sing) hell she didn’t want to take me to get tampons but you can make a drug run. HA don’t make me laugh.

I took the blame for every negative thing she’s ever done to me, I made excuses for her so that I could survive knowing that my mother wanted nothing to do with me. She told me to my face she didn’t care if we had a relationship and I still gave her the benefit of the doubt. Still holding on to hope that maybe one day she might change her mind and want to be my mother. And now that I think about it, it’s actually really sad, knowing that my “mother” wants nothing to do with me, only what I can do to make her happy. 

I am jealous of the relationship that my “mother” and “sister” have. It’s like they can talk about anything and she listens. They watch movies together and talk and when I tried to do that with her (after my dad went into the coma) it’s like I was being a bother to her and she ignored me. I now I’m grown but I did feel rejected and unloved and unwanted. You shouldn’t feel that from your own mother. She’s supposed to be there for you but mine was not and never will be. I feel like if I have to kiss her ass and suck up to her and sacrifice my daughter and husband to make her happy then I don’t want to have any relationship with her. It’s like to have a relationship with my mom I have to do what she tells me to do and let her raise my daughter and let her do whatever she wants. That’s not going to happen and I would never call a “woman” like that my “mother”.

As a parent now I understand that parents do make mistakes, they aren’t perfect, they fuck up; I’ve fucked up as a parent too. It’s nothing to be ashamed of; the shame comes when you put it on your child instead of on your own actions. Children rely on their parents a lot, especially daughters on their mothers. When you grow up without having that emotional connection with your mother you don’t know who you are as a woman.  You don’t know what you like, you don’t have self-confidence especially if it’s been taken from you by the person who was supposed to protect you and that’s a hurting thing to realize and deal with and try to fix, especially if you realize this when you’re an adult.

It’s like starting all over again from the beginning and learning what you should have known when you were a child. It wasn’t my fault. I sat there and thought about how her childhood was but then I realized that her mother was always there for her whenever she needed it. Because at first I thought she hated me because of her childhood until I realized that she didn’t treat her son or her other daughter how she treats me. Maybe it’s because I look like her, or because I don’t kiss her ass anymore and actually tried to stand up for myself when I was a kid but whatever it was, it started in elementary school and got worse from there. She chooses to act the way she does, no one makes her do it and the fact that she’s aware of what she’s doing only lets me know that it is a conscious choice. 

 

I’m putting the blame back where it belongs on her. She was the adult, I was the child, you are responsible for how you treated me, not me and not someone else, only you and with that I’m letting go of you.

As an adult woman can hunt for and find her own value. She can graduate herself into importance. But during the shaky span from childhood to woman hood, a girl needs help in determining her worth-and no one can anoint her like her mother.

“Young Children believe that Mother is the true source and has all the answers. If a mother dislikes her child, or thinks she’s not good enough, the child believes she’s unlikeable and inadequate. If someone does not challenge this distortion and show the child that she is worthy and precious, she will internalize these negative beliefs and eventually decides that she cannot be different.”

I’ve been thinking for a while, about how I’m doing in therapy and my progress. So I’ve have homework and everything and one of the things I’ve done was a billboard of positive things and things that I like that make me happy. I do have pictures of myself on the top of the billboard with encouraging words and I have post it’s on it with positive things about myself and my body. I also have a book of positive affirmations that I carry with me all the time that I created myself. That got me to thinking of why I even have to do either one of these things just to make myself feel better. I sat down and thought for a little bit about what caused all of this and how it started. I thought about how I felt about myself when I looked into the mirror how I felt about my body and my feelings towards me. After thinking and crying I realized that I don’t have self-esteem or confidence.

I don’t know what confidence feels like. I don’t know how to think about my body but the only thing I do think about is having thunder thighs and my mother always getting on me about becoming a roly-poly and losing my baby weight. I felt the same thing about my hair and my complexion. Shed called me nappy hair because I have kinky hair so she put a perm in my hair when I was 12. After I had the perm in my hair for a while, it started to break off my hair and I started wearing hair weaves because I wanted long hair. All the boys and men around her like black women with long hair so that’s what I wore. I had curly weaves, crinkly, curly, multi colored weaves, I’ve even wore a wig before. I was ashamed of my hair. I was ashamed of the length when she made me take my senior pictures with my own hair. I hated the length I felt ugly. I hated that I had to put a perm in my hair to make it straight and that I had to put hair weave in it to make it longer and I still didn’t feel pretty. The only thing I kept thinking of was I was ugly. There were days when I had the weave in she would comment about how bad my hair looked, her and my dad would always say why you keep that crap in your hair. I was a teenager at the time and I remember thinking because I’m ugly. I’m not pretty and no one is telling me I’m pretty and no one is giving me that attention that I need. It got to the point my mother wanted a weave in her hair and she went out and brought the same weave I was wearing but in a different color. The thing that I had to myself I no longer had. I went natural in 07 and every comment out her mouth was when are you going to do something with that nappy head of yours. She tore down every positive thing about my hair that I had and I didn’t have the confidence to even get it back until now. I have dreadlocks and I wouldn’t change it for the word. It’s me, I love the way it makes me look, I love my hair, even the kinky part of my hair I love. I would never put another perm in my hair again.

