:(

[sofiaviolet]

Well, internets, I am definitely experiencing a depressive episode that exceeds my medication's ability to compensate. :(

There are definitely some external components. Not sure if that makes me feel better or worse than Completely Random Brain Fuckery. I am probably experiencing a very extended sort of con drop, because I had 3+ weeks of New Orleans and parents and Doing All Of The Things (research, eating, shopping), 24 hours in Boston in which I had to Do All Of The Other Things (unpack, repack, work most of a day), then the con, and then more parents (they came up to Boston for a week to visit Ellie, so I got a few extra days with them post-con). Nothing to do but go to work, and I'm still part-time until the 5th.

It is also approaching five years since I was raped. Five years is a long time, and it is also less than a quarter of my life. I have lots of conflicting Feelings about this significant anniversary, and they can be roughly grouped as follows:

• It has been five years! Get over it already!
• It has been five years! You are allowed to still be fucked up!
• It has been five years! It is okay if you are okay!

The first one is fairly easy to dismiss, at least. I am grappling with the second (I am tired of my baggage and I want to at least hide it from people-who-are-not-me) and the third (I am actually kind of scared of being okay, okay? I don't get it either).

I am dwelling on it because I promised to make an item for shadesong's Blogathon auction (I made three things last year). She always blogs for BARCC, but the theme for this year's items is the strength/resilience of survivors. I have no idea what I'm going to make, and the openness of the theme doesn't actually help (last year, I used shadesong's fiction for prompts).

I probably should have made the Blogathon piece while I was in New Orleans. I brought a whole bunch of jewelry stuff with me, so it would've been possible. I could have hauled all of supplies up to my room and plonked myself down in the middle of the bed and made whatever came to mind and hand. (I'm amazed that I can sleep in that bed.) Same place - I probably could even have managed same time of day, late afternoon. But maybe it's a good thing I didn't - I would have been reaching for more bitterness than I am actually carrying around.

So my plan for the rest of the afternoon had been to catch up on my dreamroll, which I have not checked since Friday because spoons, but I think what I will actually do after I post this is play with my boxes of beads and whatnot. See what comes up.

Comments

[harborshore]

♥, dearest. It's actually okay to be mostly okay and a little fucked up, or whatever combination of all of them you land on. Totally. And I know you know, I'm just, like, providing an additional voice.

[sofiaviolet]

Additional voice is very much appreciated. ♥ I wish I had a better sense of exactly where I am, but oh well.

[zillahseye]

I'm so sorry you're having a hard time in a lot of ways. *hugs* I'll be thinking of you.

[sofiaviolet]

Thanks. *hugs*

[katieastrophe]

I hope you are still allowed to be fucked up because I think* I am, sometimes, and it's been longer than five years for me.

* I mean, how do you tell? Most of the time, I'm okay, and I don't blame myself anymore, and mostly, when I think about it, I'm angry, but then sometimes I'm inconsolable as well.

I don't know if I'll ever be "over it", at least in terms of the sheer fucking anger.

[sofiaviolet]

The anger isn't so bad when I get it targeted on, say, rape culture. But I am... not always so great with the targeting, and that scares me.

But yes, we're allowed to still be fucked up, whatever form that takes.

[fleurdeliser]

♥♥♥

[sofiaviolet]

♥ Thank you.

[cleverthylacine]

I was 17. I am 46 and I am still kind of fucked up, partly because it was a sexual assault, and partly because it reinforced awful misogynistic lessons my family had been trying to teach me that I had until then mostly managed to roll for disbelief on.

It is okay to be fucked up.

It is okay not to be fucked up.

It is okay to be whatever you need to be.

It is okay to be mostly over it and still triggerable and still working out the kinks it left in your thinking, not all of which are even immediately visible within the first year or two or even five, which would be where I am.

