Bringing out the monster

  Ok folks, it's time for a big one.  So far this little experiment has turned out so much better than I'd let myself hope.  The feedback I've gotten from those I've let in has been universally positive and supportive, and I've got to say, it feels fabulous to let myself have friends again (withdrawal due to not deserving friends is a common theme that comes up when my brain's pulling tricks on me.)   On top of that, I've been having a lot of big thoughts go thundering by in the last few days, thanks to actually starting to process some of this stuff.  Even with a number of things not landing quite how I wanted in the last few days, I've been noticing a lot more resilience in myself - tiny problems aren't swelling to humongous quite so quickly.  So, to put it shortly, I'm enjoying a recurrent good mood, which is wonderful and novel.
 
 Mental health has not been my strong suit for a long time now; misfortune and disability have seemed to be absolutely crushing, most of the time.  Regardless of castigating myself for weakness relentlessly, I've had almost no leverage to change anything - the endless message I whisper to myself is "Don't make it worse.  If you try to change things, you'll mess up and things will be even worse."  It's a completely hopeless point of view to be stuck in, and it's a horribly self-fulfilling prophecy.  My overall stability over the past two years or so has been abysmal, and it's felt more and more like my body/brain is rebelling in some weird subconcious ways.  The more defensive I get, the more I cling to saying that everything is fine when questioned; almost as if I'm desperate to convince myself.  I fixate on self-control and functionality, all the while ending up with stronger and stronger mental outgrowths to deal with along the way.  Night terrrors, panic attacks, and anxiety have become regular features, and a brilliant stuttering habit showed up around the same time, which only makes me feel even more incompetent.  
 
 It got bad enough to really seize my attention by having some serious eating issues show up over the last year - OCD creeps in and fixates on the possiblity of contamination, rot, and mold for the smallest of reasons and possibilities.  In trying to deal with that, I spent some time at the local anxiety clinic - didn't get as much success as I'd like there, as coming at the problem from the right angle to invoke my issues took some time to figure out.  Turns out I can force myself to eat unappetizing food just fine - getting a disgusting microwave hot pocket successfully in me does absolutely nothing to convince me that it represents a form of desirable food.  That said, they did manage to give me some skills and attitudes to bring to the table as ammunition.  Specifically, the thought that comes to mind is a concept called "Exposure and Response Prevention" - to put it succinctly, you're supposed to try to invoke your issues intentionally through taking an action opposite to the protective impulse, with the intent of diffusing fear over time and through repetition at a less than traumatic level.  My story is largely about shame, in one form or another, and the opposite action for shame is exposure - more or less the essence of this blog, in concept.  So it's time to lean into the skid and introduce you to my monster.
 
 I'm not going to give her a name here; there's no need to sully an alias and the people that are familiar with this portion of my life will recognize who I'm talking about, if they want to.  For convenience, I'll refer to her as C, because the language is going to get awkward otherwise.  She's been out of my life completely for years now, other than as a horrible mental echo, and the only reason I bring her up at all is to steal back some more of the power she took from me.  I feel like I'm starting in the middle again, so let me take a step back to establish where I was at the time.
 
 It was the summer of 2001, roughly half a year after my first wife passed away.  I was utterly shattered by this event; I'd just gotten out of the Navy the year prior and hadn't even established my next job before things fell apart.  Most of the time since had left me just despondent and spent in every little way; we had been staying with my parents while trying to get things together and that naturally extended in the worst way once I was lost in tragedy.  The day I met my monster actually started out as a flailing attempt at trying to access some of the few social contacts I had left to try to dig myself out of the pointlessly circular thoughts in my head.  One of my friends from high school invited me over to meet with another old pal for a round of Risk and catching up.  It was in this shockingly mundane scenario that I met my tormentor, a person whom I barely noticed at the time.  C. was married to the friend who'd reached out to me at the time, and thus she was introduced in passing as we played - she was never a gamer herself, by any stretch, so she refused the offer to join us and went off to do her own thing after the microscopically small talk that served to introduce her.
 
 I'm afraid that I've never been much of a drinker; too many control issues in the back of my mind to ever enjoy being inebraited to any great degree.  Nonetheless, that evening I was trying to get out of my head, and conversation alone wasn't doing it.  So, being the wonderfully cheap date that I am, I pounded a few hard ciders back with the specific intent of detaching my brain from it's socket.  The rest of the evening is blurry snatches, with mere seconds remaining horrifyingly crystal clear here and there.  The drinks hit me quickly and hard; I ended up going into their bathroom to throw up and actually passed out in there for a while - always a classy move, and only the second time in my life I'd let drinking get to a point of knocking me out - the first was a considerably more pleasant time with a navy buddy in Chicago's chinatown at 20 that was the first time I'd drunk alcohol, and and last time I drank Southern Comfort.  That first experience left no scars other than giving me a distinct distaste for sickly sweet flavors and unexplained mudstains on my socks.  This time, I wasn't so lucky, even though it'd be hard to point out my damage on a chart.

