Meursault's Journal

[meursault]

I wish this would just stop.  I don't think it ever will.  The lgal system has already prolonged this over twice as long as the Supreme Court says is the maximum allowable.  I don't understand what's happening.  And my lawyer is good, apparently.  He certainly seems good, and that therapist I saw briefly who used to be a cop told me he asked around to cop family and cop friends and they all said my lawyer is the guy THEY would get.  I've also had lawyers tell me the same thing.  They'd get my lawyer if they were charged with anything.  I don't understand why this is being allowed to go on for so many years.  It feels like my lawyer made some backroom deal with the prosecutor to throw me under the bus.

Anyhow, I (like the Kinks say)  "woke up in a panic, like somebody fired a gun" this morning.  I've been feeling motion sickness quite often recently, and a lot the last couple of days.  Walking around my place this morning, I think I figured that out.  IT's like I'm constantly teleporting.  It's like this rapid cycling of complete dissociation, so I'm almost jumping from one place to the next.  It's weird, though.  It's like my brain is going in waves of non-existence, but if I think of what just happened, my body was still there the whole time.  I don't know what this is.  Just moving from one place to another instantly in this weird strobing awareness.  To put it lightly, this is unpleasant.

Thanks for the comments, Sanmagic and Three Roses.  I don't think I would have made it through yesterday in one piece without them.

Meursault

[sanmagic7]

i wish it would stop, too, for your sake, meursault.  you are being battered over and over through this legal tornado.  still, you're with us yet, and that speaks so much to your strength and determination.  those feelings you describe, i can't even imagine, yet you're riding their waves like an elite surfer.  hang ten, meursault!

[meursault]

Thanks Sanmagic!

The "waves" thing...  My therapist allows me to send a weekly email Sunday to be read by her Monday morning.  I've recently shared a lot of music I've recorded, my poetry (yesterday I sent the romantic ish poem I wrote unromantically about her!), and I've shown her my art, and have made a couple of graphic novels I got professionally printed.  I was actually tempted to send a PDF of them to you, Sanmagic, but I didn't know if you'd be interested.  Let me know if you are, and Three Roses, let me know if that's inappropriate.  I would message Sanmagic a link to a Google Drive file, so things are still anonymous and all that...

The waves thing...  Here's what she sent back as email today as response to my crazy, defeated, trauma-exploding email last night, which was pretty open about how much she's meant to me since seeing her too, and how I love her:   (I also mentioned that if things go south with me, and she wanted to know more about what's been happening with me, she could see my posts here, but I told her not to look unless things go badly for me.)

Thank you for your honesty and your vulnerability in this email.  I know a lot of these things are hard for you to share and I really appreciate your willingness to let me in.  Your poetry, artwork and music is truly beautiful and you should be proud.  Thank you as well for sharing you thoughts and feeling surrounding the work we've done together, our therapeutic relationship and how that has impacted you, I'm very glad that you feel comfortable and safe with me.  We will continue to work together and you will get through this.  We're riding the wave right now and it's not always easy. I listened to the music however did not read the stuff on the forum.  I'll see you on Thursday [Meursault].

Weird about "the waves", how you both mentioned it in a period of a couple of hours...  I really wish she was more expressive, exuberant and emotional sometimes, but she has such awesome control and boundary management, I don't think I would have been able to trust her if I didn't see how her control made her safe.

I've re-read that email probably a hundred times already, and it was just sent this morning.  I'm desperately clinging to her to keep it together right now.  (God, I hope she isn't mad or disgusted by the poem I wrote about her....)

Meursault

[sanmagic7]

meursault, from a therapist point of view, i doubt that she was disgusted by your poem.  she's a professional, she knows about transference, she can put it in the category where it belongs without judgment.  it's part of your process, and i expect she can respect it for what it is.

she's doing her job, and part of that is to be strong for you, especially when you're at your weakest.  it sounds like you are trusting the dynamic between the two of you.  let it flow, let the process play itself out.  ride the waves - they have upsides and downturns but all the while you're staying above water, and that's what counts.

and, meursault, as much as i'd love to see your graphic novels, i'm going to have to pass for now.  i'm in a truly bad place, and i don't think it would be helpful for me to get involved with someone on this forum on another level right now.  but, thank you so much for thinking of me.  having read your poetry, i know you are incredibly creative.  again, thanks for the offer.  it was very sweet of you to think of me.  keep taking care of you - i'm doing the same. 