I wonder about this fear of being okay. Maybe you're afraid that being okay and admitting you're okay will mean that you're not allowed to be triggered or have relapses, and you might. Maybe you're afraid that being okay will make you careless, because it's tempting to believe that you had the power to prevent something like that and hard to accept that even if you do everything they tell you to do (and who wants to fucking live like that) the difference between a woman who gets raped and a woman who doesn't is a man who decides to rape her, period. I know that I have a real fear of giving up my lifelong paranoia about lots of things because it's kept me from having some of the really bad shit happen to me, but in the end I have to accept that it is a bad shit thing that has happened to me and not a viable alternative to taking risks and maybe getting hurt occasionally instead of hurting all the time.

And maybe it's none of those things. Whatever it is, it's okay.

[sofiaviolet]

You know what it is? I'm afraid to say I'm okay, or mostly okay, because that means I don't get to use it as an excuse for keeping my distance. I'm afraid because it means I don't get to delay and dodge. Because what if I get triggered in person, in bed? (Hasn't been a concern before, really - I took a long vacation from being involved in sexual relationships.) And as far as triggers go - I haven't found any that don't relate directly to The Ex and he's gone, but there's places I haven't gone poking through yet.

(The weird thing is that I don't seem to have any general triggers, at least in the sense that makes people put trigger warnings on their writing. There's stuff that I will skip or skim because it makes me more sick or angry than I want to deal with at that moment, but the only time I can say I've been triggered was a scene in The Ex's novel, and I read that before he raped me.)

So I guess I'm okay enough, but a little too self-analytical for my own good. At least I've learned about how not to scare the people on the other side of the computer too badly when I talk about stuff.

[cleverthylacine]

I get that. I haven't been on a date in a long time, like years. It has nothing to do with the sexual assault and everything to do with the way my last serious relationship melted down, but I love keeping my distance and I cling to those excuses too.

I don't have any general triggers either. I have triggers that directly relate to the incident--sounds, smells, a song that was playing at the time. You can't warn for those. I won't say what song it is because there are people on the internet who are assholes enough to use that against me, but yeah.

Most of the time when I'm triggered it's for stuff my parents did, though, not the assault, and again, it's not general or predictable. The scene in Heroes where we met Sylar's mom and he killed her put me on the ceiling, and it took me a long time to figure out why, because that scene, the one where she freaked out and told him he was evil and all, seemed just so freaking normal to me that I had to realise that it was not a normal childhood. And then after that I loved Sylar, where I had hated him before, but what can you do. He killed my mother. :)

[sofiaviolet]

That is a good reason to love a character. (I love my parents, and I also like them, because they were not full of fail. *clings to parents*)

I don't know that I could separate the toxic relationship from the most glaring incidents (which also includes other stuff like being nagged and cajoled into roleplaying rape scenes). :\

[cleverthylacine]

EEEEEEW. ***hugs***

I kind of feel (as someone who likes that kind of RP once in a great while) that if everyone involved in that kind of RP isn't enthusiastic and rarin' to go with it, it isn't RP, it's the real thing, at least to some degree, and that is the last thing I would personally EVER want.

But then there's a real gulf in the world of forced sex RP between the people who want it to be about how someone is so, so awesome that you just can't control yourself and wait to get consent (or conversely that someone is so, so awesome that they immediately know all your deep dark secret wishes and you don't have to go through the messy negotiation and pain, it just happens, exactly the way you want, right down to the part where you never have to admit that you do want it) and the people who really get off on the idea of shaming, hurting, humiliating and degrading people, and/or being shamed, hurt, degraded and humiliated. Which I don't get. I just wish there were a secret sign like Kushiel's Dart in the eyes of the freaky ones so I would know to run away.

I actually find this a problem with most kink to a degree though, particularly with men. I do not want to have sex with anyone who wants to make me feel like dogshit or wants me to make them feel like dogshit. Period. If I could set up a kink event where people were prescreened for maliciousness and the desire to make people really feel like dogshit (and not just pretend they do while loving it) I would be on that like a hot second. One of the reasons my psycho third husband is an ex is that he completely failed to understand that bdsm is not about getting your bottom to do things that s/he doesn't want to do or make your top make you do things that you said you don't want to do, and in fact must involve complete acceptance of the fact that if someone really doesn't want a certain thing to happen, you must not make it happen and you must also not get off on making it happen.

