Thoughts by Jen

“Summum Bonum”

Summum Bonum

I was actually peeing when a monstrous epiphany hit me pretty hard – I was sitting there wondering why girls are taught to care so much about their reputation when it comes to sex when I realized that somewhere along the way, the advice was simply twisted.  It is important to worry about the right time to sleep with someone, but it isn’t really the point to worry about what THEY will think of you.  How many weeks do I wait?  Has he shown the right amount of interest?  Will he think I’m slutty?  While these concerns represent one side of the coin, the actual thing we should be worried about is am I ready to begin a new experience and open a new door with this particular person at this particular time?  Will I feel connected?  Will I still feel whole?  Are we worthy of moving into this realm together?  Will we create love?

I began to think that maybe, just maybe, I’m an actual idiot and perhaps this isn’t new knowledge for everyone else… maybe I’ve just been doing it wrong this entire time?  Maybe I’m overly concerned about everyone else when I should be overly concerned about myself?

Which, of course, led to my never-ending analytical overthinking, right down the proverbial rabbit hole of self critical judgment and worry.  And somehow, someway, instead of continuing down that rabbit hole per usual, I immediately wondered to myself – am I alone in this?  Is this the reason that my love life has been a perpetual shitshow for all these years?  And it was at this moment, I realized that instead of standing around wondering if I’m alone – I wanted to talk to people and ASK; to see how the culmination of my life experiences juxtapose to those of others around me.  I am the absolute queen of asking questions and digging in for more information with the pure intent of understanding something.  So why not perform this exercise for the major question I’ve been trying to answer all these years?

What in the actual fuck is wrong with me?  

How and why am I doing so poorly at this whole love and sex and dating thing – and is everyone else doing it poorly too?  And if they aren’t doing it poorly – what do they know that I don’t?

Hell – somebody has GOT to know something about something… right?  At least that’s my line of thinking.  I’m going to be honest with you right now – I don’t know shit.  But I am super good at asking questions… and so I got really excited about going down this rabbit hole all about love and sex and how it all works in conjunction with one another.

Honestly, the topic itself is so big and so wide, I had a really hard time understanding where this journey might take me – but instead of employing my typical overthinking, overanalyzing monologue that inevitably leads to being frozen in fear, I decided just to roll with it.  I’m going to do my best to simply continue being my awkward self and to let others and their stories guide me along the way.  I want to understand the whole picture and where my realities fit into the whole of the truth behind sex and how our personal identities seem to formulate around it… and if our identity does develop around our formative experiences – does it remain that way?  Do we remain who we were?  Can we grow ourselves into a new, shiny, whole version instead?

We talk so much about who we are and what that means – but where and how does our ‘who’ intersect with identity and the identity formulated out of our sexuality?  Or does it?  I know I’m rambling now, but let’s go ahead and move into a little of my history, that way you’ll understand why my excessive thinking often wraps itself around understanding my identity through the lens of sex.  It has been a part of my life since birth; perhaps it’s my burden, or perhaps it’s my truth that I was destined to experience so that I can share it with you.  Maybe, just maybe, my suffering and pain and embarrassment and joy and epiphanies and growth can help someone else along the way, and all won’t be for naught.

As I move through this exercise, I intend to anonymize the stories that people choose to share with me in an effort to protect their privacy. everyone’s story except my own.  In this first post, I’m talking about myself and my history in an attempt to outline why I’ve begun to wonder and analyze my personal identity and how it intertwines with sexuality.   While I admittedly don’t know shit about shit – I do know what I’ve experienced and the things I’ve endured.  And I also know all of the years of work I’ve done to process my thoughts, actions, and emotions and put them into something tangible and relatable.  I decided to write about it so that I can offer an avenue for someone else if my experience speaks to them in any way – and also to lift my words out of my mind and off of my heart and into the universe.

When I was 7, I Woke Up

Almost 30 years ago, I woke up in my grandparents’ bed in the middle of the night.  I used to get scared and would crawl into bed to lie in between my grandmother and my grandfather – or ‘mamaw’ and ‘papaw’.  I can still remember this moment like it was yesterday – I even remember the outfit I was wearing.  It was a green short and shirt set with puff paint and flat, shiny rhinestones.  I loved that damn outfit.

