On: Honestly…

I realized I haven't blogged in here in more than six months. I guess life has been intense, relationships crashing, being picked up, deepening. Me learning a lot of my own mechanisms trying new things, getting lovely offers, learning, despairing, crying and then all over again.

I have been pretty shook about recently – structural discrimination tripped me and let me fall face down into the dirty. I have struggled hard for my basic needs, and I haven't felt rough like this for years. Anxiety has still to wear off but I won, I fell, got up and won in no less than a week. But in between I revisited some very dark places, and I cried like I have never cried before.
But I do think I rode on something bigger than myself too, a wave built up by a true sense of community, family. Now I am trying my best, knowing everything is safe, to get back to what used to be mundane and usual. I am having a hard time feeling motivated about my studies and spring always make me want to leave. Just run, no looking back.
I think that has been one of the hardest things in these last weeks, I have had to e brutally honest, humiliatingly so, about my physically limitations, my feelings and my worries. I felt have like an open book. Transparent. As if my throbbing blood would show under my thin skin. Like there was nothing left that was personal and just me. Like there was nothing that was just mine, that wasn't public. Anxiety makes me feel that way too. Unworthy, a fake and a fraud, someone who anyone could find out. Bust. Like there has been no one there, I have just been faking it. But never making it. And it makes me want to run. Just run, no looking back.
Of course I know logically that is not true, I know a lot of things logically because I am smart, they say. And I know what I am. Of course I know what I am. But in these testing times I lose the map.

I lay, a mess, crying in my bed. I am not wearing any skirt, just panties and a top and she lies next to me on top of the covers. We quarreled because I didn't want to eat. She said I had to, I said fuck you, then I ate. We laughed about it – but still. I cry and cry and cry; I close my eyes and turn my head from her. She is too close and I have never felt so humiliated and scared, scared to the bone, terrified. This process is too much. The rug is pulled away from under my feet; it is not just an expression.

I am no good for you, I say. Yes you are she says, and she is not lying, I know that. Still I turn my head.
I get my head up in days to come. I do believe her when she says I am still what I used to be, I get angry more often than sad at all the mess and I find I have good friends.

Then it comes, like a strong punch, a fist to the face. My welfare officer, the man who raped my mind, and forced me to feel like a soggy lump of meat, that they could measure and pass around as they liked and decline the most basic help, he calls me. I see his number on the screen and I don't pick up. His voice on my voice mail sends my anxiety level through the roof. I know I have the upper hand on all this now; we have come that far in just a few days. My army, my generals in fitted skirts and all done up blouses and me, still I fall.

I send her a txt, it's short and précis – Hi, can you get me food. Something easy like soup, am in the pit…
She brings me tomato soup, bread and candy. I tear the bread up and dip in like a starving person in the silky red liquid. I feel hollow, carved out by sharp claws. I have fits of despair, I cry and cry and cry and the bread swells in my mouth.

You must leave, I say. I need to be alone.
She goes, without a word of fuss she leaves me. When she comes back she tells me she knew I had to make a decision. And I did.
I wail when she has left. I wail and hold myself up physically, I wrap my arms around myself and I hold myself tight. The way I used to when I was a kid and nothing helped, nothing but…
I look at the steal, it's slender and sharp and I stare at it mesmerized. But then I pull it back in and put it down. I didn't need to, I made the choice not to cut but now I am angry again. Furious at how far this has made me go, how anxious and terrified they have made me. To push me so close to the edge. I haven't cut in almost ten years and before then not since I was just a girl.
She comes back and we talk, I tell her and she says I was strong; I am strong, for doing what I just did. I didn't believe her then but I do now. I do know what I am. We write up the most horrendous medical model list of what my body cannot do. Humiliations lick the cavities inside my chest and she types and types and types. Seven whole pages.
That night I cannot rest. I dream he is in my apartment, that has been let in and no one has told me. In my dream I scream at those who have let them in, I tell them off like there is no tomorrow. And I wake up at 4.30 am and can't go back to sleep.
Before my reassessment with him I dress up, pencil skirt, stockings, short sleeveed bowtie blouse, sharp blue jacket, all my classy jewelry. I dress to find a power that has crawled back into the back of my bone, forced into hiding. Just moments before seeing him again I feel nauseous but breathe in and out firmly. Convincing myself he has seen nothing yet.
I reach my hand out before his when we greet, a sign of power I have been told. I use his name and I say, hello again S. He shivers, he really does and he looks at me, my representatives from the PA agency, and her, my general in a fitted skirt. And he says as he looks down, oh how many you are.

I sit opposite to him by the table but he doesn't meet my gaze once. I concentrate on sitting up as straight as I can, using my stage voice, calm and assertive. I own all the things he thought would humiliate me. I tell him point blank about all the fucked up quirks of cripfemme life, about periods, so called personal hygiene, sex and the changing of sheets. He stutters, and blushes. I breathe in and sit even straighter.
When we get out of there I feel like I have jumped from the highest cliff ever, adrenaline throbbing through my veins and I smile wide at her.
It was wonderful, purely wonderful, she says.

I was a mean mean cripfemme machine, and he was nothing but the little boy he is. I won. I did.

It's true I won. But I still think of him, it's only been a little over a week and it is like he haunts me. I worry I will see him at the tube stop, out an about. I conjure up his face in my mind and I feel anxiety rising. I have never been so terrified and wrung inside out in my life, and I quiver still.

I needed to get this out; I must travel the path of honesty so that other people know we can fight back. This will happen again, even for me. But I must bear witness that it can be conquered. I must change this, and don't worry he is not getting away. You can run Mr. Voldermort, but you can't hide.