During the last 8 months, I tried to find a way to explain all that gets stolen, when a sexually exploited child continues to be re-exploited by every adult/teacher/counselor/pastor/mentor they encounter as they develop. This endeavor kept bringing me back to myself as the only example I could know well enough to use. This was not fun. I gave up what-iffing long ago. It hurts. And does me no good. But in order to paint a picture of what all is truly being stolen every time a sexualized child is re-exploited, I kept having to be honest about where my understanding of this subject comes from. It comes from knowing those things that came easier to me as I experienced new situations, like college, where I was allowed to try new things without interference from a predator trying to divert my focus with their grooming. The following are three emails I hope might help others better understand that there are some large pieces of a fuller puzzle missing, when sexually exploited children never have a chance to escape the horrible cycle of re-exploitation.
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"Deal"
Nov 7, 2022, 10:18 PM
Wondering why I still send these? Wish I would leave you alone? Am I ruining your life, warping your mind, stealing your future, destroying your ability to trust, damaging your odds of enjoying a halfway decent existence? Am I taking away your first ever opportunity to see a comedian perform live, a comedian that made you laugh for the first time in three years? No? Didn't think so.
When I was 17, I found out another another victim of the principal had tried to kill herself. I realized that sweet girl could have died. Two other victims had come to the attention of school staff. People in the church were starting to talk. I was horrified to think of any of those girls being dead.
The principal packed up his wife and kids, and moved to another area quite abruptly. He became the principal of the adventist academy there. I knew he was going to be fucking kids there. I realized I could not live with myself if I didn't try to keep any other girls from ending up like the one I knew. I called the president of the sda conference where I lived.
When his secretary told him I was calling about a school in his conference, he took my call right away. He started asking me questions, with that tone of voice I know and understand much better now than I did in 1983. He said he could not protect other girls unless I was honest. He was the first, and last, human I ever spoke to in detail about things that happened between me and any abuser. We talked for a long ass time. I started to realize what his breathing and tone meant; mother fucker was jerkin it. I stopped talking. His voice got professional again, and he said that because the principal had moved to another conference, there was nothing he could do.
I called the sda church where the principal had moved. I ended up speaking to the youth minister. I gave him a brief synopsis. Here is what he said: "If you try to call anyone down here saying those kinds of lies again, we will sue you for slander, and have you arrested for harassment."
I went out, got blackout drunk. A few months later, after realizing many at my local church were saying I was the bad person and I had caused the principal to sin, I set off for Kauai with 2 friends. We lived in tents on the north shore at Haena, Kalalau, and later down in Anahola. My first full year never entering an sda church. Also, the first time I felt an actual sense of spirituality, while standing on a cliff along the Na Pali coast, taking in indescribable beauty.
Why am I putting this all here? Because I know folks who say "Why didn't you tell?" I'm making sure you realize the truth. I did try to tell. I even called the police department where my father and pam and others put me through hell, to tell them what I had experienced, because it haunted me to think kids in that area were still being harmed. I was told by a detective that because I had always remembered all of it, the statute of limitations had run out on all my childhood abuse two years after my 18th birthday. I could do nothing.
In 2008-2010, I went to college for the first time, to get some vet tech training. As someone who barely graduated high school, it blew my mind (and everyone else) that I got a 4.0 all the way through, and my aptitude for physics/chemistry was kinda freaky. My chemistry professor told the whole class I was the first student in all his years of teaching who aced one of his finals. After that class, he asked me what degree I was getting. I said vet tech. He said, "No. Vet." With my history and credit score, I was never gonna get the loans for that, but it was nice to get encouragement from, instead of hit on by, a teacher.
Nobody gets anywhere playing "what if." But the truth is pretty simple to deduce. If predators had not fucked me up continuously from 2 on, my life would not look anything like the hell I've lived. Predators choose to do what they do. They choose to steal lives from children, from broken children. The broken children have no say, or even understanding, until they are in their 40's or 50's, if ever. It is all on the predators. I cannot change what happened. But if my father would have loved me, or simply cared as much about me as he cared about the paint jobs on his brand new pickups, if the principal had never preyed on broken children, who the fuck knows what I might be doing. With some ability to learn something besides sex, this dumb slut, who cannot even diagram a sentence, might have had books published. (My first short story in college was immediately published, and that professor read part of it on an NPR program in a nearby city, but the reaction of a number of people in my life to some dumb slut doing anything like "make good," was a bit scary. I do not need that kind of attention. I just want to be left the fuck alone.)
If you read these, you probably think I am bothering you, I am being a bitch. You stole my first chance in years to head into a holiday season with some sort of smile on my face. I wish I did not know about so well, or give a shit about, what predators are doing. I wish I could blindly laugh at your comedy, and brush aside the behavior that society does not care about. I am once again headed into dark winter. I am sick of predators choosing to break, and rebreak and break yet again, broken kids. I am sick of seeing it, understanding it, and living with it. I am sick of being ostracized by my family for acting like a "slut" since I was 5. I'm fucking sick of darkness, and I'm sick, having to miss your show because you have spent 30+ years creating hells for other broken girls just like me.
