The Strange Intimacy of Survival

I’ve kept journals consistently since I was 13 years old; my ongoing healing process consists of regularly rereading them and reflecting. 

One of the most shameful things I find in them — aside from the furiously unfair self hatred I had for every minor imperfection and the self blame I took on for my own abuse — is how much I thought about and grieved those who hurt me most. 

While rereading a journal from a couple years ago, I felt sad to read entry after entry centered on the man who broke into my home and drugged and raped me for several weeks, a man who — before the assault — I’d mistaken for a friend. 

The journal was written two years after the event, and there I was, yapping on about him once again, about what I saw in his psychology, about what I saw in my own, about my understanding of concepts I was experiencing like Stockholm syndrome and anniversary PTSD. 

On one hand, this doesn’t surprise me. This is a part of my trauma response. 

I have autism, and I’m someone who will deeply intellectualize my pain. It’s a desperate and futile trauma coping mechanism. 

As the confused, abused, and neglected daughter of two sociopaths, I always felt that if I could simply understand why people did heinous things to those who were vulnerable and who loved them, perhaps I could survive and forgive the heinous things, thus protect my love for them. 

I’d hoped that understanding it could make it stop hurting as badly as it did and stop my mind from spinning in confusion like it did. 

The clarity came — eventually. 

I had to stop putting all the blame on myself for not being enough to evoke love and start looking at the mental illnesses that create a lack of empathy and lack of love. I also had to identify my own pathology of BPD and stop contributing to my own abuse and suicidal ideation by loving narcissists and engaging in self harm. 

But the pain never went away. 

The flames of anger are no longer a bonfire burning me alive, but there’s still a single flame I can’t extinguish inside me that will singe me if I get too close. 

In the journal, I bemoaned my habit of thinking of and writing about the man who raped me right before I went to bed.

At first, it was no different than any other time: I thought of him every moment of every day for a long, long time after the event. 

For years, I woke up being raped. I was raped throughout my whole work day. And I went to bed being raped. 

The memories of him were like a police siren blaring intrusively through my days. They were a constant annoyance and distraction from everything I tried to do. 

I thought of him so much that in the two years after the attack, I wrote a book of poetry, a memoir, and hundreds of blogs — which received millions of views. 

It kind of disgusts me that I have so much art that revolves around him and so many journals talking about him. He’s not worth all that energy: narcissistic men are a dime a dozen, nothing special.

But that’s also exactly why perpetrators do it. 

They know they’re worthless people. They know they have no love to give, that they’re toxic and hateful. 

So, when you dare to reject their false self or engage in their shared fantasy of their own superiority, they seek revenge. 

They want to be your perfect savior and hero, but if you deny them that by looking at reality or rejecting them, a narcissist will seek relevance by becoming…

…YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE.

Because they know how trauma sits in the psyche and festers. Theirs has been doing so unhealed since childhood.