I did it again.
After a long day, when I was ready to sleep, I did it.
It has been about 3 years. Or 2. I can’t remember. The swallowing of my self confuses all time; who knows when or where or what or who I was then and now.
But I did it. I unblocked him to see what he was up to on social media. It feels like 38 years and 7 months ago is right now.
That day… when my 16 ½ year old self gave in to my sponsor’s persistence that I talk with her “dear detective friend” about him.
“He” was over twice my age when it began the summer I was 15.
This was a year later, after failed attempts to break up with him, his constant following me around, his threats to go after my baby sister (who was 8 1/2 years younger than I – you can do the math), and fear that he would use his gun. He told me he had used it before.
I was sober for about 7 months when I sat in my sponsor’s kitchen – my sanctuary. My sponsor Ruthie and her husband were there, along with a soft-spoken man wearing dark pants, dress shoes, and jacket – was there a tie? He was Ruthie’s friend. I think there was another person, but who knows. The room is filled with fog in my remembering. The detective was standing or sitting – no, standing, both, in front of the sink. I was sitting 10, 20, 100 feet away. Tunnel vision. It is dizzying to think about.
I hear his voice:
“They will be hard on you. In court. They will make it look like it’s your fault.” I already knew that it was my fault. It had to be. But his eyes…they were gentle. Like he was actually listening to me.
“I want to stay sober and clean, and I am scared that he will make me use again.” I blurted out. Something like that. Also, my “boyfriend” wanted to pimp me out. He was excited at the prospect of earning money from me.
Interlude: While I do not write specific details about the abuse, I go to some painful places here. I have never written about this particular time, and it may be difficult to read. It was difficult for me to write. Please take care of yourself. Peace of mind is precious for trauma survivors. I know how activating it can be to read other people’s stories. I will insert a few irrelevant images, to divide up the reading a bit, and give your nervous system a rest.
Like this one here: I took the picture in Bruges, Belgium. I went there by myself last year. Isn’t it like a fairytale?
A few months ago in a therapy session, I talked about an incident involving a woman I met on an inpatient psychiatric unit before rehab – and her husband. She had been writing me for a year. The event occurred around one month before I met with the detective. It involved them driving me around for several hours with a few stops on a beautiful sunny day. I can not write more about that now, there is too much trauma.
But I asked myself out loud in that therapy session.: “Did he set that up? Did (insert boyfriend’s name) get paid for it???” As I write about this scary afternoon with that couple, I start floating away. My face is numb, my throat is closing up… I can’t feel my legs.
Dissociation, the gift that keeps on giving.
Here you go: A Picasso in Chicago. Reminds me of how I feel when I write about some of this crap.
My sponsor hated the man I called “boyfriend,” whom she called “Numbnuts.” (See this post for further discussion on that designation. It also contains more comic relief should you need it. Psychokinetic Girl Power: Sobriety, Resourcing, and Cow Talk – Erliss, the Monkey Whisperer (erlissthemonkeywhisperer.com).
This was in the days before mandatory reporting, when a 15 or 10, or 5 year old could be considered a contributing factor in a 30 or 50-or 70 year old’s wandering body parts. I just threw up in my mouth as I typed those words.
Back to 38 years and 7 months ago.
My legs were shaking all morning before I went to my sponsor’s house. I believe I rode my bike there, carrying my pink diary. That diary had an image of a little girl in a bonnet with flowers all over it. The first entry was from New Years Eve when I was 6. I wrote with excitement about how we “had the Community Chest cards where the Chance cards should be, and the Chance where the Community Chest cards should be!” Monopoly was my favorite game at the time. A friend and I played it on the floor of my dad’s office that night. We laughed so sillily when we noticed our mistake. I guess I thought it was important enough to document.
When I was shipped off to drug rehab early spring after turning 15, my parents took the journal I had been writing in for a couple of years. It was brown and had a date on each page. My best friend gave it to me for my 13th birthday. They read it and said they “don’t want that filth in my house!” (In fairness to them, the “Hail Satans” may have pushed them over the edge a little. They did their best.)
SO much of my life is missing. Memories of my worst drug experiences involving men who I will never remember were in that book. They are lost forever, wherever the trash goes. I thought I should have gone with it – trash felt like a mirror reflection of my soul at the time.
When I got home from rehab, I needed to journal. So I pulled out that pink -6-year-old-self diary and began writing. It didn’t have everything in it, but it had enough for the detective to know I was telling the truth.