I don’t have self-confidence; I didn’t have it when I was growing up. I wasn’t given those resources and when my mother did give them to me it was only a little bit at a time but she would come back and break me down again. My weight is something that I’m still a little bit insecure about. I’m still a little insecure about the way my body looks. Over and over it was drilled into my head that I have thunder thighs and a big stomach. When I was little, as soon as I hit puberty in the 5th grade I put on weight in my thighs, hips and my breasts. I’m short so of course it went to those places. I’m not fat, just thick and I love it now and I understand it now but then I thought I was fat. I never weighed over 150lbs in school but when I was in middle school my mother put me on a diet to make me lose weight. Then I was 85lbs in the 8th grade. I could run a mile in 8 minutes but she still thought I was fat and made me very aware of it.

She would tell me how I needed to lose weight because I was getting big. She would tell me that if I didn’t lose the weight I would look like a roly-poly, those toys that waddle but they don’t fall down because their bottoms are big. Then I would have to ride the exercise bike for an hour crying. She made me run up and down the steps for 30 minutes while she sat up stairs watching TV and eating. This one time she made me get on the exercise bike and when my sister came in the room to try to cheer me up she yelled at her to get out of the room. In elementary school I used to eat everything like all the time. She put me on a diet then and limited my portion size so after everyone else went to sleep I would sneak out the bed room and eat because I was still hungry. She preached and preached about control my portion sizes and how I’m eating too much. I have such big anxieties about eating now. Like I only eat once a day because I don’t want to get fat, I don’t want to gain any more weight. I still feel like I’m 10 being told I’m fat and I need to lose weight, that voice is still in my head and I’m fighting every day to try and get it out.

When I was pregnant with my daughter I only gained about 30lbs and that was just in my stomach. A couple of months later my mother asked me when I was going to lose the rest of my baby weight. (my mother is twice my size, she smokes, does drugs and works 3 hours a day, when she gets home she sits in the kitchen, in front of the TV and eat until it’s time for her to go to bed. She still has her baby weight). When I started to lose the weight and started wearing tight jeans shed always have something to say about why I’m wearing tight low cut jeans. My shirt was long enough so you didn’t see anything even when I sat down. I ignored her. So you don’t want me to be fat but you don’t want me looking nice either? In all of my school pictures I was not allowed to wear skirts or dresses. Especially in elementary school. She would put me in old jeans, boots and a sweater when every other girl in the class had on a dress for picture day. So when I would come home and tell her they were teasing me she didn’t care, her response was tell them if you don’t like my clothes go buy me some. That was her answer to everything, feelings didn’t and still don’t matter. We had dresses and nice clothes in our closet but she wouldn’t let us wear them, she would make us wear things she wore as a child.



 I wore make up in high school my freshman year. She hated it, I liked the glitter and the eye shadow and doing my eye brows but she hated it. She hated everything about it because she didn’t wear it growing up. She told me in front of my friends and her coworkers that I looked like a clown with all that junk on my face. I remember walking away holding back the tears because I was still around my friends and I didn’t want them to see me cry. I thought I looked pretty but to her I felt like I looked ugly. I was always insecure about my completion. To this day I still think I’d rather be a dark complexion than the caramel complexion I have now.

I feel like I’m not light enough to be pretty and I’m not dark enough to be pretty either. I feel like I’m in the middle and I feel lost. I got tired of hearing her talk about how light my complexion was, how I didn’t look like anyone else on her side of the family and how I was the odd one out at every one of her family events. Her brothers would make fun of me because I was so light and because I “talked like a white girl” (proper English). She never stopped them she would join in and comment about how she told me to lose weight, how I would be prettier if I lost the weight. And that’s what keeps playing in my head. Where I live, men like light skinned women (red bones) or you have to be loud and ghetto. And I’m not close to either one. I’m still unsure of myself when it comes to my husband. I don’t think he thinks I’m pretty enough because I know he likes light skinned girls with red hair and I’m not that. And I guess it just makes me think of how I wasn’t good enough growing up because of the complexion of my skin and because my hair wasn’t long enough or curly enough or even straight enough. This one girl in my neighborhood would make fun of my complexion all the time all the way up until high school. My first boyfriend broke up with me to be with her because I was too dark skinned and that hurt it still there in my heart.


