Velociworld

Damn. Just damn. That is someone who 'gets' it. Thanks for pointing it out. I wish I could have said things half as well.

Oooh, thanks for the link! I am SO not worthy and bow at the altar of the VelociGod.

But on the night that I was raped, I found out how easily it would be for me to kill someone. I beat him within an inch of his life with an old, metal candlestick style lamp.

Ha! Good for her.

If the first abuse was being hit as an adult, if there were no childhood antecedents, if there was no history of the all-too-typical slow wearing down of defenses that precedes that first thwack, if the abused has the resources necessary to leave, then the woman would have a point about gumption and walking out -- if.

I was raped in 1976 by man whose buddy was holding a gun to my head. From what I can glean, they both became crab food somewhere in the marshes between Savannah and Brunswick, never to be the violent, rolling nuisances they were to all and sundry again. I don't approve of that but I am grateful.

I had some PTSD symptoms and still have the occasional nightmare some thirty years hence but I otherwise survived that okay. I refuse to take any responsibility for what happened. I have a right to walk from my car to a family home without being secretly stalked, then chased down and attacked by men who couldn't handle that I'd had them thrown out of a bar for behaving in a crudely sexual manner to women they knew to be lesbians.

Suffice it to say that the fact that I became damned grateful, too, that Roe v Wade had been decided by the Supremes not long before that was icing on that cake I'd rather not have had.

A few years later, I succumbed to domestic abuse. I realize now that I was set up for it by years of emotional abuse in childhood but that it was my responsibility to deal with both things and take care of myself as an adult. The domestic abuser, by the way, was a woman.

Velociman's 'every woman must react just like me or be adjudged a snivelling twit' survivor should learn that abuse is not limited to men -- that it's not necessarily even about men and women -- it's about people and that good people sometimes just need help.

I look back on the abused woman that I was and almost don't recognize her -- I say 'almost' because I'd be a fool to forget just yet that I have to be vigilant not to let the old messages from my childhood that I'm a worthless nothing sneak into the carefully constructed person who knows that I am just fine, thank you. I'm working toward a day when my sense of self worth is so second nature that I don't have to be that careful but I'm not there yet, so I do what I have to do to keep from backsliding.

But I'm not so callous as to have forgotten the slow, almost imperceptible slide into the nonpersonhood that left me vulnerable to her abuse and what it took for me to make a new me, either.

I've been happily married to a woman who helped me help myself out of that mire, someone who taught me for the first time in my life what love is -- married religiously since 1984 and civilly (Oh, Canada!) since 2003 -- and it just keeps getting better. Another thing I'm grateful for is that she's in my life and that I know just how fortunate I am to have her.

I love many men (and women), like many more, and hate only a few -- and they all deserve what feelings I have about them -- as individuals. That is the one thing that I can say for sure that Velociman's 'doffee' and I have in common. I just wish her heart was bigger (or better healed, take your pick) to let her embrace the weak as well as the strong.

I love many men (and women), like many more, and hate only a few -- and they all deserve what feelings I have about them -- as individuals. That is the one thing that I can say for sure that Velociman's 'doffee' and I have in common. I just wish her heart was bigger (or better healed, take your pick) to let her embrace the weak as well as the strong.

Wow. Just wow. You are amazing. Thank you. And you're absolutely right about Theaterofthesoul - I am sorry for what happened to her, and she has strength, but despite her words, zero compassion.

Why, thank you!
And to think I stumbled in here following a websearch for Chatham Artillery Punch only to take an odd trip down a memory lane consisting of strewn downed Spanish moss on a sand over hardpan dirt road meandering across a bluff with the scent of salt air mixed with rotting marsh grass wafting up from below?