The summer of 1985 was hell. I was sober, but I felt everything. My sponsor’s kitchen held that hell with the most sacred of confidences.
The detective (or were there 2?) gave me a couple choices. One was to press sexual assault charges. (There may have been more charges. I guess the word for “he followed me everywhere and called my house and hung up and left me weird notes and messages and would not leave me alone” is “Stalking.”)
Damn’t… I am 55 years old and have walked with countless women through their trauma stories. Only now, as I write this at 3 am on a Thursday, am I realizing that he was stalking me. Not only did he manipulate, control, assault, blame, shame, threaten, (repeat ad infinitum) – but he also stalked me – almost daily for over a year, and less frequently in the 3 years that followed. No wonder I am so fucked up.
“Hey…Erliss…you are not the one who is fucked up. HE is the one who is fucked up. The fucked- uppery is on him, not you. It is fucking amazing that you are even alive. Holy fuckity fuck girl!”
My ears are ringing, I can’t catch my breath, where am I?
Breathe, Erliss. Feel your toes wiggle. Look around the room for 5 blue things…
What do I do with this new information?
Erliss, you look sad. Are you crying for that 16 year old girl who tried her best? She is ok now. She is here. She made it.
I need to pause…no I need to finish writing…after a pause.
PAUSE
Silly me, I thought I could write about this encounter with the detective in my sponsor’s kitchen and “keep it simple.” But trauma is never simple.
This flower from my yard is simple. Beautiful, and simple.
38 years and 7 months ago the detective took my journal. The pink flowery one with the little girl in a bonnet on the cover, and the silly 6 year old’s entry about a Monopoly game mishap on New Year’s Eve.
An aside: memory is a funny thing. It’s possible I have it backwards – that I gave my sponsor the journal, she gave it to the detective, who read it before meeting with me. Or maybe we met twice. I feel like I gave him the diary. I do not remember. Often in trauma, order becomes disordered, and puzzle pieces are reshaped and resized. But trauma wants to be heard…it craves a good listener, a non-anxious presence to walk it from the far end of hell to its front door. Or at least a balcony.
At one point the detective leaned in and handed my journal back to me. He said he was proud of me for staying sober, that he knew life was hard for me. There was something about his voice – was it compassion? Did I remind him of his daughter or niece? Did he work with someone else – like me – who died either from suicide or homicide? Was he afraid for me?
He knew I wanted sobriety more than anything. This kind and wise man shared his fear that the defense attorney would be cruel, that the wounding would be irreparable, and I could relapse, or die with my next suicide attempt. He offered that he and this other detective (there was definitely another cop there) could “talk” to the “boyfriend,” tell him to leave me alone, and they were watching him. If he ever bothered me, I could tell them, and they would get him. Or stop him. Arrest him. Scold him. Maybe castrate him. I forgot which – probably all of the above.
It was maybe 5 or 6 months ago, while working with our local police as a volunteer chaplain, that I came to understand what was happening in that kitchen. All these years I believed that I was to blame, that the cops didn’t believe me, and probably laughed at me behind my back. But when I remember his eyes, with a tinge of sadness, and the care he took in explaining my options – he knew I was telling the truth. Maybe he knew that there were dirty cops in town that were “friends” with that man, that he was “connected” to more dangerous people.
The detective was serious – he wanted to help me. I know this, because I have seen that look in other cops eyes – the longing for justice coupled with the need to keep a victim safe; the frustration that the perpetrator will get out of jail on bond and go back to harm the victim; the lack of resources to help the victim gain a sense of empowerment; the counter-transference when “this could be my daughter/sister/son/mother/parent/grandchild/spouse/etc.”
While it has improved immensely, the law still doesn’t allow for an easy marriage between “justice” and “protection.”
Anyway, back to the point: I said “Yes, please” to the latter recommendation. I felt very small, like I was a 5-year-old saying “yes, please” to hot fudge on my ice cream.
As for the alternative choice – the thought of being the cause of that man’s arrest, having to tell everyone in court, being afraid he would come after me – I cannot describe the terror it all brought me.
Here is a picture from a rest area in eastern Wyoming. I love how the clouds frame the sky and sun.
So they did it. I went home after that meeting, and the “boyfriend” did not call my house. A couple of days later I went away on vacation with my family, attended a wedding where I found myself with a bottle of vodka in my hand (another story for another time) and put it to my mouth – then saw the phone on the wall, and called my sponsor instead. That was a fucking miracle. A holy hell damned FUCKING miracle.