[meursault]

Fair enough!  I suppose it didn't hurt to offer!

Meursault

[sanmagic7]

no, absolutely didn't hurt to offer.  like i said, i thought it was sweet.  i just can't do anything more than what i'm doing right now is all.  sorry.  and, i hope you know this isn't a rejection of you, personally, meursault.  it's just where my process is right now (in the basement).  you've been a great friend to me on this forum, and i appreciate you being in my life.

[meursault]

You too.  I think I would have been hitting the crisis point more if not for many of the things you've said to me, and to others.  You have a lot of wisdom!  I didn't take it as a rejection either (remarkably!).  Hopefully, if I make it through these battles, I decide to write about my life.  I'll sign a copy of it for you (before the book is pulled from the shelf for lack of appeal  )

I'm in an all right mood today.  I just got my cat back from my Mom's in the country, after being without her for three years!

Meursault

[sanmagic7]

yay!  glad you got your cat back.

thanks for your kind words.  and, a book!  quite an honor indeed!

one foot in front of the other.  keep on keepin' on!!!

[meursault]

Saw my lawyer yesterday.  Absolutely brutal.  Going through the minute details of what happened that night my Dad died, reliving it all, being questioned about every little detail.  I only completely lost it once, so I guess I did okay. 

Left there and went for a coffee with my best friend.  She was at that party on the weekend.  I am completely torn apart by all that still.  That's broken me down and made me feel like giving up more than anything in the last year.  I'm just not even allowed to be a human any more.  I am completely disgusting and hideous and unlovable.  She kind of lectured me that "people can't remember your needs 100% of the time".  I haven't been on an outing with friends, other than meeting up at coffee shops or restaurants, since last winter.  She told me that being upset would just drive people away.  I told her it's not like I'm mad about it, but badly hurt.

She offered to organize a potluck for people to come to my place.  I just panic at the thought.  Do any of these people actually like me?  And that would just feel like "giving scraps to the poor".  I wanted to be a normal person, at a normal event, meeting some new people, women, really.  Anything at my place would just be friends who are not even romantic possibilities.  I would just feel like some mentally damaged THING whom they are condescendingly showing mercy to.

I guess I'm pretty appreciative of her offering that, but I don't think that helps me any.  I think I'm too scared of all these people now to even want to know them.  I'm just alone.  Life is *.

I don't understand what it is about me that makes me such a monster, and how no-one wants me.

Meursault

[sanmagic7]

meursault, i think you're going thru an extremely traumatic time with all this legal stuff, and that can make everything else bigger, including neg. thoughts about yourself.  i can't wait till all this is over for you.  too many layers of trauma to see straight.  it's horrible, what you're going through.  if i had my magic wand, all this would already be over and done with and you could get back to rebuilding a real life.  always with you.

[meursault]

*****TRIGGERS for talking about childhood stuff, some sexual content....

I'm sure you're right, Sanmagic.  It's hard to keep a reasonable perspective with all this extreme thinking and overwhelming emotion.

I saw my therapist today, and she was very gentle and connected with me.  The stuff I'm feeling and pain I'm in is really all tied in with that stuff from when I was a kid.  I had my bear with me!

I don't think I've really gotten into detail about much growing up on here.  But It's like all that stuff has been activated.  The terrible attachment, the crushing inferiority and unlovability, constant daily fear of pain and death, the sense of annihilation, all that stuff.  The fear, the exile from love and affection.

I grew up with my Mom and three older sisters, but saw my Dad some weekends and over the summer.  My Mom HATED males.  From my earliest memories, all she was was a bottomless world encompassing rage about how men are all monsters, and deserve castration, rape, murder, disfigurement, jail, cancer, loneliness, torture etc.  She was an extremely militant radical second-wave feminist.  She did stuff like "person hole cover', and refused to let my Dad call her "my wife" since that implied ownership.  She had the most extreme view of patriarchy as one is bound to find, with beliefs like the medical system is a front for exterminating women, etc.  She cheered and laughed whenever hearing about something bad happening to some male in the news or whatever.  Men were all subhuman rapist monsters, and women all flawless angels.

