This is a small part of me.
It is a strange thing how sometimes only one
child in a family will be mistreated, while the rest are spared.
It makes it difficult if not impossible to talk about things that happened
to me without some of my family members expressing disbelief. After all, they were not
treated that way, they never saw it, how could what I am saying be true?
My childhood, while containing good and bad, was marked by an intense isolation.
For years I felt unloved. I remember having thoughts of suicide at a very young age.
Finally at about age fifteen, I confided in younger sister that I wanted to kill myself.
She began to cry and told me, "If you kill yourself, so will I, because I cant live without you".
That stopped me in my tracks. I felt like such a bastard for telling her that.
I didnt want her to die. I realized the profound effect my death would have on her.
Someone loved me and needed me to stay, so I did.
After many years of emptiness, I began to understand that in order for me to live, I had to
stop going to the KH. Even though I still carried the JW mentality with me, my natural
desire for happiness and survival overcame my fear of leaving and I finally ran away in the latter part of 1994.
When I left KH, I knew nothing about the world.
It always felt like I was an alien visitor from Mars,
observing the curious customs of earthlings. In some ways I still feel this way.
I was disconnected from the world at a very young age.
Perhaps that is something that can
never be repaired.
I got married. My (now-ex) husband abused me very badly.
One of the milder episodes of abuse involved him dragging me into
our bedroom, grabbing a pair of blunt scissors and hacking off a large chunk of my hair.
I wear my hair long now. I will probably never allow anyone to cut my hair into a short style because of this.
It was/is hard for me to tell people everything that happened in my marriage because I
found out very quickly that there were some people that felt no sympathy for a "battered wife".
Some of the responses I got were, "Im your friend, not your therapist" or "Im glad
I was never stupid enough to put myself in a position to be sexually/physically/verbally/emotionally abused".
I began to wonder, was it my stupidity that put me in the position to be violated?
Or was it that I was conditioned from a tender age that a moral woman does not leave
her husband just because he is abusing her?
In any case I am learning not to take insensitive comments like those to heart anymore.
I am beginning to understand that being taught that all my life
that abused women who stayed with their abusive partners were heroes
was a factor in why I found myself staying in an abusive relationship.
I endured his abuse for a little over a year before I was able to summon the courage to leave.
I have tried to just forget the bad things from childhood, the bad things from my first marriage.
Its not working.
My apologies for the length of this post.