The Chronicles of Australia Part One

Pre-FrontalExplanationland

As you can see, I haven't uploaded in any blogs ages. that doesn't mean I haven't been writing, I just haven't been uploading. I'm not going to be around much longer and I'd like to tell my story even if it's not in order and even if not everyone likes it.

I've not even uploaded since D left Canada for Australia.

So I'll start there.

This is Part 1 of 3 parts.

These are The Chronicles of Australia


Preface: With all due respect, I am going to say that calling Soph in this context is not intending to disrespect her, her female gender as a trans woman, or any non-binary people, but I was with a male person named Daniel. I've come close to having girlfriends from time to time but never have, I'm simply not attracted to women sexually. So when I talk about Daniel, I'm talking about the person I loved, the person dated and was engaged to. Daniel would never do the things Sophia did, and if they were the same person, we would have worked it out and I would be married to Sophia. But that’s not what she wanted when she moved into Daniels body. From my perspective, in many ways they are two different people.

I miss Daniel and I grieve for him. It's a different kind of grief than I had when John died- in some ways it's harder and more confusing because I know the kind, sensitive, empathetic and loving person is still there somehow.

Please don't conflate what I am doing here as "dead naming". It is how I've needed to cope with what happened. I am and will always be an ALLY, even if others won't be an ally towards me.

One more thing: this is highly abridged, and it is my perspective. Clearly Soph has things that she remembers that might be different. She is of course entitled to her opinions and what see does with her own history.

I wish her well in the future.

Albatross

As some of you know, Daniel came out as trans and is now Sophia, which shouldn't have been a problem, but when she became Sophia she decided that she couldn't date anyone but another trans woman so once again I came to a point in my life that my existence as a person was a problem. This is what happened from my perspective as it happened.


It took me 6 years of knowing her and her convincing me she loved me and would never leave me to have me consider coming to Australia.

I asked her many times is there was ANY reason why I shouldn't come here and was clear that it was a serious question because I'd have to sell my house, re-home Pteri, sell everything I could, donate the rest and I would need him to fill in the places where I needed help and was unable to manage things for myself- huge Swiss cheese holes in my life from my learning disabilities, from being neglected and not knowing how to manage things that most people my age seemed to be able to figure out, and help with thing I just couldn't manage any more because of my spinal injuries. I asked the question time and time again in different wording and at least three times in obvious clear, concise words:

"Is there ANY reason at all that you can think if that I should not move to Australia to get married to you?"

"No, I want you to come here, I love you, we will get you help here, my family will also help, we'll get you better, I love you". I felt insecure but I trusted him and that he was being honest. I loved and trusted him like I'd trusted no one before in my life- intelligent, seemed stable, supportive in ways that I've never seen before, he loved my jokes, he were that kind of couple where we could finish each others sentences and know what the other was thinking. Daniel had never experienced that before and was amazed by it

The house didn't sell as fast as we would have linked, in fact it didn't sell at all. I don't know if what's-her-face wanted a signature in blood but no matter how many times I asked she never listed the fucking thing. I was stuck. I couldn't go home because I'd taken alone against the sale of the house to GET there.

Blue-ringed octopus

It wasn't even 6 months before Daniel started to morph. He became more and more irritable (a tiny studio is way too small for two introverts and Daniel had never lived with anyone except his own family- he didn't understand that other families had different rules, values, and so on and so he conflated some of the ... lets use the word "unique" things about his family with "being Australian".

Once Daniels mom realised I wasn't a walking talking baby oven, the passive aggression started and I didn't want to be a pain and I was really shocked at how dependant Daniel still was on his mommy at his age. He was not like this in Canada, but back under the gravitational influence of his mom, the sun, he was malleable putty in her hands and she could manipulate him with a glance or with the cadence in her voice.

The hostility started to leech into the apartment, Daniel would get furious if I made "too much noise". The result too much noise would be caused by the following but not limited to 20 to 45 minutes of haranguing about:
- vigorous typing or clicking the mouse "too much"
- plastic wrap of food packaging crackling
- metal spook clinking the side of a cereal bowl or mug.





