#AfterAbuseChat: What have you learned since acknowledging your abuse?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this year, I’ve learned a lot about myself since acknowledging the memories that have haunted me most of my life.

First of all I am tenacious as hell, but I am also afraid of a lot of things that I shouldn’t have to be afraid of. Like men, I am genuinely terrified of men. This isn’t my fault, this is due to more than twenty-six years of being abused by boys and men who think my life matters less then their immediate pleasure.

I’ve learned that I have identified every single man and boy who raped me, and I did so in a way that forced people to listen to my story, graphic as it is.

I was strong enough to tell my story, and stronger still to kick everyone out of my life so that I could heal the way I needed to, without being a burden to the people that I love. Because that’s what I needed to do.

It’s hard knowing that my childhood and formative twenties were spent being a victim who was passed around, without in the moment, being able to really say “this is what is happening to me.”

It’s easier now, that I am a little more removed from the abusers, from the users and the people who knew, and I am a little less bitter about it, but I am finding this strange sensation of not being able to get angry about it any more.

I’m too tired to get angry about it any more. It’s over it’s done, and I am safe now, thanks to so many people I have lost count.

I made my report to the RCMP, I handed in my journals and now I am waiting for them to do something, even though I have sort of given up hope that they will since I haven’t heard a word from anyone in four months.

My friend Heather has been actively taking them on in Kelowna, so I told her I didn’t see the point of making another report, and she sort of agreed with me. The RCMP doesn’t really care about sex crimes and never really have. So this is where I am at, wondering when and if I will ever receive justice for what Sean Garfield, Chris Tucker and the others like Giles and Harms have done to me.

I doubt it, so I am choosing to move on, and hope that one day Karma does her thing and gets them back for me, I am choosing to move on, I keep telling myself because I have no other choice.

I can’t sit in the misery and the shame forever, so I am trying. That’s all I have this week.