Toys

This is what I found on the couch when I wandered into the living room this morning. Jack is going out of town tonight, and I guess he packed the bag we usually use as a toy bag.

I saw this tangle of stuff, and my thought was "Wow. Is this really my life? Awesome."

(It's worth noting that this doesn't include any vibrators or insertables, which have taken over my nightstand. Or things like the long riding crop, which don't fit in the bag.)

So I keep trying to find a way to build a big, important post about this framing it within lots of meaning about trying things I'm afraid of and being brave and adventurous and what I've gained from that...but that post kept coming out really pretentious. So I'm just going to skip to the part I want to brag about...

...Guys, I got set on fire this week-end.

Actually, the fire was burning just above my skin and only felt uncomfortably hot when left to burn for more than a second or two. But still, I was pretty much scared to death and I did it anyway and it turned out to be really awesome.

so yeah, thanks to the friend who set me on fire, I did something scary and I was okay and that's awesome.

So writing about the creeper ex in my last post, I touched upon the fact that I'm scared he would find this blog and recognize the events I've written about...and then two seconds later, I brushed it off and said something about hoping he'd be scandalized. He probably would be scandalized--either that or dismissive, he'd read about my wonderful adventures and say "I knew she was a slut all along."

But what I didn't really go into is how afraid of him I still am.

It's definitely not as bad as it used to be, back in the days when I would actually jump when I saw a car that looked like the one his mom drove, but it's still there. He broke up with me nine years ago and I am still afraid of him.

For years I had nightmares. I dreamed we were at a party and got in a fight, I dreamed he was leading a cult and his followers kidnapped me. In college, I dreamed he appeared backstage during a show I was in, dragged me offstage and raped me in the basement of the theatre building. The nightmares only stopped within the past year or so.

I have a hard time talking about the whole situation. I tend to dismiss it. I tend to try to blame myself. A few months after the break up, he read my livejournal and was furious. He hadn't abused me, he claimed, I'd been a willing participant in everything. I'd wanted it all...and it's true, at the time I wanted nothing more than to prove my love, to please him. But that doesn't mean it wasn't abuse. It's hard to talk to my friends about it, because some of them were there. My college boyfriend just didn't understand at all what I meant by emotional abuse. "What exactly did he do to you?" he asked.

He manipulated me. The first few months were wonderful. I was perfect, an angel, his salvation. He was prone to extravagant romantic statements and it made me feel desired and loved and wanted. He had been so alone, and now he had found me and I was his first and only love and we would be together forever and it would be perfect.

The first clue should have been that I was terrified of him when he was angry--he would punch things, slam things around. When I did something "wrong," something like not being around to talk to him on the phone at exactly the right time every night, he would hurt himself, cut himself. There were certain things I couldn't say, things I couldn't do. Commenting on anyone else's appearance was forbidden, was hurtful and would make him jealous. He was only interested in me, so why should I think anyone else was attractive? Going anywhere without him would make him feel left out and upset. Saying things like "I can't imagine ever being with anyone else" implied that I wasn't 100% sure, and expressions of doubt made him feel like I didn't love him as much as he loved me. Didn't I want him to feel as loved and valued as I did?

I followed all his rules completely, but it was never enough. I stopped going anywhere with my friends, my friends stopped talking to me, but I still occasionally went places with my parents and that made me unavailable for phone calls. I started faking headaches and sickness when my parents wanted to do family things. I didn't look at other guys, but I still occasionally had dreams about them, and that made him upset. I stopped having sexual dreams about other guys. Don't ask me how that's even possible, but I did. If a dream crept under my defenses, I would turn it into a rape dream...which resulted in him telling me that if I was ever raped, he'd leave me because "I couldn't bear anyone else being inside you." He didn't even want anyone else to see my bare shoulders or arms or calves, so I wore long skirts and long sleeved shirts and shawls year round.

Even when I did all of these things completely and perfectly, he would find fault. I had hurt him in the past, and he couldn't trust that I wouldn't do it again. I begged for his forgiveness--literally begged--and apologized until the words "I'm sorry" didn't sound like words any more. I swore I'd be better, I'd do better, I'd be perfect. Things would be perfect. I wrote angsty poetry and short stories where my character was cursed or part demon and was redeemed by love. He said "You weren't cursed, you chose to hurt me."

But hey, he didn't hit me, right?

His brother did. His brother did not like me, and would do things like twist my arm behind my back until I had tears in my eyes. I would, in fact, provoke his brother to hurt me on purpose so that he would have to step in and save me, because that proved he loved me. I cried every day. It was a goal of mine at one point to go a week without crying, and it seemed like an impossible one. I often didn't know why I was crying--we were blissfully happy, right? Everything was going to be perfect someday, right?

So yeah...I'm still scared of him. I'm not sure why, as none of this would possibly happen again, but the thought of running into him somewhere ties my stomach up in knots. Every time I think I'm over it, something will happen to remind me of him and I'll freak out all over again. I still have a hard time saying his name.

I actually thought I was over it. Jack has been really wonderful and patient over the past two and a half years in helping me break out of the last few remaining behavior patterns I was stuck in because of this. But a few weeks ago, I read a lot of the archives over at Quizzical Pussy and her posts about her abusive ex scared me so badly I stayed up half the night. At one point, I actually was convinced she had dated the same guy as I had.

Clearly, I need to talk about this more. I need to talk about it until I'm not scared anymore, if that's even possible.

Only tangentially related to the main post: The evil ex definitely needs a pseudonym, but all the ones I keep coming up with make him sound too interesting. Need to think about that some more.