I woke up and realized that my grandfather was molesting me.  He was rubbing my vagina with his finger and poking his penis into my anus. I can still remember the sheer terror I was feeling in this moment of realization, coupled with his gentle laughing in my ear.  I pretended to stay asleep and tried to figure out what to do.  While I was laying there, I had the realization that he’d been doing this to me for my entire life.  I never really knew it, and I’m guessing it’s because he started molesting me before I was old enough to understand anything at all.  I believe as I got older, he touched me in my sleep.  Honestly, I don’t remember if he simply stopped molesting me that morning or if I just got out of bed, but I went into the kitchen and I sat in one of those ugly, dark chairs straight out of the 70s with my back against the wall and my knees to my chest.  I don’t know how long I sat there, completely stunned and afraid and angry and scared, but at some point, he followed me into the kitchen and asked me what I was doing.  At 7 years old, I looked right at him and I said,

“I know exactly what you’re doing to me and if you ever touch me again, I’ll tell my mother”.

I don’t have a clear memory of what happened next, but I began hatching plots and plans on how to best keep him away from me.  My mom worked night shifts and I had to spend a lot of time with my grandparents.  Before I realized what he was doing to me, he had free reign.  But afterwards, I began locking the bathroom door.  He used to come in when I was in the bathtub, but I can’t remember him doing anything other than looking at me.  Every time I locked the bathroom door now, he’d get super mad and bang on the door and scream to let him in.  But I never did.  

My grandfather was a fisherman and used to bring me out on the boat with him early in the mornings.  After I was wise to his attempts, I tried to spend the least amount of time with him as possible.  Once, when I was 8 or 9, I ended up on the boat with him and it began to rain.  He pushed me under the bow of the boat and tried to grab at my “breasts” and I shoved him off of me.  He was always trying to pinch me or grab me or touch me, but I would snap at him or slap his hands.

I have a vivid recollection of my cousin and I hiding under the covers while he blared XXX movies in the living room and laughed.

He died when I was 10 years old.  He had a heart attack alone on his boat and laid out there for hours until someone found him.  I remember at his funeral, I was crying because I was so relieved, and then I was crying because I felt guilty at being glad that he was dead.  I’m still glad he’s dead.

When I was 16, I used to have this extremely vivid nightmare that my grandfather would walk into my room, walk right up to me while I was in my bed, lean over into my face with his icy blue eyes and softly say “boo”.  I would wake up terrified every single time.  I now know this is a symptom of PTSD, which I believe I still struggle with at times.  I’m jumpy, afraid, have severe trust issues, and suffer from bouts of anxiety.  Over the years, I’ve found many ways to cope with the fear and anxiety – but it’s a daily practice that I continually employ in an attempt to maintain a healthy life.  It ain’t easy.

The first person I ever told was my least favorite teacher in 8th grade.  Mrs. Hopkins.  She wasn’t nice or kind or friendly or warm or loving.  I think I just couldn’t keep everything bottled up anymore, and I had a breakdown, which just so happened to be during 8th grade English class.  I must have been struggling because she stopped class and asked me to come out into the hall with her.  She asked me what was wrong with me and I just broke down and I told her with an awkwardly extreme bluntness.  

“My grandfather molested me as a child and I can’t keep it a secret anymore”.

I didn’t receive comfort or words of condolences from her that I remember, only a quick, simple response that I  needed to tell my mother.  But, Mrs. Hopkins didn’t know that my mother was an entirely different story and someone that I didn’t feel I could trust.  I didn’t take Mrs. Hopkins advice – at least not for 5 more years.  I didn’t get sent to the counselor, I didn’t receive any other words over the next year from my 8th grade English teacher.  And I wouldn’t tell anyone else my secret until I was 17 years old.

Growing up, my mother and I fought constantly.  When I was 7 years old, she picked me up by the back of my pants and threw me into the wall in one of her famous and frequent fits of rage.  One night,  when I was 17 years old, the night her shitty husband left her, she told me that she blamed me fully and wholeheartedly for his leaving her.  While I admit it did sting a little, I also knew that she was a psychopath, he was a psychopath, and I was caught in the middle.  That night, while she was wailing on me for her husband leaving her, I gained the nerve to fight back for the first time.  And now, at 17, I was a lot bigger than I used to be.  Because I hit her back, my mother called her mother and cried over the phone.  She told my grandmother to come pick me up because I’d hit her and that due to the violence, I could no longer live in her house.

As we pulled up to my grandmother’s house, she asked me why my mother and I don’t get along.  Somewhere in my answer, my truth came out and I revealed, for the second time, that my grandfather molested me as a child.  In the moment, I did realize the severity of what I was telling my grandmother as this man I was calling a child molester was her husband for 40 years and the father of her 5 children.  Her response?