Cassowary

He stayed up all night on the computer (I now realise it was spending Second Life with someone new - I did ask if he was cheating and he said "no" but I maybe could have been more specific and said that I meant online sex). Because of this, he wouldn't go to bed till 7 or 8 am and the apartment had to be silent and dark till about 2-4pm or even later when he decided to get up.

He became cruel, didn't help with the housework, blamed everything on me, and kept drawing lines in the sand creating hostility when we should have been working together to be a stronger couple. I was fucking terrified. I didn't understand what was going on.

He would want to "talk" about what was going on and so did I, but he had rules: he got to talk, I had to stay silent, not "interrupt" and not get to say anything. If I did dare say anything, he "would have to start at the beginning again" because it was a fucking lecture he'd prepared or something. That wasn’t talking, it was a critical laundry list of abuse. It was Chinese Water Torture with really insulting patronising insults. It would go on and on and on and in any other kind of home a person would be able to go out to another room. All I could do was put n my noise reducing headphones and try and tone him out.

A couple of times he ripped them off my head and it would bend my ear painfully because of my neuropathy in my face nerves. Once he grabbed my laptop and posed like he was going to throw it out the window of our apartment on the third floor down to the asphalt in the back alley. I was terrified: My art, my photos, my contacts, my writing, my medical files- he was about to destroy all of everything. Of course later he downplayed it and said he would never do such a thing, that he was "kidding" and I should have known he would never do that. But there were other things of mine that he HAD broken, and his point of getting my attention wouldn’t have been effective if I didn't honestly believe he was going to do that. Later, after he'd broken something that appeared small and like something that could be easily replaced (it wasn't), he admitted that he gets feelings of rage and will just sash the first thing that he sees regardless of whose it is. That is a sign of a very dangerous person, who knows what happens to a partner of someone that loses their shit that much. That is how partners get killed.

One day the phone rang at 12:50 pm in the afternoon. It was a wrong number. Daniel was annoyed that the phone woke him up but he didn't say anything. The phone rang again, it was the same person making the same error again. I said it no problem and I went back to the futon and back to my cereal. Apparently I was intentionally and enthusiastically clinking and clanking the spoon on the bowl like the drummer from Hüsker Dü a million zillion times super loud just to annoy him because he started tearing into me verbally about making all this noise when he needed so badly to sleep. We got into this things about why doesn’t he just go to bed at a normal time, blah blah blah. He got into comparing me to his mom (a common topic) and I said I'm not, never will be, and am not interested in becoming anything like his mom, nothing wrong with wanting to be my own person and he needed to grow up and untie the apron strings or something along that line. He totally lost his shit and leapt out of bed and grabbed my neck and started choke-holding me from behind and shaking me by the neck and milk and cereal was going everywhere and dribbling on my laptop keyboard and I was trying to hold everything steady and going "Stop! What are you doing! Stop it now!" and his clock alarm thankfully went off and he snapped out of it. It was set for 1 pm. All that for 10 fucking minutes of extra sleep. I was starting to wonder where I could go if things got Dan S. Level of psycho-danger.

Drop Bear

16 months was too long to stay in a studio apartment with someone who was getting more and more hostile and abusive in stages. He was becoming mentally and emotionally more and more childish, he was saying "this is your mess not mine" - like when I lived with others, the person who prepared dinner that would be their job, and the other would do the clean up. Not with young little Danny Boy. He NEVER cleaned the toilet "he didn't know how". In fact "he didn't know how" to do a bunch of things. It was clear that his mom was coming up the 3 hour each way drive and and doing things like cleaning and defrosting the fridge and cleaning the toilet and all kinds of things. He didn't know you had to wash the mop and broom and cleaning things periodically. He didn't like that the dish towels were getting used looking with age, so I bought my own that I could do whatever with. The he started to get mad because too may extra things were coming in the apartment and I was "a hoarder" because I'd keep and reuse reusable containers rather than making landfill fodder. I really tried to encourage ecologically friendly cleaning- not wasting paper towels when it was necessary, etc and he thought it was stupid. When I'd made dinner so it was "my mess to clean up". He wouldn't clean the bathroom because "my shampoo bottles were in the way" because it's so hard to move something for a minute while you wipe it. If I carried his dishes to the sink after dinner then they would be "my mess", it was right fucking out of control.

