Kidnapping: Amusing Myself to Death

I always speak about my year of living dangerously, in the back of a Datsun pick-up truck with my father, as though it was an amusing anecdote.

It sure is fascinating. A nice back story that makes me seem so worldly even though I’ve never seen Europe. In the right contexts, of course. Then I can be sure too that the people who say they love me don’t, they just pity me.

Such a light touch I always gave it.

The climax to that Year with Father I also deliver like a proper conclusion to a dramatic tale. In fact I tell it as though it happened to someone else. That’s because it sort of, emotionally, did.

As a child I told that story to myself in my head and to other children probably hundreds of times. Each time I told it I believed it to be a complete fabrication. Something I had made up, that proved I was a bad child and undeserving of friends. I’d think about it even in my own mind and then think how bad bad bad I was.
And it was also useful because it made sure that whomever I had told was thus preserved from ever being important to me because I had ruined everything by instituting a terrible lie as the foundation of our intimacy. Once in place, this lie let me opt out of all obligation to respect them or care what they thought because I knew that the entire situation was bullshit. They had no idea who I was and I didn’t care. Fuck them.

The year with my father is a cipher. I started to realize this when my attention was drawn to the fact that I cannot remember details around actual information given to me about that time. Previous Post On Memory Mess
I might remember the content of what is told to me but then something happens in my brain and how I got that information gets lost enough for me to believe I don’t really know anything. It is all made up.

Note: my memory is usually a steel trap. Photographic. Besides, even those with average memory skills usually don’t forget the details around talking on several occasions with someone that they were, you know, kidnapped.

Even right now I am thinking, none of this happened. Like: I never had a father, I never was kidnapped by him, I was never abducted from him by a stranger, I never ended up in all alone. All well-rehearsed lies.

But it all happened. And this is the part that is difficult to deal with: that makes me feel crazy. What does this mean? For me, crazy means that my brain is off doing things without my permission. Like I’m not running things.

All that practice telling tales about my year with my dad was necessary. Not so that I would never bond with people in any meaningful way. Nice effect though. No, more than that, it was, I’m starting to think, because I was desperate for help. I think that after being kidnapped twice, raped and ending up in an orphanage at the age of three I needed help. But when I got back home instead of help, I got this:

Grandmother: She has been through enough. We will never speak of any of this again.

So I was kinda on my own about it. I think I’d really like to believe that I was good enough to create an effective way of moving through things on my own. That by spending my childhood spinning the whole thing into a protective lie I was healed.

It worked for a while. But now that I am being more “authentic” as the therapists and Oprah say, and actually trying to verbalize what I am thinking instead of feel really pissed off and think angrily of others, it has stopped working.

What happens to post-traumatic stress disorder on 30 year delay? Funny you should ask. Because I can tell you!

Well, my favourite is how I start to breath really rapidly and hear banging in my ears.
Jesuspenis likes this one too and stares at me reminding me not to hyperventilate. Next in line is how I can get racked with terrible sobs for no good reason. Just for a minute, passes by, and is gone. Not sleeping enough. Feeling like I have ulcers.

The fun of this is compounded by my inability/hopelessness about talking about is. See talking about it was what caused the problem. When I talk about it I feel like I am lying. That kind of thing is what got me here. Three decades of the truth-talk-lie-disassociate project, for a rituals expert like me, is not something that can be just wished away or deconstructed with logic. It will take time, and: here is where I get really confused – I need to start talking about it.

LIES LIES LIES LIES LIES LIES LIES LIES LIES LIES
I am a liar
I appeared on the earth at four
That boring childhood crap affects weaklings not me
I don’t need help
I just need to be left alone so I can stop thinking about any of it
I will be fine I don’t feel bad about
Feeling bad
Because it is all for no reason
Except that I lie.
Because I’m ungrateful for how wonderful it was that my family
Saved me
And protected me from those bad bad times.