Promiscuity.

Healing is something I don't think I've done much of yet. I'm not even sure when I admitted to myself that my past left me scarred. I know now looking back the signs that I was bearing after effects. When I was 14 I got my first and second kisses. They were boys my age and they were perfectly normal, enthusiastic teenage boy makeout sessions with two perfectly normal, attractive boys that I knew and felt (obviously) a certain amount of familiarity with. The feeling I got in my stomach was terrible. Even now finding the right words is hard. Maybe horrified? I felt violated  even though I wasn't. I felt fear, even though I knew I had no reason for it. It's pretty typical for sexual abuse victims to become promiscuous and it would be another year or so before I did, but eventually I did.

The year that I was 14 I came out of my shell a bit. I had a group of real friends for the first time in my life. It was probably because that's when I started hanging out at the 'stump'. Back then the space where the new high school is was a field and us kids would simply walk over there, right off of school property and smoke. My best friend was a very sweet and loving person that socialized well (unlike me) and is probably the reason I ended up having friends at all. I was learning to socialize, finally. I was also learning that the more sarcastic and aloof I acted the cooler people thought I was. I was learning to sell myself.

The year before I had gone to three different schools, I started off here in town until I told the school councilor that I would kill myself if I wasn't removed from my home. And I meant it. That resulted in me going into a foster home briefly, then being shipped off to Oregon to live with my cousins. My behavior was awful, I was really unhappy. I ended up getting sent home to Ellensburg after I got caught shoplifting and my mom sent me to school in Kittitas. It was then that my mom had me put on anti depressants. She used to work in a psychiatric hospital and I think unfortunately that was the view she had of me, in some ways, was as a patient. I don't want to go into a lot of detail about our relationship right now, the relationship we have now has evolved into a very good one and she does everything she can to help me, so I would like to talk to her before I post anything about our life together.

She had some friends, Peggy and I want to say Bob but I really can't remember their names. She asked them to take me in because I wasn't doing well at home. They were the apartment managers at Brook Lane back then and the summer before freshman year was fun. There were a lot of kids my age that lived there and that's how I met my best friend Kiku. One thing that was nice was that they let me be my own person, let me pick out my own clothes and I think that really made fitting in easier. I played outside with my friends all day, I didn't have to be home all of the time. We spent a lot of the summer as a group of kids exploring the graveyard on the other side of the fence and up the hill behind Brook Lane. My arms would be clawed up by the wild cats that lived around there that I thought I could tame. It was a happy summer.

14 was tough for a few reasons. A big one was the flashbacks. One day, out of nowhere, I remembered a scenario with my father that I hadn't thought of for years if ever. We were home alone one day and he called me into his room. There was a half eaten apple on the nightstand and it had turned brown, so I asked him why. He explained that the sugar in it made it turn colors when it was exposed to the air. I'm not going to go into detail about what happened next but it's the only time that I can really remember the specific incident. I was the youngest kid and I probably got the brunt of his abuse at that time because I was the only one that didn't go to school, I was 3. I remember being stubborn even back then. I used to prevoke him just to show him that even though I knew he was going to spank me he wasn't in control of me. I remember scaling down the wall outside of the window one time by a cable wire when I was supposed to be in bed just because I knew he was home. I hid in our back yard behind a tree while I heard him shout for me, knowing damn well I was going to get my ass beat and not feeling sorry one bit.

So the flashbacks triggered two self destructive urges in me. The first one being a need to numb my feelings. I found that if I took an extra amount of my antidepressant/sleep aid it made me feel high. That was my first brush with recreational drug use. The second reaction was to become bulimic. I haven't evolved much since then, over the years my drug use got really bad and eventually became alcoholism. Bulimia and anorexia have been a consistent reaction to immense stress to this day. So, now you know.

14 was the year my mom sent me to a group home. It was right before school let out, I was in detention and my mom pulled me out saying that I could do it another day, we had an appointment. Well, the appointment was at DSHS and they were taking me to a group home in Yakima for a few months. In order for her to do this and not pay she had to relinquish me to the state. She had every intention of getting me back after I had learned my lesson but while I was there I used the system to save myself from her. I had gone to OIC when I was 14 to get extra schooling and a summer job. I bonded with the woman that ran the program and while I was in the group home I called her up and asked her to become my foster mother. Her and her husband, bless their hearts, got licensed to become my foster parents. At the end of the summer I went home to them instead of her.

But while I was at the group home I lost my virginity and had my first real boyfriend. Those guys were not the same person. If you know me then how I lost my virginity will be no surprise. He wasn't a guy I knew very well, he wasn't a guy that I even liked that much. He was a guy willing to do a job that I thought needed to be done so I could stop being afraid of men. When I was afraid of heights I used to climb to the tops of trees, hang out on roofs reading books, climb the scaffolding on skyscrapers, because if there is one thing I hate it's being controlled by fear. I spent a large portion of my childhood having nightmares of faceless men chasing me to kill me while I tried to scream for help but no sound would come out. Or I would be in the middle of a crowded street, like one in New York, and I would open my mouth to cry for help and all that would happen was my throat would ache and no one would even look at me. That's probably why I would stay up all night reading books by the light outside my window, or line by line with the light from my clock radio.

But back to the tale of virginity. His name was Rich, he claimed to be a Hilltop Cryp, he was a tall, slender, blue eyed, blond, tough talking creep that probably made up most of his rapsheet. I'm not sure how we even got on the topic but needless to say when he found out that I was a virgin looking to get it out of the way he offered to help. There was a park across the street and being the classy broad that I am that is where I lost my v-card. One night I ran away and he ran away right after me. They called the cops whenever kids 'ran' but we had a solution for that. I hid in a tree and waited for him. He whistled when he got there, I climbed down and he climbed on. It hurt, but I gritted my teeth. His exact quote was "You're a SOLDIER, most girls puss out on it." Gee, thanks Rich. It was July 13th.

The second boy was Mike Phillips. He was beautiful. He was a year younger than me and he loved me. We had the same case worker so we often got to spend time together away from the home. She bought us cigarettes, she was cool. We had to stash our smokes in the park across the street and were allowed 3 10 minute walks a day, but not at the same time. At the beginning of summer they had no idea that we could sneak from room to room by way of the roof (eventually our windows were bolted shut except for about two inches) and so he became the second person that I had sex with. I think it was the first time I wasn't afraid of a boy and didn't get that feeling of intense suffocating from intimacy. I really loved that kid. But as all things must, it came to an end when I went home to Dick and Gayle's at the end of summer and all I had left of him was a baseball hat that he had sprayed with Brut to remember him by.

That wasn't the end of my promiscuity because as I came to discover I was still afraid of boys and men. I don't think that it was the fear of sex but the fear of being abandoned that caused me to break up all of my boyfriends within 48 hours. The sad thing is that I still have the same pattern. The most I can give to most relationships is a night in bed. The men I have been with for longer were out of necessity, except for the one time I fell in love in Santa Rosa.

I could write forever but Cade has homework and it's time to get things done around the house. Thanks for reading, this is the first time I have felt excited about something in awhile and I think it is helping me a lot to get this stuff out.