Subconscious Truth

I’m haunted, more so than usual. Generally I spend my days avoiding my memories or truly thinking about anything that will cause me distress. On days when the memories get especially hard, I double down and do twice as much work. On those days I’m like a zombie, mulling around from task to task with no clear direction. If I stop--if I take one second to sit down--that’s when the pain creeps in. The memories over take me, and my mind will focus on things I never wanted to remember in the first place. The mind is like that, it doesn’t give you a choice about what it forgets or what it wants to remember. It does what it wants--what it thinks you need--but I don’t need or want the memories it’s bringing up.

I certainly don’t want the nightmares.

That’s all I have anymore. Vivid, awful, non-fantasy related nightmares. It would be a blessing to dream about murderers or awful monsters chasing me. I’ll take vampires, mutants, ghosts, crazed homebodies that feast on human flesh. Anything other than moments with Danielle (aka my POS mother). 

I’ve always been a vivid dreamer, then again I’ve always had anxiety. For those that don’t know high times of anxiety causes vivid dreaming. I often had the “Scooby Doo” dream, when me and my friends are in a haunted house being chased by monsters, ghosts, ect. There were the random ones of me choking my sister when she was being overly bratty. Yes, I used to dream about choking my sister, not killing me, just choking her. Hands around her neck, shaking her while yelling for her to stop being such a bitch. (My sister has always been a spoiled bratty bitch. It started before she could even walk.)

Now my vivid dreams are disturbing on levels that leave me hollow, exhausted, and in the case of last weekend, devastated. 

I grew up without a voice. Danielle never let me talk about the awful things that transpired in our home. Behind closed doors anything was possible, and you didn’t talk about what happened in the family. Everything, down to the smallest insignificant detail was taboo to speak about. Outside or even among the family. You don’t talk about how your parents discipline you, if they fight, what they fight about. You don’t speak about money problems, how your brother or sister abuse you, and you never. . . NEVER. . . talk about anything sexual. Doesn’t matter if it’s right or wrong. DON’T talk about it. 

It’s in the past. . . We don’t talk about the past, because it doesn’t matter.

I followed those rules because on the rare occasion I didn’t the punishments were scarring. Physically. . . Emotionally.

Even when injustices happened in the moment I was not allowed to speak out about them. I wasn’t allowed to say something wasn’t fair, or tell either parent (mother & stepfather) if my brother and sister were picking on me. It didn’t matter what it was, I was always wrong!

You know the term, “I can do no right.” I lived that, 100% of my life with Danielle. She let my brother and sister get away with murder, but most of the time she simply didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t want to face anything negative or fighting of any type. If she was pushed to her limit I would be thrown against a wall, or pinned against some object while she yelled and spit in my face with pure unrestrained rage. I was Danielle’s outlet for. . . well, for everything. If her job sucked, it was my fault. If her health was awful I had to pick her up, and when she made suicidal comments I, as a child no older than 12, had to find a way to keep her from spiraling into depression. 

It’s no wonder I now dream about situations where I simply yell at Danielle. Of course my dreams are very vivid and scarcely accurate, because I wake-up annoyed as hell since Dream Danielle doesn’t give a single shit of what I have to say. It’s honestly nightmares about me emotionally venting, yelling, and expressing years of repressed feelings only for zero reaction. It’s tiring, and honestly, I don’t think I have had a single restful night's sleep since last year. That’s a whole year of awful, emotionally fueled dreams of screaming, yelling, and getting nowhere! 

Fun times.

Over the last six or seven months the dreams have shifted a little. Instead of simply yelling at Danielle and taking her silence in aggravated strides, dream me has begun threatening to move out. To leave Danielle with her two children that are a life suck, and stop being the support of the whole family unit. Dream Danielle would laugh at me, or shrug her shoulders because, like in real life, she knows I have nowhere to go. They has never been, at least in my mind, a way out of my situation with Danielle. 

Shit, I mean, the first time I tried running away I was five. . . FIVE!

And it wasn’t one of those, “you said I couldn’t do this, so I’m running away!” type of child’s temper tantrum. No.

I would pack suitcases and hide them in my room or little overnight bags. When Danielle found out what I was doing she took them all away. So I resorted to filling shopping bags with clothes. I would horde change, so I would have money to run away and I would wait until Danielle was away. Such as when her boyfriend was supposed to be watching me, but he was sleeping. I would try to sneak out with my bag or suitcase, but I always got caught. Then punished, usually spanked or something along those lines and grounded, of course. 

As I got older and smarter I realized where I was going to go? We had moved away from all our family and now lived around my stepfather’s family. None of them I trusted or I knew would take me in. According to Danielle, my dad wanted nothing to do with me at all. In her words, “he’s embarrassed by you. He never wanted you to be born, and he hates me.”

At the age of six who am I not to believe her. It doesn’t matter how wrong, messed up, violent, or abusive your parents are. When you grow around them, and only them--when there is no other example of how things should be--they are your gods. You will do anything they say whether or not your heart tells you otherwise. You will believe anything and everything that comes out of their mouths. Parents, to a child, are like cult leaders. Charismatic, lovable, untouchable, and 100% unquestionable. 

Dream me, at 35, still believes the things I was raised to think. All the lies and abnormalities I know now to be wrong, I’m still clinging to them. Danielle is still very much in my head, and my dreams symbolize the struggle between letting go and still holding on to a lifelong belief that I’m shit. I know it. The wanting to get away is real. The yelling and screaming to be heard--to get a reaction--of notation of some type of love out of her. It’s all real life intruding in my dreams. It leaves very little time for actual rest.