I said we need couples therapy and we went- it was awful because as soon as Daniel started talking about how much he adores his mommy, the therapist got moo eyed and it was stupid. She said Daniel needed to find other outlets for his temper and that breaking my things and threatening to smash my laptop was inappropriate (enter "I was just kissing" mode) and that I did need a place to have a desk and draw and not have to always eat balancing on my knee as soon as possible. He took that to mean "after the move". He warped anything people said to suit himself. She was right, though. Daniel definitely needed some physical activity to take up all that pent up aggravation. He'd continuously blame me for his feelings and had no self control over his emotions and they were always someone else’s fault. I had offered to teach him how to ride a bike for example (there are lots of places around that even rent out tandem bikes, that would be great to teach an adult with, but he was too ashamed to start learning anything where people might see him learning, in his imagination people would be laughing at him and it would be unbearable.

The rudeness and the bulling kept getting worse and I dealt with it the only way a person who has been abused their whole life can: stay quiet, do what they want, try and make them happy. He expected me to pack his suitcases but he didn't SAY that, he just kept putting it off till the last minute (I had been reminding him to pack for over 24 hours then it was 1/2 n hour till he had to leave for the air port and I caved and packed for him as he had tantrums all around me for not being fast enough. I found myself doing ridiculous fucking things like tying his shoelaces for him while he was yelling at me that I wasn’t doing it fast enough.

It was insanity.

Cinni and the bad back

I used to work at the barn and live and breathe horses, starting as a volunteer at 12, I was the quiet kid in the back with the broom that no one noticed. Favorites were played really heavily there, demonstrated by daddies coming in the office, and doubtless money changing hands so these girls would climb up the ladder and I never knew what I was doing wrong. I worked very hard, did everything that was asked, so it baffled me why I didn't get to be the one in the arena assisting the instructor or any of that. But I had been programmed not to make a stir, so I never asked.

The other girls would get their horses "because they got A's" or "because they turned 16" or "because their daddy loved them" or "whatever". And these weren't normal kid horses, these would be 10, 15 thousand dollar Hannovarian show horses. They were mean, too. I'd have the floor swept and it was like they had a sixth sense that the manager or instructor was coming around the corner and the would dump  bunch of shit and straw where I had just swept so I would get scolded and have to stay late cleaning up (which I didn't really mind that bad, the bullying at school and at the stable was really nothing compared to the shit I was dealing with at home).

When I got old enough to drive I would borrow my moms car as long as I would be there to pick her up from work. It was a 10 year old station wagon, obviously way below the princesses' standards, so they would slash the tires of the car.

When I was 19, and moved out of the house, I bought my own horse, Fox. He was a strange sort of chestnut/dun, and more skin and bones than you could imagine. But he had the sweetest personality, and he was affordable. Poor thing was 1/2 way to the packers.

Fox, 2 months after being put back on better quality feed- I don't have a true "before" picture of him.
http://tesseract.ca/images/Pets/Fox_John.jpg

This is Fox one year later:
http://tesseract.ca/images/Pets/FoxJump.jpg (I know I'm a bit behind that jump but I don't have any other pictures)

So it went on kind of like that. John (the guy in the photo) committed suicide, that was a shock for everyone, so I moved back in with my parents (which was awful), And I had Fox for 4 years before he was diagnosed with Navicular Sundrome (a painful osteoperosis type degeneration of the navicular bones inside the hoof) and we managed the pain on that for about 4 1/2 years before he was so depressed that it felt like the balance of the quality/quantity of life had tilted, and I put sweet Fox down. I still have flashbacks.