A few days after vacation ended, I had a week at music camp – one of my safe places that I still refer back to when needed. And after that – about 2 weeks after the cops had their “talk” with him, (which, I imagine in those days, involved a little bit of roughing him up- at least a part of me wishes that happened.) I started feeling like it all worked. It was the longest time I had gone without hearing from him in over a year. I didn’t have to be with him, do what he said, smell his alcohol smitten breath, be afraid all the time – I was free.
Eleventh grade was fast approaching, and I was ready to start the school year with hope.
In early September I went to the grocery store across the street from my house. It is the same grocery store where I first met him, the ONLY man to ever call me “Princess,” the year before. Who knows what I bought, but while in the check-out line I heard my name. And there he was. He told me “You didn’t have to go do that BULLLLLLLLLshit!” “You will always be my princess,” “ I will never leave you alone.” And “I am watching you always.” Then he handed me an unsigned letter and walked away.
I was dazed, like in a trance.
Memory is strange. What happened after that? Did I go back to the cops? Did I tell my sponsor? It’s a blur. I know that I did not have sex with him again for about 8 months. Instead, I tried to shrink my 5 foot 5-inch-tall body as both penance and protection. At my first year AA sobriety anniversary I weighed 86 pounds. See, the man liked young girls, but they needed breasts. I was still wearing a bra but went from a C to an A cup. He left me alone. I ended up on a medical unit for anorexia nervosa– the first of 3 longish inpatient treatments for my eating disorders. I felt like if I could disappear, so would he.
And yet…the point of my sharing is to say I now know, 38 years and 7 months later, that those cops wanted me to be safe. They did not blame me. They blamed him and wanted him to pay for what he did. And I imagine they were sad and angry that they could not get him. Maybe they even questioned their own calling and sense of purpose.
No one was able to get him. Not for what he did to me, not for what he did to my friend who was a year younger while I was in the hospital for the eating disorder, not for what he did to myriad young girls in the years since then, and not for what he is most likely doing today.
It is hard for me to think of myself as a victim. One of the benefits of shame and self-blame is the illusion of having a sense of power. If it was my fault, then I had some power in the abuse. I COULD have stopped it but didn’t. See how that works?
I cried when I connected the detective in my sponsor’s kitchen with the cops I work with today. If I could talk with him right now, it would go something like:
Thank you. You believed me. You were wise and protected my sobriety – I would never have been able to testify and stay sober. And even though he didn’t stop completely, you said something that scared him, because he slowed way down.
I got to graduate high school; go to college; attend graduate school. I even got married to a kind, loving, smart person – you would like him. I have sponsored countless people, often sitting on the listening, non-anxious presence side of their trauma hell stories. I needed a lot of help, and maybe some would not see this as a success.
I know you are angry that you could not stop him from hurting other girls. It was a small town, with few resources, and he had power from beyond.
But I am here today, clean and sober, because you listened to me. You gave me a chance, you believed me – when so many others did not. I am grateful for you, my dear sponsor’s dear detective friend. Thank you.
It is now 5:15 in the morning. I wrote more than I expected. I feel sad and confused. There is a bit more for me to work through than I thought.
And I am crying.
Here is a picture of a special tree. It stood at the entryway of my graduate school campus. I love how it shapes itself over the earth below, hugging the space between its limbs and the grass. I find it comforting, protective, safe.
My therapist reminds me that when I am in ptsd brain, when I dissociate and feel like it’s all hopeless and I am a bad person blah blah blah– that I can hold more of my story than I could in the past. As I wander off to different parts of myself, I don’t wander too far. I have a greater capacity to witness without judgment. I don’t hurt myself to stop the pain. And I have more compassion for the traumatized little girl I once was.
There are 48 hours before I can block that boyfriend/abuser/sick-fuck-jerk-off man again. He probably doesn’t remember I exist. And now he is over 70 years old. Don’t worry, I reported him twice a few years ago. I have no proof of what he is doing today, only instinct. I hope someone is watching him. I don’t want revenge. I want justice for what I imagine are hundreds of his victims.
I still have fear that he is doing it today to some poor teenage girl – and that it is my fault. And I have to have compassion for that part who self-blames. It hurts to carry such responsibility.
Erliss dear, you are not accountable for his actions. You are not accountable for any of their actions.
I need to get a little sleep – take a nap for a few hours before I start my day. A day which conveniently ends with an evening therapy session. I wonder what I could possibly discuss in that hour and a half.
Thank you for listening.
Much love to each of you,
Erliss
PS- Maybe, someday, I will be like Dignity. I love her.
