FREAK SHOW

~ Hide No Seek ~

If there is one post that has been the hardest to write, it is this one. I have sat down many a time trying to get it out, but the emotional toll it takes is at times overwhelming even in this seven years into healing. But...I know it must be told as in conversation recently with another soul left in sexual abuse's wake, for her I will tell it and for the me who needed to have never felt this way in the first place.

It should come with a disclaimer, but will need to keep that for later as to not forefront the ending.

It was five years ago, post-divorce dating and had somehow found myself in a relationship that was even worse than the hell that had been my marriage of almost fourteen years. I say "somehow", but that was in my then. Now...I am smarter in my learning through the fire of how that somehow was. But more on that later. Five years ago, I was free and in a relationship that I thought had been the answer to a dark haul of years. It had all the makings of a perfect "Where have you been all my life" romance and so of course fell in hard and (too) quick. And things in their new and shiny were going well until, they weren't.

"You have a wrinkle, that wasn't there yesterday." "I'd prefer if you came out of the bathroom after you've done your hair and make-up - your wet hair is very unattractive." "Here, wear this skirt. That one isn't sexy." In reading these comments now, they should have seemed an obvious red-flag to me, but since I was new in my healing journey, and since my marriage had been absent of any kind of sweetness at all, these unfazed me. I complied, without even a blink. In fact I would pull over a block from home and make sure I was perfectly primped and painted as to not be a disappointment in any capacity on my arrival home to him, and not with a purpose of excitement for being my "best face forward" into his arms, but rather as a soldier, making sure all my ducks were in a row before the sergeant came for inspection.  I should have seen the sickness in this. I am ashamed to admit, I did not.

Until one day, getting off the bus after work and getting into my car, I was approached by a man motioning for me to roll down my window as his car pulled next to mine, our driver's sides parallel. I was hesitant, he smiled, I rolled it down a short way. "I just wanted to tell you, you look amazing. That's all. Not trying to hit on you. I just saw you walking and I've seen you before, and I just wanted you to know." his words. I can't even remember if my "Thank you" was audible or not as it found its way out, barely. He smiled, rolled up his window and drove on. For me, I sat there for nearly an hour stunned, before troopering on to what criticism awaited me. I had a blemish - my boyfriend was quick to point it out before even a hug...if there even was one that day as they were stingily given.

A few days later while on a lunch break with a co-worker, a guy whistled at my legs. I looked down thinking no way that was for me, it was, as he saw me look to her then to him, and he nodded a "Yeah you" (she was wearing pants as it was). Embarrassed but found a "Thank you." in me.

A day or so later while running into the elevator a Director in my office who I hadn't seen in awhile said, "You look stunning." in the presence of several other co-workers. I remember getting to my desk as fast as possible, wanting to hide from the staring eyes. I didn't like being looked at. And even less liked being called attention to. After all, I had done a great job of managing that the years following the abuse, as I equated being "unseen" with being (hopefully) safe.

I pulled up about a week later at my usual Chevron, I am loyal that way, always using the same local station if I can :), and I went in to pay and the regular woman behind the counter blurted with great exuberance, "Ohhhh do you remember a guy, he was behind you in line last week waiting to pay?" (I didn't remember. She continued.) "When you left he said, 'That was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen'. I've been dying to tell you." I cried. Literally in the middle of the gas station, cried and managed a shaky "Thank you, Rusty." through an even shakier smile.



~ Making peace with the face in the mirror ~

That same night I had gone shopping with one of my sisters and while we were there, a guy had been staring at me. Quite intently several times making it known. Eventually he smiled and approached cautiously, but confidently spoke, "I have been watching you since you walked in. I haven't been able to stop looking at you. Something about you, your look...you are a very beautiful woman. And I'm not picking up on you, I swear, I have a fiancé even, but I just just had to tell you." He concluded as his friend approached who smiled and said, "Oh he told you?" I laughed (wow I mustered one?) and said, "Very sweet, thank you for the compliment. Appreciated." I remember that word "appreciated" as it was a punch to my gut of the most deeply felt magnitude. It had been so long since hearing anything of such nature. My entire fifteen years with my husband had been barren of any, not even one, "beautiful" nor any token of the words "I love you" (only in writing when he'd sign a card, "Love Always" - ALWAYS "Love Always". Not a single "I love you" in all those mornings and nights for nearly half of my life - starved of any terms of endearment.

Revelry would have been the obvious to a normal person receiving such a compliment while shopping, but I was more in a state of revulsion.

What.The.HELL! I mean come on! Something was either a really cruel joke or I was amiss in my reality. I of course went to the nature of a prank and not the other and even asked my sister when I found her in the store, "Jenn. Did...did you...did you pay some guy to compliment me?" She looked at me like I was speaking Chinese. She asked me to repeat and asked what the heck happened. I told her and she then asked me to show him to her, her reply, "Oh he's reallllllly cute!" He was. :) And she said, "No, I did not payyyyy some guy to tell you you were beautiful. And I wasn't even in the store, I just walked in, I was next door. Whyyyy would I pay some random guy to tell you this?" She was my sister. She had known me all my life. And yet...she didn't know me at all - not this part of me. - The part that had no idea that possibly I wasn't ugly.

I got home that night, ignored the boyfriend in the room and reunited with a friend long ago lost, my reflection in the mirror, and forced myself to look not just at, but INto it. To not look away in disgust as had been my regular. It had become my routine to change in the closet in the dark, to wear a (and not the cute kind of) ponytail every day, look in the mirror only long enough that might be necessary since it was there all big in the bathroom, hard to avoid at some point, but never making eye contact with the ugly in the mirror. But this night...I looked. I even stared. And I sobbed.