I fight unseen battles every day while I’m awake, and now I’m fighting while asleep. But I believe I am winning, and I latch onto that idea. It’s my hope in a dark and exhausting situation.  Every morning I wake up struggling to open my eyes to face another day--when my head is pounding from a night of sleeplessness--and my emotions are raw, I repeat to myself. “It’s only this bad because it’s getting better. The old mindset is desperate (like Danielle) to keep control of me.”

“I’m winning. . .”

At least I really hope I am. If this is all for nothing but endless suffering, then I don’t know what will happen when this all ends. If it ever ends. 

I look to the progression of the dreams to know how far down the healing highway I’ve gone. Like I said I dream about yelling at Danielle desperate to get a reaction out of her. About three or four months ago, instead of stomping away and threatening to leave, knowing I didn’t have anywhere to go. Dream me starts to make plans. Actual action to go along with my threats. That’s where the violence started. 

Dream Danielle, and real Danielle, do not like being turned away. She acts like a child when denied what she wants, and if someone gets the upper hand. Well, they magically disappear from her world, or they become the devil incarnate. In my dreams, when I can no longer yell--as I realize she doesn’t care what I have to say--I calmly tell her I can’t do it anymore. I don’t want to scream, or yell, or be angry. I don’t want to feel like shit, so I turn to get my small amount of things to leave. 

When she comments I have nowhere to go, that no one wants me. I shrug and tell her I’ll figure it out. This is a BIG win, my subconscious is breaking free. You would think this would be the end of my nightly battles, but no. Like all abusive controlling people Danielle is not going to let me go. This is where the violence starts. As I turned away Danielle attacks without relent. She has tried to murder me in every way possible. Poison, shoving stuff down my throat, beating my head off the wall, stabbing (the one I hate the most), and even choking. The whole time she’s smiling, repeating that no one wants me. I have nowhere to go. Then, I wake up because why wouldn’t I. Sometimes I wake up in a panic, gasping for air. Other times I slowly slip away into consciousness and think to myself, “I’m getting up. It’s less stressful than sleeping.” 

This has been my life. Vivid, violent dreams where I work out my childhood trauma, but hey. I’m winning, right?

I’m nearly through the awfulness, what else could there be? How else can Danielle destroy me? She can’t. I no longer have contact with her, I’m simply fighting her phantom, as powerful as it is. There is no new torment from real her, no more fuel for her war inside my head, and yet I came to my limit. . . Right when I believed I had reached the end of my suffering. . . when I believed nothing new could strike my heart I got leveled. 

Last Saturday I woke from a brand new nightmare, a devastation I never imagined. Dream Danielle had brought me to my knees, literally. 

As I slept it was the usual, a random ranting, raving, screaming to be heard. I believed the only usual part of the dream was the fact my sister was in it, and it was about me trying to show Danielle how shitty my sister was being. Danielle didn’t care, told me to mind my own business. This was all standard stuff she has actually told me in real life when I often tried to warn her my sister was doing something self-destructive. Like dating boys years older than her when she was 12, and kissing them. . . and her sexual bragging. Danielle never wanted to hear it, to her I was being a tattle tale. As the dream often goes I made my case but part way in, instead of throwing everything I had into the argument, I stopped. I had reached my limit early. Yay, another sign of growth and healing. 

I told Danielle if she didn’t care what I had to say then I wasn’t going to do it anymore. I wasn’t going to live in her destructive household where I meant nothing, and I stormed away, a winter coat in hand (I have no idea why I was holding a winter coat, I just was). Stomping down a hall with my head held high, refusing to let her see the hurt in me, Dream Danielle muttered something that cut so damn deep. It hit at my core and sent the pieces of my already shattered heart scattering across the world. 

“I never wanted you anyways. . .”

One sentence. . . five words.

I made it around another turn in the hallway and I hit my knees. It’s an image burned into my head even a week later. I see it when I close my eyes, feel the deep wound it made in the dark of night before falling asleep, and I think about the truth in that statement in my waking moments. 

I’m there, crumbling under the savage verbal attack but keeping my spine straight with defiance. Then, as the corner is turned, my strength reaches its limits and I fall. Devastation isn’t a strong enough word for it. . . anguish. . . agony. . . none of them touch how I feel, how I continue to feel. After all the abuse, the physical and emotional pain, five words have broken me. 

Yes, Dream Danielle said this not the actual person, but that isn’t true. Danielle, the real Danielle, might have never said those words, but she said it in many different ways. Her actions screamed the truth I never wanted to face, and I still don’t want to face it. How can I? My god, the center of my world. . . the person I clung to for everything. . . I mean nothing to them.

She said these words when she dragged me along to drunk parties when I was 3-5, to gain attention. 

She said it when she made me sleep on a motel room floor while she had sex with her boyfriend in the bed above me. 

She said it every time she bought food for my brother and sister and gave me table scraps I hated.

She said it every time she told me to hide from my stepfather, and made it clear if I didn’t then it was my fault for his rage. 

She said it when she took back the man that sexually assaulted me, and allowed him down the hall from me. 

She said it with every insult she lashed at me, and with every shortcoming she pointed out.

She said it with the lies she told me about my father.

She said it with every dream of mine she crushed.

Every-time she called me stupid. . . slow. . . lazy. . . incompetent. . . perverted. . . sick in the head. . . 

She said it when she didn’t want to hear the sexual abuse and rape her husband put me through, and she said it when she allowed a doctor to rape me to teach me a lesson.

“I never wanted you anyways. . .”

She never said it out loud but the message has always been clear. It’s a truth I’ve been running from for my whole life, and now it’s here and I can’t handle it. My soul can’t handle the devastation, the words have been said. Maybe in only a dream but they cut deep, and I can’t stop the bleeding.

~Jax~