Diva

"Why don't you just kill me?"

I was hunched over in the middle of the room, half crying, half yelling.  My face was throbbing where my stepfather had punched me, and something inside me had just cracked.  For the first time since he had started physically and sexually abusing me eight years earlier, I stood up to him.  But it wasn't bravery that compelled me.  It was total and complete despair.  I just didn't care anymore.  I was fifteen years old, and I wanted to die.

My stepfather pulled back for a moment in surprise.  I had never challenged him before, and my cry from the heart seemed to deflate him.  I stumbled into my room and collapsed on my bed, but I didn't weep. I huddled there with my arms wrapped around my body and withdrew into a safe state of numbness where I felt nothing.

People who work with abused children will tell you that this type of disassociation is a common mode of survival.  In some cases, the disassociative state becomes permanent, and the psychic injury never heals. At that moment, I was dangerously close to slipping off the edge.

On the day I confronted my stepfather, I guess my words struck a chord because he never touched me again.  But it hardly mattered; the damage was already done.  I had become weak, fearful, and empty - the product of a lifetime of physical and sexual abuse.

The feeling of weakness, the disassociation, developed with time.  In the beginning, I fought tooth and nail.  Even as a very young child, I knew it was wrong when my stepfather touched me. I kicked and yelled. I screamed, "I hate you!" and "You're a bad man!"  My one victory was that he never achieved penetration, but in every other way, he won. Each time my stepfather hit me, I went deeper inside.  Each time he touched me, I became colder and more unfeeling.  Eventually, I stopped fighting.  Since I didn't have the power to stop him, I simply gave up.  Over time, failure became an easy place to be.  I was used to feeling weak, to saying, "I can't stop this!" When you're abused as a child, you feel helpless and learn to withdraw.  You try to protect yourself with frailty, with invisibility.  I became a weak, frightened young woman who lived in shadows.

My stepfather got away with the abuse because my mother was constantly working to support us; he was always between jobs.  I never told my mother what was happening.  My stepfather convinced me she wouldn't believe me. He loved to taunt me with that:  "You're nobody, and nobody will believe you."

But my mother had her own grievances with the cruel man who lived in our house, and their marriage finally ended.  I still remember the day she kicked him out. AS he left the house, he reached out and tried to kiss me. I turned my back and closed the door.  A weight was lifted from my shoulders, but it took me many years to sort out my feelings. I'm still putting together the pieces of that puzzle now.

Today, at thirty-two, I can vividly remember the sensation of feeling that life held nothing for me. My stepfather tried to take away my identity, my strength. But in the end I was lucky.  I'm telling this story for the first time because I know that before a woman can get fit, strong, and beautiful, she first has to know she exists - and push through the greatest barrier of all - the inability to believe in herself.