Moab Is My Washpot

*** Like all posts in this blog, there is a major trigger warning for what follows:

I love Stephen Fry. I want to grow up to be him, crooked nose especially. I've been told that I look like him a bit, to which I've responded by glowing.

My hypothetical and non-existent reader may be curious as to why I decided to write about this in my survivor blog. However dearly I love him, Stephen Fry can be a bit triggering for me. I first discovered this really unfortunate fact not long after I first started accept the fact that I had actually been sexually abused. I read The Liar a couple years ago. I picked it up from a friend to read at work. At the time I was working as a phone operator for a very large company, and I was so good at my job that my call times averaged at less than a minute, so I had some time on my hands. Like most unpleasant memories, I've forgotten the finer points of the plot, but the premise involved a device that could detect lies in a real way, even if the teller was unaware of the lying. There was a lot about how the brain processes information, and how it does it differently with manufactured information. I think why it upset should be fairly obvious. Even on my best, most assured days, I have a lot of trouble believing that I am not essentially a liar. On my best day, if someone were as me if my mother sexually abused me, I would hesitate. I am terrified of any action either way. I don't want anything else to happen to confirm that it happened, and I am even more terrified of being proven wrong.

My first therapist told me once that it didn't really matter when all is said and done. Ultimately, if I feel that my mother sexually abused me, that's my reality; I have to live with it either way. My mother remembers thing differently, or so she says, and both understandings of the past can coexist. To be honest, I was pissed the fuck off when he said that. How dare he? It was in my opinion at the time tantamount to saying I was making everything up, but to this day there is no other statement that can make me feel better on the days when I feel like I'm lying.

Those days happen more regularly when I'm doing better oddly enough. I am medicated and still living far away. In fact, I've been nigh untriggerable lately, so much so that I've been calling my mother regularly. I don't like admitting that. It feels like defeat. I have been having long conversations with her when no one is home, and not mentioning that I was the one who called her or that I kind of enjoyed them. At the moment, I can't emotionally or mentally remember any of the instances of abuse. This happens whenever I'm doing well, which means apparently that I'm not doing well so much as taking a break from doing not well. It's at times like these that what that therapist told me runs through my head daily.

"Moab is my washpot" is a peculiar title, but if it's good enough for Stephen Fry, it's good enough for me. This summer I am yet again at a job that leaves me with a lot of time to read. I'm reading Stephen Fry's autobiography, titled, yes, Moab Is My Washpot, I'm only a hundred pages in, but it's having a very similar effect on me. He writes a lot about lying. He writes about how prideful he was about being a good liar. I can relate to it heavily. I know I'm a good liar. I'm in a lot of ways proud about being a good liar. If I'm as good as I think I am, it is not inconceivable that I am lying about the abuse. When in a better mindset I try to remind myself that this can as easily be a symptom of sexual abuse, learning to lie and believe lies, as much as it can be a reason to believe I was not a abused. Stephen Fry not only reminds me of this internal dilemma, but he gives good reason in my disordered brain why I should lean toward the explanation that I wasn't abused. Stephen Fry writes about lying the same way I in a disordered way feel about it, but he was not abused. He says so directly. He feels that he was in no way abused, and he even goes somewhat in depth as to what the definition of abuse is. He feels nothing that has ever happened to him ever came close. This way of thinking can develop in someone was not abused. I could just be lying. It's not proof, but it's enough to trigger me into thinking it is.

This is in essence the triggering part of Stephen Fry's books. They remind me that the symptoms and behaviors I cling to to prove to myself that I was abused when I cannot remember the abuse itself could just as easily be unrelated or used as proof that I was never abused. My therapist was right, I suppose. I don't think proof exists, not in the concrete way. I don't know if my memory will ever be reliable. My mother's memory certainly isn't. All I have is that I feel like I was abused most the time, and whether or not that did happen, I still do have to deal with it. I still have a gut reaction to reject it. I want to insist that no, actually, I was abused. I am dealing with something real. I've never been one to accept the whole reality as a construct understanding of the world. Things do happen. They happen in context and with translation but under that they happen. Externally to me. That is what I need; external confirmation.

All this hasn't triggered me into any real PTSD symptoms. It manifests in super depression. I will finish the book because the other aspects are lovely and funny. It's these problems that remind that I need to go to a serious therapist, and work through remembering events and processing them. I can't deal with remembering, coping with the trauma of remembering, and repressing again and again forever. I need these memories to exist consciously in a way that doesn't hurt so much that I repress them again. While trying to think of them now only one or two incidents that I've always remember come up. I can think of nothing at all. It's frustrating.

That is all. Sorry for the long absence. I don't have much to write about on this front when I'm in this state of mind. In the interest of continued honesty, and irony, I suppose at this point, I can say now that I've been diagnosed with PTSD. There was a lot less fuss than I thought there would be. I told the doctor my symptoms. He said I had depression and PTSD, prescribed some medication, and I was on my way.