Written Whispers

I wrote this in Borders the other day while waiting for my Hubby to get out of class. I sat there for about three and a half hours pouring this out, only getting up for one thing or another three times. What I have to say isn’t just for my own sake, I hope it helps others too because in a way that would be the greatest help to me, to know that humanity can learn and change through experience.

This is only the first half of something bigger but I need… to re-gather myself before I can come to terms with the second bit. All will be explained sooner or later if you’re interested enough to follow me along on this journey.

Warning: For those of you are sensitive to it- there is mention of self harm, teenage drinking, something on the verge of mental illness, and borderline (depending on what you compare it to) child abuse. This version has been edited and names/places/and minuscule details have been changed to protect privacy.

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It’s been a very long few weeks. If you’ve been keeping up with my most recent posts so far then you know I’ve been vague,… almost shy about what’s been going on with me which isn’t normal. Writing here like this is my therapy- my crusade and my therapy but that’s another story. Mostly it’s my way of cracking my head open and seeing what will fall out onto my keyboard when I tip it over. A way of trying to understand myself because a long time ago, or maybe not so long since I’ve lead such a short like, I realized I knew nothing about the person I was or the person I wanted to become.

I started journaling regular during my last stay in foster care with several failed attempts beforehand. I don’t really remember what spawned it precisely, the very moment I started, only that I had a notebook and nothing more to express myself with. My spirituality was repressed, my views harshly looked down upon, and my wings clipped in more ways than the average person can imagine.

I had all but given up creative writing- being so depressed at the time that my characters had started trying to commit suicide and since my stories always followed what was going on in my life in one way or another… I’m sure you get the idea. In a way I’d also given it up as a means of punishing myself, something that I’m not about to explain in detail just this moment. Long story short- I didn’t think I deserved the little escape I had created, full of people who cared about my alter ego in a world that didn’t exist.

So, I stopped playing make believe.

Still, I have never not written in all my life. It’s not merely the flow of words but the art of telling stories that really gets me- it’s like the act of breathing. Inhale the world and exhale a couple dozen pages about it.

On top of that I had no one to talk to. Given, I’d never been very talkative, but in one short year beforehand I’d gotten used to always having someone around who was ready to listen when I just needed to let it all out. When I re-entered foster care my first and foremost demand was a therapist because I knew I would need someone I could trust but then my Medicaid was cut (I was labeled as a runaway for over a week and the system didn’t think they’d see me again) and I couldn’t see her for months.

I didn’t speak to the other foster girls at that point. I’d tried before but they always broke my trust, we were just too different and I made a really good target. I couldn’t speak to the foster parents who’d recently turned the other girls against me when I tried to secretly report things that don’t need to be mentioned here.

My social worker was a bitch and if you know me then you know I don’t say that lightly. I absolutely despised the woman who thought the best thing for me was to put me back with the mother who’d grabbed me by the throat in front of half a dozen witnesses before exclaiming it happened every full moon. When I requested she not, under any circumstances, give my new address out to her because there had been stalking issues the year before- she did any way and I received a letter from my parent full of guilt trips and a second from a little girl I used to babysit- written because my parent had asked. Fortunately I suck at replying to letters, guilty about it or not.

I was alone. Completely and utterly in every sense of the word I could fathom. The people around me, the adults who were supposed to care for me and the girls who were constantly in my presence would all tell me that I was a liar every time I tried to tell the truth about the house we were in. It was so similar to when I was living with my bio parent that I found myself thinking, doubting, that they might be right and that there was something wrong with me.

So, I started to keep a journal. It went everywhere with me, a simple spiral notebook with faded stickers on the cover. I always had it, even when I sat at the dinner table, when we watched movies, and beneath my head when I slept. I trusted no one with my thoughts because I believed I was a horrible person and the things I would write would prove it- just as my characters had continuously proven my mood.

Not only did it go everywhere with me but I wrote everything down in it. Everything. For every single thought that crossed my mind I would write the equivalent of one of my blog posts and not just once a day but several times. Every few minutes in fact with the time printed neatly in the sidebar; 11:45 PM, 11:56 PM, 12:10 AM, 12:23… and so on and so forth.

I wrote down the things I ate, when I was sick, little things I thought I should remember and the things I saw happening around me but most of all- I wrote about what was going on inside my head, trying to understand what everyone else seemed to think was wrong so I could fix it. I hardly ever let myself believe that they were the ones who were wrong because, surely if so many people were telling me I was the one who was lying then it must have been true. Only a small handful of people in my entire life had ever told me I was a good person and, though I had a few quirks to keep an eye on, I was a lot better than the people currently surrounding me.

Eventually, as my spirituality began to suffer under the watchful gaze of wannabe Christians who told me I was going to burn in hell for a number of thing (believing in faeries, not going to church, happily calling myself a neo-pagan, daring to think it was okay to be bisexual, etc), I started writing each entry in my journal with ‘Dear Angels,’ in the upper line. I told them my every thought and concern, knowing they didn’t care what religion I followed, what I believed was right and wrong, or what I thought was appropriate expression of opinion for a child my age. In my mind (then and now) they just ‘were.’ In known history they precede all human beliefs and sociocultures and so they became my therapists, the ears I could always speak to because they neither judged me, condemned me, or told my vulnerable secrets and dark thoughts to others.

I felt that when I spoke to them, wrote them letters every single day, they would show me what I needed to see in my own words. I’ve always been a firm believer in helping yourself, you ask the universe to help you and they give you the tools you need to do it yourself and I still believe that till this very day because without what I saw in my writing- be it guidance from angels or just simple relief that I could keep some part of me open without it being gouged out by the world, I don’t think I would have survived.

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This is the end of part one. I need a little break before I can go over part two- there are four, maybe five in total.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 11:43 pm and is filed under Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.