And the thing is, I really do consider violation of stated hard limits (or even continually repeated "I don't like when", "I don't want", "no, I really don't enjoy that") to be sexual assault. Because what the fuck else do you call it?

[sofiaviolet]

Yeah. (Have had to tell C. that while in theory I would like for him to hold me down etc., I don't actually know how that will work out. Because if I have triggers, that's probably where they live.)

I really need to read the Kushiel books, don't I. *adds to list*

Re: your last paragraph: co-signed. Seriously.

[cleverthylacine]

Er, no I didn't mean that as a rec. I liked the first two Kushiel books all right except for the part where she erased all her fictional Jews by making them followers of "Yeshua" (which was horribly offensive) but there's way way way too much grotesquely detailed nonconsensual sex that does not in any way resemble a good force/rape fantasy in those books and there's way way way too much grotesque abuse of one character to the point where I wonder how he gets out of bed in the morning. I do not actually think they are very good representations of kink either, though I realise I'm in the minority on that one.

The third and fourth books were unbearably awful (I couldn't finish the fourth one) in terms of general not-triggery but just plain unpleasant badness. I think they appeal to a certain mindset which I probably lost 20 years ago.

[cleverthylacine]

Also, you shouldn't have to separate the two. The only reason I know it's not the sexual assault is that the sexual assault happened when I was 17 and the last serious relationship happened when I was 36. So there was some time intervening, and I had mostly worked through the sexual assault by then, although the last serious relationship falling apart and the psycho-ex husband right before did bring some of those demons back up. I kind of have this huge really long history of relationship fail. :) Which is why even though I've done metric fuckloads of therapy over the past year I'm still scared of dating again. I know I know how to protect myself now in ways that I didn't and that I am more aware of my issues and able to defend myself and set limits/boundaries better.

This does not mean that when I think about dating again, the lizard brain doesn't go "omg fuck no fuck no remember what happened the last kazillion times you did that?"

[sofiaviolet]

Oh yes, the lizard brain.

Given the overall level of ick, I don't know that I want to separate them. It's just a series of bad events.

IDK if I want more therapy. I had so much of it for straight-up depression that I burned out. It might be a good idea, but meh.

[cleverthylacine]

What I'm actually doing isn't traditional talk therapy but EBT (http://www.ebt.org) and it's actually pretty effective with a minimum of having to tell other people what happened. :)

[heartequals]

Whatever you are is okay <3

[sofiaviolet]

*hugs* and ♥

[pinesandmaples]

There isn't a rule about how you should or shouldn't be.

[sofiaviolet]

No, but there is internalized bullshit. Ugh.

[cleverthylacine]

We all have that though.

In a way, if you've been raped, there's a small sort of consolation prize/advantage, IDK what to call it, because I'm not saying it's worth getting raped for at all. But. If you've been raped you at least get to see your internalised bullshit and become aware that you have some.

The thing about privilege isn't that a lot of the things privilege gives you are bad. They're not. I want everyone to have some of the things I have because of my privilege, and I really react very badly to the notion that everyone should act like they don't feel confident they have the right to speak because some people were robbed of that right to feel that way.

The thing about privilege is that it makes you IGNORANT of your own internalised bullshit. And of many things that are actually hurting you in small subtle ways. Like food that tastes good but is secretly quietly messing your body up, these beliefs serve you in the short term but fuck up your head over time. Suffering sucks, but it can and often does make you aware of these beliefs before the brain weasels have a chance to assume domination forever.

[sofiaviolet]

... I am going to chew on this for a while. *bookmarks comment, stars notification in gmail*

*stabs some brainweasels, too, for good measure*

[eledhwenlin]

*hugs*

[sofiaviolet]

Thanks. *hugs*

[turlough]

*hugs you a lot*

[sofiaviolet]

Thank you. *squish*