 Remember our opening scene, where your hero just wanted to have a horribly dull board game with friends?  My memory cuts directly from setting up the game board to the feel of the cold linoleum bathroom floor against my face, then jumps directly to the second worst moment of my life.  Someone got me from the bathroom to a bed.  As I struggle back to conciousness, the first thing I'm aware of is that someone has their mouth on my crotch.  It's not a good feeling; it feels like she's actually trying to consume my flacid penis by gumming it to death.  The next moment, I become aware of my friend, C's husband, passing by the window outside and suddenly yelling.  I'm not connecting any dots at this point; nothing makes sense about the situation, and it takes me at least another 20 seconds for me to realize that it's C on top of me.  Honestly, I'm not sure how much of that disorientation was residual drunkenness, flat surprise, or just having a hell of a lot difficulty placing someone I'd only met in passing earlier that evening.
 
 Now, I'm no Romeo in the best of times, and there was absolutely no intent or interest on my part, or even literal consciousness to convey such.  I could be petty and wax eloquent about the unholy murky depths this hosebeast must have been birthed from (she was honestly just singularly vile in form and manner), or I could go back to the endless questions I ask myself to try to piece together that evening in a way that might make sense, but neither really makes any difference at this point.  I don't know why or how C. got to the point of doing what she did that evening - the nearest I've ever been able to come is that this must have been some terribly weird way to implode her marriage and escape the situation.  At the time, I couldn't even process that she'd forced herself on me... that this was rape.  All I could work from was that she now had no home and no resources to take care of her 3 kids.  My friends had every reason to feel that I'd betrayed them in the worst possible way, and I couldn't face them to explain myself when I couldn't understand how things had landed so very far away from anything I would have wanted.
 
 My moral framework bent and twisted to try to deal with the desperate incongruity between my beliefs and the thought that somehow I'd created this mess and thus was responsible for it.  I moved to Portland, and let myself be talked into having C. as a roommate, simply because we were both essentially destitute at the time and just starting a job that barely paid minimum wage.  Discomfort and ethical quandries helped C. to continually erode my self esteem, eventually working herself into thinking of us a couple by choice, and giving herself the role of some kind of rescuee.  All told, it took me two years to finally work free of her - almost exclusively because of that horribly contorted perception of responsibility for the whole thing, somehow.  In the end, I actually begged her on numerous occasions to find someone new.  Luckily for me, she managed to land a new interest in a matter of weeks, got pregnant again by him almost immediately, and finally had a reason and means to leave.  Poor sap.  She disappeared entirely from my life, to my great relief, until a few years ago when she dropped a hateful email to me through Facebook bragging about how much better her life now is and how I could have/should have had it all with her.  I don't miss her.
 
 I do think about her though.  That's why I refer to her as my monster; decades later and the detrius from her actions continues to tear me apart, albeit with somewhat less potency, now.  I don't like seeing myself through the lens she gave me, the twin titles of homewrecker and traitor still sting with far too much flavor of truth - somehow it doesn't even count that it was forced upon me.  Some of that is more of the wonderful internalized masogeny that I can't seem to get rid of - boys are always the instigator, the agressor, the guilty party - the actual events that occurred are completely secondary to where the blame will lie, to the only possible place for it.
 
 It's not even the friends she cost me, although I'd known them both for decades, I'd been far away and disconnected for a long time - whatever I lost was probably fairly tenuous to begin with.  What decimated my self image was that I simply couldn't reconcile this guilt with how I saw myself - there simply wasn't a way for me to fit the outcome into the person I understood myself to be, and that feeling of responsibility for the whole thing just wouldn't let go - stacking the absolute certainty that I wasn't this sort of person against the practical truth that I was still stuck in the middle of all this horribleness only made me doubt how well I really knew myself.
 
 She didn't beat me up.  She barely even mistreated me verbally, while she was around, and the wonderful food issues she's left me with probably weren't intentional, even if I can draw some pretty straight lines of cause and effect between those and her housekeeping and bathroom habits.  What she did do is make a damn fine attempt at killing any respect I might have been able to hold for myself.  I was never scared of her.  I was appalled and digusted by the person she made me believe that I was.