cormorancy

system personal blog general tw for oa/incest

[phalacrocoraxdreams]

post therapy journal part 2 because i also forgot mine (warning for organized abuse & its attendant buzzwords):

i think if kc is going to try to use our therapy time for herself (this is good, i am onboard with it), then i need to use this blog more to offload some of the organized abuse horror that i am navigating mostly on my own. michael [part] is of course always a huge help (ha—i could not have imagined writing that 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, etc. ago), and my girlfriend helps so much when young parts need help in the physical world, but the burdens of disclosure are mine to hold and to manage. i am the one who weaves what mica or fern or marie or any other young part tells me into the narrative of our life.

it is so persistently difficult to notice and be with mica; there is another part, a fogging, stopping, redirecting part with a lot of influence internally, but with whom i do not speak. i know the interlocking mechanisms of our system spin apart and show me the workings when i can support mica, so why is it so difficult to keep choosing that? there are two corridors and my mother is at the end of one of them and the blank room is at the end of the other.

some things i am thinking about in my life that i just need to say the words of somewhere: hypnosis, bloodletting, the ingestion of blood and feces, needles (always), “dog stuff,” ritual preparation, sexual murder, being a living corpse, the difference between being a doll and being dead, symbolic deaths, knives, catheters.

i am having great difficulty resisting the pull of ritual in my life now—it seems all avoidance is preparation, all these things we must do to be ready which masquerade as diversions. we have been high too much and it feels unstoppable. consolation and preparation for something intolerable—but we are the only one who knows the ritual. it could be over with forever but we dont want to be alone without it; it still creates meaning, solidifies us; what to do with the need and the knowledge when the context is gone? feeling so discomfited that ritual once again feels more alive than life—but trying to learn from it, at least.

[phalacrocoraxdreams]

post therapy journal because i forgot mine:

im disappointed; im embarrassed; i am tired of these being the things i usually feel. i am unhappy to hear but also glad to know that A often interprets our freeze as parts being angry at her; sometimes i am(/we are) but i need her to have a different reaction. i know that none of what she said to me was meant to be rejecting but that is what it feels like to me and i cant work that out with her if she freezes when i freeze because then eloise has to rescue me, which i appreciate but is embarrassing, and then i am not in control. i feel deeply unlikable and i feel like my reactions are both overreactions and incorrect. i want to have some kind of relationship with A but i dont know how and it makes me feel fucking stupid!!!

[phalacrocoraxdreams]

i am actually struggling so much right now 🥲 staff week tanked my confidence completely—i know i am a highly effective camp staff but that is so hard to access when i feel so viscerally that it is not okay to be the person that i am. i am the only trans staff, the only jewish staff, one of four fat staff, and i wont make assumptions about others but i do seem to be living a very different experience of autism and disability than anyone else with whom i will work this summer. i have experienced straight up exclusion this week in a way i have not since grade school. it is beyond lonely; it is actually actively humiliating. i feel like i will spend my whole summer marinating in how wrongly i move my body.

everything is in some state of disarray internally. i/we am/are under a constant barrage of cruel remarks and criticism; mica got to the point of beginning to physically harm the body before michael and i’s joint presence could redirect him (and then he said some truly disturbing things to [barbie doll he vents on], which were not new but its never not disconcerting to have these things that really were said to us come out of our mouth). so its bad.

the wind is high with the incoming storm; i tend to ourselves as best i can. hopefully the week is better.

[phalacrocoraxdreams]

it is so difficult—impossible, really—to feel like this body is mine when all of the ways it was praised or appraised are passed into young age and i do not make many of the decisions about what we do or what happens to or with the body and i cannot even get drunk about it.

[phalacrocoraxdreams]

child prostitution

sometimes i will feel that i have made something adequately clear in therapy and then i will say something risky but not new and it will suddenly be very clear that A did not understand what was told to her. i am feeling so hurt and so angry after experiencing this—holding as an adult part that i can forgive a mistake, a misunderstanding, a forgetting, but the child part of me who was bought and sold does not want to forgive this. it is like this: nothing that happened to me matters or was real. there is a separate book of memories of Things That Were Not Real And Do Not Matter. and that is where the part of me who is the most me lives. where she is forgotten, gone, fiction, a nothingness. the money that changed hands bought not only my body but my realness, too. the doll was real for them / the child was not, is not.