It was constant and graphic how I deserved to die because I was male, and she took gleeful delight in telling me how men deserve to be sexually violated etc.  I could provide dozens of graphic threats I got on a daily basis of what I deserved for being male.  They are things that if someone said to a stranger, they would without question end up in jail.  Everything boiled down to rape.  I remember being terrified by four years old of her.  It was constant.  And she would laugh and take a great deal of pleasure in me shaking in terror or crying, and I'd be ridiculed for it.  My sisters took it to heart, and acted as her lieutenants.  I was garbage to all of them.  I was "bad".  Stupid, ugly, not human, pathetic, undeserving of either life or happiness.  Everything was viewed in a very hardcore political feminist framework.  Every sex crime in the news was talked about and discussed in graphic detail, and everything was the fault of the "typical male!"  I was threatened with castration regularly because "then you'll get what you deserve!" or threatened with being put in jail with "I should throw you in jail and then see how you like it with all those big guys having their way with you.  Then you'll get what you deserve."  Stuff like that was daily.

There was some physical abuse from my Dad, and I guess from everyone else too, like how my Mom recounted (and still occasionally does) how she bit me when I was about two years old hard enough to draw blood and how I 'howled".  That was something she has always recounted with great pride, like it illustrated what a creative and good parent she was.  I remember when I was either four or five an instance of sexual abusive stuff with two of my sisters.  I remember it not being unfamiliar, and I remember I regularly "taught" my teddy bears what to do with Barbie dolls until I was around nine.  I think there was quite a bit more than that one time.

Mostly it was just this totalitarian environment of hatred and rage, though.  She still proudly talks about how she refused to name me after I was born, and my Dad finally had to after a couple of weeks because the hospital couldn't release me without a name.  I was hated for being male from the get go.

There's so much stuff that happened I could go on talking about this for weeks, so I'll shut up.  Just thought a lot about that today.  Just feeling I am abandoned by my friends and am completely alone, and suffering through this ongoing legal trauma, barely human and cut off from connecting with the world, and women in particular.  It's really activated a lot of that stuff from when I was a kid.  If I reverse the gender on all this, it is obvious how abusive and brutal it all was, but I mostly still have a hard time even thinking it WAS abusive.  It was so forceful, constant, and from an early age, my brain just believes I deserved it.

So that feeling cut off from people, and feeling undesirable to women, just triggers this massive sense of attack in me,  Just this self-annihilating terror that because I'm unwanted, I'm unwantable, and that could only be because I am hideous, monstrous, garbage etc.  This stuff is so deeply built into me, I don't know how to deal with it (yet!) when all this other pressure is on me.  I was pretty much wailing in my therapist's today about "Why doesn't anyone want me?  What's so bad about me?   What do women see that makes me so disgusting and not even human?"  That sort of thing.

I hope it's okay I posted this, Three Roses.  I just kind of feel like I needed to express some of this.  I have a hard time gauging what I say regarding triggers etc, since this stuff was so constant, and for so long, it seems normal to me.  I'm sorry if I shouldn't have written this.  I think I intellectually understand this stuff mostly, but I'm still just a broken little boy emotionally a lot of the time.  This last week I've been like a screaming little boy suffering more pain than he can handle.

Meursault

[radical]

Hi Meursault,
I wish I could be of some comfort beyond telling you that I believe in you and I believe you will get through this current *.  I can't even say why I think you'll get through.  I know not everyone does, but there is just something about you that makes me feel a kind of confidence.

Hearing about your family life also makes me all the more aware of the gravity and impact of losing your father.  With the tragic and traumatic circumstances and the all the outfall, I hope that loss didn't get buried.  Not just losing your Dad, and that is such a big loss in itself,  but the only male kin who can bear witness to the hatred and abuse you endured within your family as a result of being born male.

[Three Roses]

 

You've said nothing wrong! I'm glad you were able to get that out, in fact.

A little boy deserves to be held, cuddled, encouraged to explore his world, deserves to laugh and be happy and feel safe. It grieves me to hear you did not have that, growing up, and instead were threatened, assaulted and bitten. I can not imagine what could make a mother do this!

Please feel free to express your pain and longings here, it's what the forum is for.

[meursault]

Three Roses:  Okay, phew!  I wasn't sure about this sort of stuff, how to phrase it.

