Blogging again

Here I am again.  I am thinking about reviving my blog and posting regularly, but I know what I am like and so I have decided to just take it one post at a time.

I have realised that I need this blog.  Putting aside the selfless ‘I want it to help other people’, I have finally figured out that my blog helped me too.  It’s somewhere that I can let it all out and say the things that I could never actually say out loud.  I’m not afraid to say them as such.  It’s more about how people react.

It’s funny.  You’d think having people acting all sympathetic and offering their support would be nice.  And it is in a way.  But it is also difficult to accept.  On one level, I don’t feel that I deserve it.  Not that I don’t think I am worth it, though I suppose that is also another side of it.  But I just feel guilty that people are worrying about me when there are so many other things going on in the world that are a million times worse than anything I have ever experienced.  And I don’t want sympathy – it makes me feel as though I am broken.  The same goes for support.  That sounds like I cannot cope on my own.

What I do want, when I talk about what happened to me and how it has affected me, is understanding.  I want to share what it was and still is like so that people can have more of an idea of the impact that it has on someone’s life.  And not just the victim either.  Everyone around them has got to carry some part of the burden.  I hate to think of what I have put my boys through over the last ten years.  I can only imagine what my revelations did to my wider family, especially those closely related to him.  And I will always carry a level of guilt for that.  What happened to me was not my fault, but I do feel responsible for forcing them to share in the pain.

To some people who have never had the misfortune of knowing a victim of Child Sexual Abuse, it is probably quite a shock to realise how far reaching the effects are.  But it’s as I explained to someone today – I was nine years old when the abuse started and at that point, it was as though a part of me was frozen in time, never to grow up.  Inside me there is still that nine-year-old girl.  She hasn’t grown up and still sees the world through the same eyes, experiences all the same fears and perceives the world in the same way.  And she will always be there – there just isn’t any way to exorcise her or change her.  All I can do, is try to accept her as she is and find ways to deal with the things she cannot understand or cope with.

Scary, isn’t it?  But that is my life and that is part of why I need to start blogging again.  Maybe I can talk to her through these lines and help her through the terrors that are the adult world.  And maybe, yes, just maybe I can help someone – even if it is just myself.