So, yeah, gonna head out for a bit. See ya in the funny papers.
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"What if"
Feb 11, 2023, 11:56 AM
What ifs are apparently the stupidest form of questions that can be asked. I know that for me, personally, some of the most painful things I can think about are the realizations of how amazing my life might have been, and what potential might have been realized, when I ask myself "What if my father would have loved me?" I can't visit this question for any amount of time. It hurts too much, imagining the trajectory of my existence, if that one thing in my fucked up life would have been different. Fuck that question. It is irrelevant to my reality.
Looking at the pictures my friends have sent the past few days, looking back on the way things have gone since the moment that millennial came out of nowhere and put a Stephen King "Thinner"-type curse on me, thinking about the HBO special a friend and I will be watching in a few hours, this one question is blinking neon in my mind: What if maron had never made the choice to prey on broken girls?
god damn you, Marc. You have been given an amazing gift. You could be such an amazing human. You would shine so fucking bright, if.... You wouldn't be perfect. Nobody fuckin is. But take away your sexual predation, and you would be living a life full of good, decent, amazing human being-ness. If you had never decided that you were going to exploit young girls broken horribly by sexualization, every gift you were born to fulfill would be shining so bright, while being wrapped up in that most important human attribute, safe-ness.
In rescue, some of the saddest moments are the moments when a dog is deemed unsafe. Such dogs, who but for horrible circumstances in their first years of abuse/neglect in their lives, could have been a loving part of a family. Thank goddess such dogs are rare. But when such dogs are proven to be irredeemably unsafe, they must be stopped. Unless a specialist like Cesar Milan is able to take in and keep all other living beings from being harmed by such a dog, a grindingly painful decision must be made. The dog is not at fault. It is simply incapable of understanding how to choose not to be unsafe.
You are not a dog. You could choose to stop preying on sexualized girls with BPD, girls in my group, damaged young girls who are part of my broken tribe. You refuse to admit how exploitive and abusive your behavior is. You do not give a fuck about the consequences others must suffer because of what you choose to do. You refuse to give a shit. You are incapable of caring about this group I belong to, at all.
As I watch your special later today, there will be a part of me that will catch glimpses of that lost potential marbled throughout the layers of you. And that part of me will think, "Damn. What if..."
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"Just went there"
Apr 3, 2023, 12:05 PM
I just accidentally let my mind feel something I have very carefully avoided feeling, ever. I didn't mean to feel it right now. It happened because of what I wrote in my last email. I have skirted this issue, peered around corners of my mind at it, and let myself get close enough to write that poem, "High Noon" about it (refer to my email about restorative justice. It's in there.), and even viewed it a bit in a couple of emails I have sent you, but I have never let it fully hit me. Until now. I didn't even let it hit me. It just hit me, full force, no choice or preparation on my part. I let my mind do that most awful thing, where I fully finished imagining "what if." I felt, clear into the marrow of my fucking bones, how much better my life would have been, if one very simple, very easy, very natural human behavior had occured after my birth. I realized on a much deeper level how absolutely different my life would have been, would have felt for me and for my children, if my father would have loved me. That's not asking anything outrageous. That's something happens everyday, all over the world. But I let it finish playing out in my head. Fuckin hurt so much in my chest and head, right after I wrote these words:
"I will never know how I would have developed as a human, and what part sexuality would have played in my life, if I had not been sexualized from the age of about 2, on. I will never know who I might have been drawn to, what a more normal set of "first-time" experiences might have looked like, for me. I will never know if I would have been capable of a sustained relationship, and might, even now, be enjoying a decent life with a partner who I shared deep, committed life-long feelings with. At 2, all that was stolen, by my own flesh and blood father shoving his grown ass dick in a 2 yr-olds mouth. Gone. A whole fucking life. In one moment. And men like you just keep re-exploiting girls like me. And if one of these children somehow have some bodyguard like de Becker, or some therapist or other decent adult who helps that child get past the sexualization enough to have a more fulfilled life, men like you will see that as the child "exploiting " themself, instead of escaping the prison of a life lived like mine."
(This last sentence was in reference to the previous email, where I brought to Mr. Maron's attention that during his recent podcast with her, he told Brooke Shields she was "exploiting herself" by becoming something other than the sex object men like Maron think of as the end-all, be-all, fully formed example of what female babies should want to aspire to grow up to become. Brooke Shields was protected enough earlier on by people like Gavin de Becker, to be able to escape enough of her childhood sexualization to actually fulfill some of her potential. She got to answer some of her "what ifs.")
"I can't help you feel how it just felt for me, to write out, and fully feel, the prison I am in, to this fucking day. If you could feel what it feels like, to be forever stuck on this porch where I stand, you would never re-exploit another broken girl again.
I wish I could use words to vulcan mindmeld."