Radical:  Thanks for recognizing that.  It's something I deal with in my head all the time.  After he died, the battles between my sisters and Mom began.  Now there are two camps:  my Mom and oldest sister in one, and the other two sisters in the other.  They will NEVER speak again.  I tried to be a peacemaker and have to balance in the middle all the time.  About a year and a half ago, my one sister, who is just like my Mom, started trying to crush me down, being blatantly abusive.  Normally, it's been more subtle, but she had been getting pretty aggressive with me for many months.  Somehow I had really good boundaries.  I was with an ex-girlfriend and went to my sister's place, and she pulled out a stack of papers as thick as a phone book, full of sticky notes, and started to go through every little thing she could twist or misinterpret and verbally attacking me.  I left.  My ex-girlfriend was shocked.  She said "Oh my God!  I've NEVER been spoken to like that by anybody, much less family!"  I was glowing, because I thought it went pretty well!  Now that sister basically doesn't speak to me, and has gone around to extended family vilifying me.

So I feel pretty alone in my family now too.  To all of them, I am bad, have terrible friends, am a liar, etc.  Meanwhile, in normal life, most people I know tell me I'm kind, honest and intelligent.

Really, though, my Dad wasn't any support growing up.  He saw how bad it was but didn't do anything.  He used to regularly say "I'm glad when you're around, because then your mother goes after you instead of me."  Once, when he was raving about my Mom, I told him to leave me out of it, and he said "Everybody needs a whipping boy, and you're mine.   Your Mom takes it out on me, and I take it out on you.   That's how it's supposed to work!  Why do you think we had you in the first place?!?"  And then proceeded to empty a toolbox of wrenches by throwing them one at a time at me, as I was stuck working under a farm implement.  That always stuck with me very clearly.

Nine days before he died, I kind of finally confronted him about this.  All he said was: "I had it worse than you, she was supposed to be my wife!"  I said: "There's one difference.  You could have walked away, I couldn't."  He got mad and just insisted "I still think I had it worse."  Not much of a father, but at least he recognized how abusive it was.  He just didn't care.

I look at the night he died, and there I was STILL trying to be good and helpful and responsible, and trying to protect my Dad from my Mom and himself. Still trying to prove that I deserved to be loved.  What a joke.

I notice none of my sisters has ever called me to see how I'm doing about my Dad's death.  As bad as she was, at least my Mom puts on the show.  I'm pretty sure my Mom would be diagnosed with Anti-social PD, Oldest sister is a bundle of neuroses and anxiety, next sister (the one who now doesn't really speak to me) is almost a caricature , she is so quintessentially Narcissistic PD.  The next sister is very cold and controlled and aloof, but not mean, just robotic and unemotional.  They are all stupidly successful, as well.  Like, national chairs in their fields, cover of national papers etc.  And me?  Effortless getting good grades in school, but just all this endless trauma.  When I finally finished school, I was such a wreck emotionally because I felt so unlovable because no women wanted me.  Really bad depression, social phobia, and agoraphobia because of that.  At one point, I didn't leave the house for six months.  I didn't actually go on a date until 22, and lost my virginity at 23.  After that, I had about eight great years (really there were ups and downs there too), until a girlfriend of six years broke up with me. 

Last few days, I really miss my Dad, though.  He wasn't the greatest, but was more on my side than anyone else in my family.  He used to always complain to me: "I married my Mother, and my daughters are just the same!"

I hope I'm not being too negative about things here.  I guess I just need to spill some of this.

Meursault

[Three Roses]

☆POSSIBLE TRIGGERS☆

You are not being too negative. You are letting your pain out, and we are here to listen and validate you.

It's funny how we can miss people that are gone now but mistreated us when they were alive! My own dad was very abusive, physically and verbally, but there are days I just miss him so badly. He could be funny, and strangely enough he was well-liked in our neighborhood. He was a painter and sculptor, and I so have some of his art in my house, reminding me of his presence in my life.

Some of his attempts at humor, though ... for instance, one of his favorite jibes was that I was half way between pretty and ugly, and that made me pretty ugly. I just never knew when words or a hand or fist would fly out of nowhere, heading my direction.

I do hope today brings you some respite from all you're going through, my friend. Hugs to you!