Growing up I wasn’t called pretty, I wasn’t called beautiful, my mother never told me any of this; my father never told me any of this. The closest thing I was told was that I looked nicer in my clothes after losing all my weight. That’s not a compliment, that’s an insult. I wanted to feel pretty, I wanted to feel beautiful, and no one told me any of those things so I went looking for them. The boys my age didn’t find me pretty either so I went to older men and that’s when I met my ex, which was the worst thing that happened to me in my life. A lot of things I didn’t have growing up that I should have had but I never got. And I dint think that it would affect me as an adult but it does. I don’t have as much confidence in myself as I should. I don’t believe in myself as much as I should and I’m trying to learn it for the first time. I do feel empty, I feel broken, and I feel like not myself. How can I be confident when I don’t know what it is? How can I be sure of myself when I don’t even know who I am? I know what I like, I know what I don’t like, I know who I love and I know who loves me but I don’t know me. I don’t know myself. I feel like I’ve been beaten so many times that I’m struggling trying to get up again. I feel pretty now, I just don’t feel whole. While I’m going through therapy I feel my inner child talking to me and I talk back to her. And I can feel her crying and it’s so loud and that pain I had from being a child is starting to come out.


 Right now I’m scared of changing but I’m excited at the same time. It’s so scary for me because I haven’t felt like this before. I wasn’t allowed to think for myself and now that I had the freedom to say what I want and how I want it I guess I’m careful on how I do it. For so long I’ve carried this around with me because I was taking the blame for when my parents failed, especially my mother. She was the one who was supposed to be there and guide me growing up and she didn’t. That’s not my fault. I was under 18 and a child, I’m not responsible for her actions and I never will be. I’m responsible for what I do after I turned 18 and what I chose to do now. I used to think that because my mother had a bad childhood that was she did to me was excusable and that she didn’t know any better but she does. I see now that she knew exactly what she was doing, that it wasn’t an accident or something that she can blame her childhood on. That was her conscience decision and I’m not taking the fall for it anymore.

I'm 26 Years Old and I'm Learning About Sex Again.......

Just now I had this burning sensation through my body, I felt like I was losing control over everything. I’m scared to talk about the rapes with people who don’t know the details or don’t know me as well as my closer friends. I’m scared that if I open up and talk to people about it I will get hurt. I’m scared that it will come back in my face like I’m use to it doing. I have this big fear that once other people know that I’ve been raped that they will look at me differently.

 I feel damaged sexually. Everything else I can get through but my sexuality before the rape I can’t get back. I will never have something to compare sex to. So much has happened to me before me and my ex-husband met that it really fucked me up mentally. And I was thinking about that last night. How sexually I’m not normal, I never will be. The fact that I can’t just have sex when I want to upsets me.

How something so intimate, so personal, so private can be taken away from you and there’s nothing you can do to get that sense of security back completely. I just learned that I have been dissociating during sex. My body would leave its self and hover over and watch what was happening. I remember doing it when I was raped. I just didn’t realize that I was doing it when I was with my ex- husband. 

Let’s face the facts, I know that if I had an identical twin and we didn’t everything the same and it’s time for us to go out to date and she hasn’t been raped but I have, I know that she would be picked over me.

I’m not stupid or Naïve, no man wants to be with a woman he can’t touch or be intimate with. That’s a fact and that’s my baggage, that’s me. Considering I didn’t have a choice in the situation of having sex I still feel like it’s my fault
I’m learning about sex all over again for the second time. I’m learning what touches I like and don’t like. What feels good and what doesn't, I’m learning the emotional part for the first time ever because I never had a chance to share it the first time around. It’s scary. I know that sex and emotions go hand and hand which is probably why now I feel so emotional after sex when before I just felt so nonchalant about it. The feelings, the emotions, the looks, stares and connection is what I feel when it comes to sex now and even that is a scary and new thing for me.

It’s those days when you want to just hide Forever It’s a constant cold It’s covering your head with shame It’s living as a statistic It’s was drives you To residing to an easy escape It’s when living turns to surviving It’s rape.

I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot lately.
For the past week I’ve been feeling like total crap, I don’t know if it’s because of therapy and how much has come out or if it’s my emotions. But I’ve been feeling super down, emotional and vulnerable lately.

I’ve been talking so much about my feelings and my thoughts to my husband and friends and it’s just so exhausting. I’ve been feeling a lot of hurt lately. Last night it hit me that the men, who hurt me, actually hurt me. This whole time I’ve been dealing with every feeling that I’ve had except fort feeling hurt. I’ve been feeling angry, upset, pissed off, irritated and wanting them to die.

I’ve never felt the feeling of hurt before until last night. At 4am I went into my bathroom, sat on the toilet, with the cold breeze blowing through the window and I cried. I cried because I hurt for the first time over this. I sat on that toilet last night and rocked back and forth and I cried.

I cried so hard that I could breath and I had to clear everything just to start crying again. I repeated over and over and over again they hurt me, I can’t believe they hurt me, why would they hurt me. And I sat there drowning in so much hurt that I couldn’t sit still anymore. I had to get up and I took all that left over hurt to bed with me that night…..