Next to Normal

Most little girls wanted to be a ballerina but I kind of wanted to be a vampire.  I never remembered feeling settled or calm, nor do I ever feel those things now.  I was always feeling chaotic things, overwhelming things, things to big and too complicated for a little girl to make sense of so I spelled them out on my arms and they spilled out of my mouth in waves of nausea and word vomit.

Secret: I still hold my breath whenever people touch me or hold me.

Rape

Rape is such a primal thing.  It's an act that strips you of all of your humanity, ignoring your protests, disregarding your wants, your needs, thus reducing you to nothing more than a body.  It's a crime against sleep and memory that echos into all aspects of your life, voicing itself in quiet moments.  I often wonder if I'll ever be the same.  I wonder if there will ever be a kiss that doesn't remind me of his, a touch that doesn't cause my skin to shudder with remembrance.

I really thought that everything I thought about that night-the shame, the terror-would fade in time.  But that hasn't happened.  Unfortunately these memories have just grown stronger as the light I'm shinning in this dark place is revealing details that for so long were buried.

This remembering brings up a barrier between myself and the people I meet.  I suppose it's the distance of marred memory, of a twisted and shape-shifting past.  When people talk about their childhood, I laugh along and try not to think: that was when I was purging in the elementary school bathroom, when I was feeling like I was suffocating under the weight from the men on top of me, when I was crying in my bathroom at night terrified to step into my bath lest their be another one of them there, waiting for me.  That was when I lost sight of my soul and died.

I became aware that my body was a separate entity from me.  My corporeality became very clear to me, the physical imposition that I had upon space was always a point of contention for me.  It seemed that the body was the problem-my body.  A body that had its incessant wants and needs and feelings and aches.  A body that was too small to fight attached a mind that couldn't make sense of what was happening.  So it seemed only natural for the two to be split, it seemed they could be better dealt with separately.

I'll burn in hell for saying this but there are days, so many days that I wish I could go back and just want it.  So many times I've thought that it would be so much easier to just go back and lay there, not fight, and accept it as sex.  The word rape is loaded.  Sex is easier.  It's easier to accept that I am a whore than it is to accept that I am a victim.

Remy


"And, what's more, this 'precious' body, the very same that is hooted and honked at, demeaned both in daily life as well as in ever existing form of media, harrassed, molested, raped, and, if all that wasn't enough, is forever poked and prodded and weighed and constantly wrong for eating too much, eating too little, a million details which all point to the solitary girl, to EVERY solitary girl, and say: Destroy yourself." 
— Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)