[phalacrocoraxdreams]

as an adult i look at my life both then and now and see that i do have limits but there is a space inside of sex where the feelingknowledgetruth is preserved—that i have no limits, that death is the only hard stop. it is bizarre to me that i am alive, and that something in me tried so hard to stay alive. whatever could help me i clung to and so there really must have been so little.

what i want now: a way to stand inside the experience of being without limits, as an adult.

[phalacrocoraxdreams]

things i am appreciating in this moment:

michael salter’s clarity on organized and ritual abuse

that A used the word torture in session today

michael’s steadying internal presence

i am sad and grateful to be sad and i want more time where my only responsibility is to feel the sadness. it is so dear to me. i often imagine judgment for “identifying” too heavily with my pain, but of course i do—what else has been with me in every moment including the lost ones?

[phalacrocoraxdreams]

self harm / abuse / blood and blood-related abuse

it is interesting to me the way “self harm” remains an important part of our life, even as cutting/burning the way we used to has mostly fallen away from us. i am trying to respect the reenactment, and allow it when i know parts are choosing it and not responding to an obligation that no longer exists. it is interesting to me that the kind of self injury this begets is uniformly comforting and relieving, even if very painful and/or upsetting in the moment; it is interesting to me how long this effect persists, especially when blood is involved.

the ritual substitution of drawing small amounts of blood fulfills some of the need in us to be bled, i think. for a day or more, we (marie) can release some of the sick desperate guilt and wrongness of having all this blood which she feels still does not belong to us… she was trying to explain this to A last week, and A was having so much trouble understanding what i actually agree with marie is a pretty simple idea: her blood belongs to him; he is the owner of her blood. i disagree but i understand why she believes this.

in wanting her to feel that this body is hers to exist within as well, i have to trust and allow her to exercise autonomy in ways i find difficult… and i do not have to understand her needs in order to allow them. </3

[phalacrocoraxdreams]

im getting triggered by almost literally interaction i have with other people right now, im just so sensitive and its exhausting, im tired of being upset and im tired of feeling disappointed and im tired of having to change my plans because i get triggered and switch.

[phalacrocoraxdreams]

all night dreaming of my other other neighbor and my parents raping and torturing my sister and i.

she is getting so close to moving out and it needs to happen and im proud of her and excited and all the things but im also so frightened for her. shes tried to move out a few times and each time she has become so incapacitated by trauma thats shes had to move back in with our parents; shes planning for this, i think she can do it, and—whatever surfaces for her will be terrible.

at the end of my dream i set up a bank account for her, which i am actually going to help her with tomorrow; going to take my dream as a sign that it is a good next step.

[phalacrocoraxdreams]

allowing myself one private moment in the hospital parking garage to feel crushed about health things

it is hard to be chronically ill. it is hard not to listen to my parents’ voices in my head about it. i am sad, and tired.

[phalacrocoraxdreams]

when i was young i really enjoyed and benefitted from sharing my dreams out loud, and i often tried to do this with my family but was invariably met with “no one cares” “i hate it when you try to tell me your dream” “theres nothing more boring than hearing about dreams” etc; hurtful stuff (from both of my parents, although my dad was the one who hated dreams. my mother just hated listening to me or my siblings talk at length). this did bad things to me as you can guess but its what currently feels relevant is that i truly thought most people were not interested in dreams at all. but as an adult i am so interested in dreams! dreams / dreaming motivates so much artistic output from me, and i love art that other people make about dreams or that is dreamlike!

i think my mom just did not care about things that interested me, but my dad’s thing about dreams is interesting. he wont talk about it seriously; he wont earnestly engage with you about dreaming at all. (sometimes, though, he would tell us his own dreams. it was like he forgot he was against it, for a moment…) it’s the kind of thing with him where i can tell he’s got something there but i’ll never know what. odd man.

[phalacrocoraxdreams]

disturbing dream

had such a vivid dream last night, and the scene/feeling i want to remember is: i had been very severely mutilated and kept in captivity for a few years, and after being rescued i was living and recuperating in my old girlfriend’s place, which was kind of in this sketchy video store that sold extreme porn/snuff films/torture videos/etc. my (old/ex? how to describe the relationship when neither of us had moved on but there is an inevitable transformation in a relationship after several years of absence and torture?) girlfriend told me that i should start looking for my own place soon, which i had been expecting but still hurt, and i tried to explain that i was really working on feeding myself (which i had to be doing basically consecutively with a g tube) so it would take a bit.

after that i was feeling real low so i went to the video store and found the copy they had of the video made of my initial mutilation. which. well i say mutilation but this was a pretty sci fi dream and really i had just been completely cut apart but while retaining consciousness and then put back together in a way that was no longer human shaped… i tried to watch it on one of the private machines, but there was a problem with the video. the owner came over and was making a big deal out of it; he knew me so there was no, like, customer service happening, he was just pissed i had broken his machine; i was really horrified and ashamed and embarrassed, and attracting kind of a crowd. and then the video started playing.

