The trick to overcoming abuse
Sympathy is overrated. Concentrate on self-expression.
Abuse comes in lots of packages. You might catch it from parents, a spouse, or a random asshole down the street. Sometimes it’s clearly marked. Other times, there’s no return address. My mom told me I wasn’t abused almost every week. And I believed her.
Normally, it would happen after a commercial about abuse aired on TV. My mom would give me a dirty look and say something like, “Don’t even think about calling them. That number’s for real abuse.”
My mom convinced me that my friends were the problem. Not her. She distracted me with lies. Like she’d caught them stealing my clothes. Heard them laughing behind my back.
Anything to throw me off the scent.
She didn’t engage in physical abuse that often. When you’re good at psychological warfare, there’s no need. Why leave evidence? Screaming and throwing dishes was just a bonus.
Anyway, you get the idea.
I’m not special. Abuse happens all the time. It won’t end anytime soon. Every big city holds thousands of victims.
We don’t deserve anything though.
And that’s the trick. Reminding yourself that you don’t get anything special for your abuse.
The truth sucks. Because you endured years of beatings and mental assault. And for what? There’s no prize for most abused child of the year.
They don’t give out scholarships for abused kids. At least not that I know of. Even if they did, lots of victims don’t like talking about their past. They don’t want to wind up in some nonprofit newsletter.
Somehow I struggled through high school and tuned out all the chaos. The less my mom saw me, the more she focused on ruining my dad and brother’s life. I doubled down on my grades and athletic performance. They became my tickets out.
And then in college I started to forget that key lesson. Inside, I felt pride about what I’d accomplished. But nobody else knew what I’d overcome. Sometimes, I tried to tell people. But they didn’t care.
When I started expecting sympathy, that’s when my life went to shit. Instead of studying, I excused myself from hard work. I’d come far enough. It was time to cut myself a break.
Plus, I was still coming home on the weekends. Still had to deal with my fucked-up family. But every day, I sank deeper into the well of “It’s not fair,” and “Why do I have to do this?”
Finally, my grades took a nose dive and I almost dropped out of college. My friends lost interest in me. I’d become a walking sob story. The more apathy they showed, the more I hated them for their normal lives.
At some point, I settled at rock bottom. It occurred to me that I was alone. And that’s not special either. Everyone winds up alone at some point in their lives. Either they’ve been abandoned. Or they’ve pushed everyone away. I’d done my fair share of pushing.
We all have to face our shit. Nobody hugged their way to a gold medal, or a promotion. I’m not saying keep your problems to yourself. Everyone needs some way to express themselves.
But talking never helped me. It might not help you, either. Instead, writing did the trick. Other people might find their release through poetry, music, art, sculpting, or sports.
The bonus is that I’ve developed all kinds of skills around my art. They helped me figure out my way into a career. If nothing else, I’ve taken the worst parts of my life and used them as fuel for the best parts.
You can’t ignore the bad shit that happens to you. Don’t repress it. Don’t try to shrug it off. But everyone deals with their hardships in different ways. For some people, therapy and moral support might just make things worse. For me, any kind of sympathy just made me dependent on others.
There’s a big difference in collecting sympathy and creating art from negative experiences. I’m not interested in making people cry for me anymore. And I don’t need an apology from God, the universe, or anyone else. You can only go up, and forward.
The article is published in Struggling Forward. We are a community of people that are helping each other through the struggle on the way towards our dreams.
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