“He probably thought it was me”.

We never talked about it again.

I didn’t start speaking my truth until I was 19 years old.  A friend of mine from high school passed away in a car accident, and her death caused me to really question life at that moment.  Why was this life?  Why had it been so gross?  So hard?  So fleeting for someone like Lindsay who was so much better than me and should have still been living.  I had a very spiritual encounter with a stranger named John in what I really refer to as my ‘awakening’ moment in this life. 

After John told me that, “Girls and Boys need my story” I believed I was supposed to write a book.  Except.  I really wasn’t a practicing writer.  At the age of 19, what did I have to say?  Except what I knew.  And what I knew was that the only story I had so far, was the story I’d been hiding from everyone.

And so I practiced speaking my truth.  I told my mother who broke down and cried.  I began to speak my truth at any given moment to anyone who seemed as if they’d benefit from the story.  It really became the jumping off point on my road to healing.  If I felt compelled to share my truth, I did.  

My mom took me to a therapist once after I told her the truth, and he basically said yep.  She’s depressed.  She has PTSD.  Don’t hug her unless she wants to be hugged…. and I’m not certain we’ve hugged that many times since.

I think the first step in being able to process the realities of what happened to me was admitting it to myself.  At 36, as I look back over my life, it’s really painful to see the devastation and disaster my childhood brought me throughout my formative years, my teen years, and my early adulthood.  I hate to admit (although I really shouldn’t) that the impact and repercussions of being sexually abused, physically abused, and emotionally abused have reverberated throughout my entire existence.  Almost every major choice I’ve made has been wrapped around my perspective of existence, which, unfortunately, came to me through the lens of abuse.  While I have deep regrets about many decisions I’ve made, I acknowledge and understand myself and respect the why regarding the decisions I’ve made over my life.  If I could have been perfect, I certainly would have… but none of us are that, are we?

And so – a part of the path of my healing has been to frame the question of why I do the things I do.   What is the root cause and where does that stem from with regard to my behavior patterns? Because I truly believe that we can only conquer something that we have named and analyzed and studied.  In this exercise, I am trying to conquer another piece of myself.  Who am I in the lens of love? sexuality?  And why?  Am I broken because of the things that happened to me?  Is my understanding of who I am polluted by the sexual nature that was forced upon me at birth?  Am I to carry shame forever in the decisions I have made because of the abuse I endured?  Am I overly shameful?  Am I making way too big a deal out of what I do and say and think?  Am I being too hard on myself?  Is my analytical nature pushing away any chance of love ?  Or is it my pain and hurt doing the pushing?  Am I doing love wrong?  Can I even do it right?  Are love and sex actually intertwined?  Are they supposed to be?

What is right?  

What is wrong?  

What is sexuality? 

What is sexual identity?  

Who am I?  

Who is Sex?

Who is Love?

Formulating Personal Identity

To understand ourselves, it seems we must start at the beginning, no?  I’ve come to realize that many of the things I thought about myself while I was suffering through my teens and early adulthood were imprinted upon me in childhood.  That isn’t much of a stretch, right?  There’s plenty of research out there that attests to this fact.  

In living through abusive experiences, and actually growing into a somewhat functioning adult, I’ve had a lot of time for reflection.  Only in more recent years,  through the act of growing to actually know myself, love myself, and believe in myself, am I able to see the truth about who I am.  I am just a creature and I am all of the things I practice in my life.  I am kindness, love, understanding, faith, hope, goodness, light, truth, justice – working towards summum bonum.  Through this acknowledgement, in looking back towards who I believed myself to be in the formative years of my life, the only thing I can point to with regard to WHY I thought of myself so negatively in my teens and young adulthood is the culmination of life experiences as a child.  

When I was 11 years old, I wanted to go meet my friends at the mall, as we millennials did back in the 90s, and was super stoked that I’d get to see my crush.  I sat on the sink in the bathroom for an hour or more to make myself look absolutely perfect.  I painstakingly curled every single strand of hair on my head to achieve beautiful, luscious ringlets.  I carefully layered on my makeup to ensure that my crush would not look at any other girl but me that night.  I worked and layered and primped and curled until finally, I was a glorious beacon of 90s beauty.  I was so proud of myself, and couldn’t wait for someone to eagerly agree with my blatant good looks and assure me that my crush would be wowed with my emanating beauty.  I got down off the vanity and walked out into the living room, totally unprepared for my mother to be in one of her ‘fits’.  As soon as I walked into the room, her face twisted and she said, 

“You look exactly like the dirty little slut that you are”.