(the vcr had a label on it along the lines of “really disturbing/not for casual viewers.”) it was bad. really scary gory video of obviously real horrifying torture. and because there was a crowd, i got to take in all of these random strangers’ reactions to the worst moment of my life. i think someone threw up—most people very disgusted or horrified or both, most people left.

i really remember the video store owner’s face—i could see him processing in real time that this was a video of me, the person living in his building. he was a guy who had watched a lot of disturbing videos but he had a problem with this one. he took the vcr out and said he wouldnt let people rent it anymore; there were a few guys who had hung back and who wanted to rent it after seeing it, and he got pissed at them and chased them out of his store. idk what happened to the video—i would have liked to keep it, but regardless it meant something to me in that moment of feeling utterly alone that someone recognized how awful what happened was, but still saw me as a human.

[phalacrocoraxdreams]

sexual abuse, in dreams and otherwise

had such a horrible dream; myself and my family and some family friends were vacationing in a rental house on an island (or somewhere similarly remote), and it was very nice at first but quickly became revealed to me that the men we were with had orchestrated the vacation in order to sexually abuse the women they brought.

most of the dream (and it was long) was rape scenes, which i am thankfully mostly unable to remember the details of. there was a progression in terms of who was being abused, and i was first, so what was happening started as a secret and became less and less so as the dream wore on. when everyone knew and the vacation was coming to an end, my father cornered me in the kitchen and threatened me with knives. i picked up a knife and fought him despite being very outmatched. he seriously injured me, but i got him pretty good too!

before i fell asleep last night, i was so uncomfortable and flashback-y thinking about my mother when there had ceased to be any distinction between in the secret and out of the secret at home. i’ve been so sad. this morning i am feeling the weight of “it was real;” i feel pinned down.

[phalacrocoraxdreams]

(& i remain bizarrely but steadily grateful to J—such an awful man, truly, but he saw a version of me beyond my parents and, i choose to believe, this is what he was interested in from the beginning—my potential. many adults saw some kind of potential in me but it is meaningful to me now that someone entered the secret and took me past where my parents would have kept me—they were boring owners, he had ambition. certainly no other adult put as much effort into developing whatever potential they saw in me. it is fucked up and always will be but he was the closest anyone came to being a real mentor to me, if in a very narrow context.)

[phalacrocoraxdreams]

anyway that is largely conjecture but the important part is: there is a whole life after holding in my hands what was once untouchable. what i thought i could not face is & has always been my dearest beloved. only together do we finally, haggardly, hardly believing our luck and/or misfortune, turn toward life, and live.

[phalacrocoraxdreams]

the older i get the more hollow my perpetrators seem to me; they sowed in me the same needs but i see now how completely possible it is to bend them towards life and not death. i have pity and compassion for whatever was broken in them but this fellow feeling only affirms how other choices were available to them, too. why did they end up doing so much harm (why do they continue to do so much harm)? idk!

[phalacrocoraxdreams]

i’ll never understand J’s deal; i never lived with him, he never really let me see who he was beyond the masks, and he dropped me before i knew enough about him to do any real harm (a decision i begrudgingly respect and that i am sure i dont understand the half of but that was, actually, smart. i made him so crazy at the end, lol).

but my parents! both of them treated me like i was a sweet they werent supposed to have and were indulging in only in secret. they had this image of themselves as people who were disciplined and ascetic (and, thus, mature—such grown ups, denying themselves what they wanted), but this just meant that all of their “bad behavior” (which ran the gamut from having a little ice cream to [REDACTED]) happened in the nothingness they still cannot look at 😂 like, living so that [room parts] can live (and live as children!) makes me see again and again how cowardly my parents are, how basically unable to face not only their actions but their own thoughts feelings desires etc they are. May i not trap myself by finding myself so untouchable!