Once composed I called my other sister and said, pleading evident in my voice, "Danielle, I need to ask you a question. And I need you to be completely serious with me. No holding back the truth. I can handle it. I am asking not as a sister, but human to human, for you to be absolutely 100% honest with me." I think I scared her with the intensity of my question as she had never quite had me come to her in this space before. She said, "Yes, of course, I will be totally honest. What is your question?" "Danielle, am I hideously ugly? Remember you promised to be truthful. I need to hear it. I need to know am I hideously ugly?" Her pause was uncomfortably long. "Is this your real question?" she asked. I guess it was a crazy enough question from her standpoint, not knowing that from mine, it was the way I had felt about myself "hideously ugly" in such regular self-dialogue for all my from youth on years, that it wasn't crazy a question to me at all as pathetic as that sounds. "Yes. Am I?" I can hear her words in reply as clear today as if it happened yesterday, "Niccole, you are gorgeous. Do you not know that?"

The rest was some dialogue of sorts of how lost off of center I clearly was and how skewed my filter had become. When I hung up the phone with her I felt a rush of feeling for the first time in a long time. A welcoming back to my own skin in a way. Remembering, more like a surging up of a flashback forced into my consciousness, a comment made by a friend, a beautiful beautiful girl, in high school in the middle of Spanish Class, "You are so pretty. You could be a face model". I thought it was a joke. All this time, all these years later, I was able to process "OMG I pushed her away thinking she was making fun of me." She was a very nice, not a mean girl, one of the nicest in fact, which made it seem even crueler of a joke that she would make fun of me in such that way. Only now in the split second rush up to be able to hold, "OMG she was giving me a compliment. She wasn't making fun of me".

It is a horrible horrible feeling to come to the realization that you have been carrying around the heavy weighted sense of being not only ugly, but hideously ugly, and even a creature categorically!

And so began my journey of discovery of "Where *did* this come from? Wherrrre did these horrible feelings originate? Where did *this* level of disdain begin?"

It all started to make perfect sense.

When you are abused, you go to battle with your body almost immediately. Not just because our body was IN a war zone. But because our body WAS the war zone. And it becomes an enemy of the most detestable kind. And in our need to be removed from it, we numb to, hate on, revolt against our body. Our sacred, beautiful vessel that is ours to hold in love, we counter instead with neglect, destruction, disconnection and in my case, also a belief of absolute disgust. The healing then is to find our way back to being comfortable in our own skin. To be one with it versus doing anything and everything to escape from it, what felt as a cloak we could not expel. A therapist one time said as I purged to her my extreme abhorrence with people staring at me, that gawd I must be sooo ugly that everywhere I go people just starrrre like I'm some Freak Show! She said, "Did it ever occur to you that maybe they are looking at you because they find you attractive?" No. No it had not. How messed up my thinking had become that this had never once crossed my mind as a possibility, going instead to run and retreat.

A week later on a date with my boyfriend, all dressed up hitting the town, crossing a sidewalk in Seattle, a guy called me a MILF. Yes I know that is a derogatory term but at the time, as a person just awakening to being uncreaturingly in feeling, it made me smile, but my boyfriend was unflinchingly instead consumed with his critiquing that I should have worn my strappy lace-up heels instead of my stiletto boots that night. Five minutes later in line for our table reservation, I sat and watched, like a movie that starts to slow-mo for dramatic effect - my boyfriend, not once, not twice, not five, ten or even fifteen...but twenty-two, twenty-two times look down at a young (nearly half his age) hot girl's a** right  in front of me. I watched as if almost outside of myself, this unfolding. And in that moment, no longer was I the girl who wanted to ice a wrinkle for an hour before he got home to defuse any potential cause for leave. I instead said, "I will NOT be that girl, who is watching this happen between a guy and his girl and feeling sorry for that girl, who in this case is ME. I will NOT be THAT girl!" And I broke up with him that very moment.

I would like to say it was smooth sailing from that day forward. That this aha moment changed me on a dime. It didn't. It took me a lottttttttttt of work to get to where I am today. From a girl who cried the first time a new boyfriend several years later said, "Good morning beautiful". And any time since, it gut checks me when a person I am with in life, holds my face metaphorically with his kind words that are met with eye contact that he does not let me escape.

Now here is the disclaimer. I do NOT think I am beautiful. Not even close (though I no longer think that I am ugly, as I no longer "feel" ugly) and this share is not about looks at ALL! It is about, that which was done to me, and inflicted upon me as an innocent young girl, no longer bears burden on the image by which I see myself. I was born worthy of love and of kindness and that love and kindness must begin and end with me. And hideously ugly, creature, defective, disgusting do not belong in my vocabulary for this second half of my life.

~ Hope is in the looking up ~

I have a dear friend who helped me greatly during this very low time, who encouraged me to post my first photo and to make myself look, really look, at myself. It had been yeaaaaaaaaaaaars since I had taken a photo - the trauma of looking at one was too great for so long. He helped me find the courage to tackle every wrinkle, all of my freckles, to embrace my flaws and to radiate my purity from within no matter how many blemishes might be surfacely present. The scars on the inside were the ones that needed the tending to, not the ones on the outside that my boyfriend was often to point out with great contempt. 

This my friends is the work and the walk. It's getting easier. And it is my mission to help others whose eyes I meet in the looking down. I will bended knee to rise them up, back to where they can feel the sun once again and I will hold their face for as long as it takes for them to reconnect to their own beauty. {love and peace}

~ RyRox