The Last Time I Had Sex

I've written here before about my creepy abusive ex from high school, and I've written about being groped by a stranger on the bus. And since April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, I've been reading lots of other people's assault stories. For some reason, what reading these stories reminded me of was not my own assault story, but...well...the last time I had sex with my creepy abusive ex-boyfriend.

It was consensual. It was, in fact, probably what I wanted almost more than anything else in the world at that time, because I was convinced that if we had sex again he would want me back. But I'm getting ahead of myself...let me start over.

He broke up with me. He broke up with me in April for unclear reasons (I was convinced it was my fault, because everything had always been my fault) after at least a month where he was increasingly distant and strange. Later, I would remember the IM conversations with my "best friend," a girl we knew only online, that he had finished by saying "I love you," and it would all add up, but for the time being I was devastated and confused and spent pretty much all my time either begging him to take me back or deciding when, exactly, I was going to kill myself.

The day it happened was the day of his graduation. After the ceremony, I went out to dinner with his family and back to his house. We were kissing, making out in his bed, and I think he asked me what I wanted. I told him I wanted to have sex. We left his room and went into a closed-off room that no one used for anything except storage. He kept asking, over and over, "Are you sure you want to do this?" It seemed like things were going so well, he had been so attentive, so affectionate, so nice to me, that I was thinking I had passed the "temporary break-up test" (because up until this point, everything had always been a test) and that we were going to get back together. I was very, very sure I wanted it.

I laid down on the floor and he got on top of me. It was brief, in my memory it seems like it only lasted a minute or two but I'm not completely sure. I remember being confused about where the condom had come from, as he'd said a while before that he was out of them and that's why we weren't having sex any more. And then, after he came, he got up and went back to his room. I followed, and sat on the bed. I don't know what I was expecting--that he would say we were officially getting back together? That he would come sit on the bed and cuddle with me? Instead, he picked up a cheap plastic bracelet off his dresser and tossed it to me. Then he went to sit down on the floor and play video games with his brother. He pretty much ignored me for the rest of the night, until I went home.

I didn't have penis-in-vagina sex again for six and a half years, and for that time this was an event of huge, terrifying significance in my life. It was "The Last Time I Had Sex."

It would hit me a few months later, the awful symbolism of the bracelet and the way he ignored me. I ended up tearfully telling my next boyfriend the story, concluding it by saying "he thought I was just a worthless whore."

The creepy ex didn't speak to me for about two months after graduation, after the last time we had sex, and over the course of those two months I woke up. It was that sudden. I got up one day, and I wasn't in love with him anymore. I wasn't devastated. I was, well, me again. And I slowly reconstructed my life, figured out who I was. He and I were in contact for a few months after, on and off, with me telling him to leave me alone and him convincing me we could be friends. Eventually I stopped replying to his e-mails.

I'm still scared of him sometimes. Part of me is scared he'll find this blog post and read it and recognize it (there are enough details here I feel like he would) and then he'd have found me again.

Part of me hopes that if he did, he'd be scandalized by what I'm up to now, since he would constantly say that he "hated sluts" and that open relationships were wrong and cheating.

But today, thinking about this, I'm really unnerved by how many times he asked if I really wanted to have sex with him that day. I'm convinced he knew it was a bad idea, he knew I'd look back and regret it, and he was really just obtaining clear consent over and over to cover his ass. I'm so creeped out by that thought.

Easter

I keep forgetting about Easter. In college, we didn't get any days off for Easter or Passover, so Easter stopped being the big family holiday it was when I was little. But it's still kind of lurking around the edges of my brain.

It's hard for me, as a lapsed Catholic, to talk about Easter without thinking about Lent and holy week. In fact, at this point, the whole not-believing-in-God thing has turned them into completely separate things in my mind.

Growing up, Lent and holy week and the Triduum and the sacrifice and darkness that lead up to Easter always kind of seemed like a bigger deal than Easter itself. Advent, the lead up to Christmas, totally made sense--who doesn't want to count down until Christmas? But Lent is 40 days long. That's, like, forever when you're in third grade. And as you grow up Catholic, going to Catholic school, you learn that Lent is about sacrifice and abstinence (not necessarily that kind of abstinence--just general abstaining from things like booze and anything else that might make you happy) and fasting. You can't eat meat on Fridays, when you're an adult you're supposed to fast as well, and, if you grew up in my house, you go to church, like, 50 times during holy week for confession and to pray and for Easter Vigil and it all feels very Medieval and ancient and strange.

I never really got how all that enforced suffering (though I love fish fry, so that no meat on Fridays thing wasn't very suffer-y for me) was connected with Easter itself. I knew intellectually from probably third grade on what the connection was--we're suffering because Jesus suffered for us, we're celebrating because he rose from the dead, the butterflies and bunnies and eggs are signs of new life (new life, the nuns stressed, definitely new life). But most of what I got out of Lent was that we're supposed to suffer and Easter seemed like a weird follow up.

Now I know that part of the reason for the disconnect is that the bunnies and eggs are co-opted pagan fertility symbols, something I now greatly enjoy explaining to other people. But this is still a time of year I can never seem to really make sense of. But yeah, Lent and Triduum and sacrifice and spending what felt like 60 hours in church are definitely the things I think of when the conversation comes around to "why I'm kinky."

Even though I'm a happy atheist now, and I started brushing off all this "Lent" stuff when I was in seventh grade and told Sister Frances that I was giving up human sacrifice that year, I'm really attracted to the idea of fasting and suffering and sacrifice. Even when I was trapped in that awful relationship in high school, one of my favorite tactics to prove my devotion was to not eat--look what I'm doing for you, look how I'm suffering to show you my love. It turns out fasting is not a great idea when you're hypoglycemic. But anyway, this year I'm thinking maybe I could do with a little more structure and sacrifice in my life. Because it's kind of hot.