2014: My year of being big enough.

It’s the end of another year. For me, it’s a time of reflection and looking forward. It’s the time when I start making resolutions.

2013 was a big year for me. My family moved across the country, I started a new job in a new place with new people. Literally, everything changed this year. Somehow, that makes next year that much more important. So much of this year was spent holding on for dear life and praying that the crazy train I was on didn’t derail. Now that we’re more settled and things are less hectic, the pressure is on to define my new normal.

So, I sit here, and I ask myself what I want next year. The old standard resolutions are, of course, ever present: Read more. Stop smoking. Change the world. These are the same things I resolve to do every year (and most years fail at).

There’s a new one this year, though and it’s terrifying. I want to heal.

Heal. Four letters, a rather small word, really. Yet I’m sitting here staring at it and my chest is tight. I can hardly breath just thinking of that word. It’s scary because wanting to heal means admitting that I am hurt.

I’ve spent so many years of my life in defiance of that hurt. ‘You can’t break me’, I said, ‘I’m stronger than you’. Here’s the thing. She did break me. She broke me in a way that is still with me, almost two decades later. It’s an injury that has permeated everything I’ve ever done. It’s the film that sits on top of my skin, oily and black and hateful. I’m wrapped in this constant bubble she constructed for me when I was just a kid, and I live here. I stay here. I deny that I AM here, but I can’t leave.

The ‘She’ I speak of is my former step mother. Her name is Barb, which I find ironic and rather fitting.

For however many years she was married to my dad (I think it was 8), she abused my brother and I. I feel unjustified to use that word. I tell myself that there are so many people that had it way worse than I did. I was fed, I was warm, I was never in fear for my life. I was fine, really. Just fine.

That’s a lie, plain and simple. I wasn’t fine. I was abused. I NEED to say that word. I need to use it, and I need to accept it. The abuse she shelled out wasn’t primarily physical, though there was a little of that (my brother got the brunt of it). Her punishment for me was mental and emotional. There are quotes of hers that are tattooed on my brain, affixed more resolutely than anything I’ve heard or read since. The things she said defined me, and have continued to do so for years now, until I can hardly discern what is really me and what is who she told me I was.

When I brought home A’s on a report card she told me that I’m lucky I was smart, because I had nothing else going for me. She told me, when I was 8 and my step father molested me, that he did it because I liked it. The first time I let a boy go up my shirt, she found out and told me I was a whore. I was twelve. Once I heard her encourage my little brother to call me Miss Piggy, which he did and continued to do for years.

She and my father divorced when I was 13 or so. It wasn’t much different once she was gone. The voice in my head picked up where she’d left off, and never stopped.

I’ve spent my whole life thinking I’m worthless. That I’m ugly. That I’m fat. That the things she said are true. Even when I was older and I developed a rational, logical mind that KNEW she was wrong, the rest of me still believed her. The rest of me still does believe her.

I am honestly and genuinely surprised when someone likes me, for any reason. I can never understand it when people go out of their way to spend time with me or be nice to me. I don’t understand it, and I don’t trust it. I can’t take a compliment to save my life. I’ve never looked in the mirror and truly believed that I’m pretty. I’m jealous, and insecure and needy. I have an irrational fear of being happy that’s so ingrained in me I never even noticed it until recently.

I’m tired of this. I’m done with this. When I was a kid, I’d tell myself “As soon as I’m bigger, she won’t be able to do this anymore.” 2014 is going to be that year. Im going to find a way to heal, to finally be big enough that she can’t hurt me. I’m terrified, but I’m determined.