I was crushed.  devastated.  confused.  hurt. 

“Go take all that shit off your face, slut”.

I ran back into the bathroom, crying.  I scrubbed off every last bit of makeup and brushed out my terrible, ugly hair.

I felt like the slutty trash that I had to be.  My grandfather created a slut, and my mother confirmed it.  I was nothing but a piece of garbage.

And that’s how I felt.  For years.  It was so confusing wondering the hows and whys of why I, particularly, was disgusting trash.  I mean, I knew it was the truth because that’s what they’d shown me and told me since I could remember.  But what, exactly, made me disgusting trash versus everyone else?  I was pretty good at stuff.  I could sing.  dance.  I got A’s.  I was smart, gregarious, funny, fun, and pretty okay-looking.  Was it the outside parts that made me trash?  Or the inside parts you couldn’t see?  Was it my grandfather using me that made me trash?  Or was it because I was born from a mother who simply deemed it so?

And this is why I detest the word slut.

I often carry around soapboxes in the backseat of my car, and I pull them out with a quickness.  And when someone uses the term ‘slut’ in a derogatory manner, I’ve been known to whip out a soapbox, jump on that bitch, and instantly proselytize to those within my proximity.  

Be careful with your words.  You have no idea what someone is being told by the people who are supposed to love them.  If I’m being told that I’m a slut at home, and being used as a sex toy, I very well may believe that I am born as a slut, and destined to live my life that way.  And if and when someone outside of the home confirms the narrative that is being sold, it’s really easy for that person to go about their entire life believing the identity that is being spoken into them.  Our truth is exactly what we make it.  Unfortunately, for children who don’t have the power or the tools to reframe the narrative for themselves, they will have to grow in stature and in mind before they are able to rewrite their narrative – if they ever have the opportunity to do so at all. 

I love to remind people that we can reframe the narrative any time we choose to.  We can do that for ourselves, and we can do that for those around us.  As the amazing Bob Goff says,

“Tell people who they’re becoming, not who they were”.

It seems we carry these ideas that were formulated around our identity in our childhoods throughout our adulthood and into our relationships.  So often, in talking to others about their stories, we’re able to trace some of the behaviors back to childhood, and even into their parents’ childhood.  Familial patterns continue over generations.  Until we can identify the behavior patterns and work through them, we’ll most likely imprint these patterns into our own children and, unfortunately, future generations. 

It has to be our willingness, openness, and vulnerability that help us achieve the self-awareness necessary to begin seeing our personal truths.  Each of the conversations I’ve had with people for this project have been an exercise in the traits listed above.  When we’re open to analyzing our patterns and our stories, we may just learn a truth about ourselves or those we love.  It’s all a work in progress, a journey towards achieving contentment with this life we have, however long that may be.

My story led me to believe I was unworthy of love.  If my partner *really knew* the real me…. they’d know the truth.  That I am a disgusting piece of trash who isn’t  worth their love.  That’s what my inner self believed for years and aided and abetted many of my self-sabotaging choices.  I still struggle with sexuality and worthiness.  That’s why we’re here, right?  I’m asking all the things.  I’m trying to find some answers.  

At 20, I found myself pregnant and completely unprepared to love someone else. Of course,  I didn’t really know that at the time,  but ultimately that was my reality. I’d only just begun the long road to healing and was still overloaded with a plethora of personal issues. The new reality of being a mother on top of still being a broken child is another story for another day.

I figure my story is just one, single story.  We can take from it what we will… but what about everyone else?  What is their story?  What have they learned from their struggles, trials, and tribulations?  What do they know that I don’t?  Perhaps learning their stories will help normalize the fact that there probably isn’t much of a normal.  The constructs that society has created and fed us are most likely the minority, and we’re all simply hiding away pieces of our lives so that we fit in the boxes we’ve been told to fold into.

“And they’re all made out of ticky tacky

and they all look just the same”.  -Malvina Reynolds

My goal is for this blog to reflect the joy and beauty and pain that is life.  We have hard times and wonderful times and we laugh and we cry. We experience pain and suffering and death,  but we also experience joy and happiness and love.   It’s within our stories that our life is meaningful; our value lies within the knowledge we garner in each lesson we gain, and what we give to others to help them along their journey.  

May our truth bear witness to an immense authenticity by which others may find mirroring, parity, and hope.