Then I had a sweet little Appendix QH for a short time but he got a bad colic with a twisted gut and he was put down on the operating table.

I trained a couple horses in here, I especially like training horses to jump and for trails, we do it like a game so they really like it. :)

Then I got Cinni, a PMU mutt warmblood, another rescue. I liked Cinni. He liked me. He HATED his ex owner, she would strap him all up tight with side reins and whatever and chase him around the arena with a whip, she called that "liberty training". Cinni called it "I hate you and your lunge whip" and made it very clear one day by jumping out of the sand ring with 6 1/2 feet fencing with his head strapped to his chest. I thought this would be a pretty fun horse to train.


 but in 2002
*Trigger warning: sexual assault/rape and the fallout*
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This guy I was talking to a few month earlier had asked if I'd wanted to go out with him/be his girlfriend/whatever. I told him that I was still coming down off a bad abusive relationship and I wasn't really wanting to see anyone at the moment. I thought he was ok with that. At least, at the time, he sounded ok with that.

I'll spare you most of the grizzly details, but if you want that part of the story it's blogged here http://sparklegnu.blogspot.ca/2012/03/what-it-was-really-like.html

So I was raped and my back (lumbar vertibrae 4&5) were torqued so badly as he was manhandling me (I was drugged with GHB, and contrary to popular belief, you are NOT unconscious, but you are unable to control your movements! Like a puppet with the strings broken, cause I was in 3rd Person Perspective too, staring from the ceiling!)

I managed to get out, the doctor said I was lucky to get out alive (although on hindsight I often wish I didn't survive that night).

The back pain came on gradually, slowly and stealthily. Rather than becoming softer and easier to ride, Cinni would get very heavy on the forehand (horsie term that simplified means he was pulling really hard on the reins) and would get quite difficult to ride. I was running low in funds, and my friend convinced me to move him to a horse farm just south of the city so we could ride together.

But my back kept getting worse and worse and I started to lose my nerve when Cinni would steamroll through the bit, he would especially have anxiety attacks when the head "trainer" was riding, which meant a lot of blood and spit and eye rolling and whip cracking and it created anxiety in both of us, I think we were both sensitive to watching these horses being beaten- I mean "trained".

Then one day I got a phone call after getting home from the doctors, that I had to get to the stable right away, that Cinni was very sick and "it didn't look good". I phoned around and got a vet, and met him out there. I didn't even recognise him, he was such a mess. Haggard and covered head to toe with shavings, they had let him lie down and roll (a death sentence to a colicing horse).

I couldn't fucking believe it.
http://tesseract.ca/Pain/Grief.jpg

So... I couldn't afford to replace him, and I had nowhere to ride. Inquired about some leases, one weird place was trying to stick so many add-ons to a 1/2 lease it would have been more expensive than owning outright. There are some weird people out there. And just hopping on any old horse and going dor a ride is nothing compared to riding your own horse that you have deep love and companionship with.


 Then my pain dr retired and I got assigned to an absolute idiot for a replacement and the medicine I was given made me balloon up like a walrus and I started having pain induced seizures. So I can't get to the stable at all anyway.

The Cutest Thing Ever (Fox and the Coyote Pups)

The cutest thing I ever saw was I was riding my quarter horse, Fox, into the ravine (in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) and his head went up and he nickered. I thought, oh someone else must be train riding nearby and he senses one of his horse buddies...

We went around the bend and there was a coyote! I looped my hands in Fox's mane but he wasn't acting scared so I just sat still and let it play itself out. Rather than scared though he looked even happy to see her. She approached and I was really surprised but stayed as still as I could. She looked at me and Fox put his nose down and they sniffed noses and I think my jaw was going to fall on the ground, but then she went into the bushes and out came 3 coyote puppies! The cutest ever!

They all were so cute and bouncy and he smelled their noses too and bounced around his front hooves and I couldn't believe my eyes, and then as soon as they appeared a few seconds later they were gone and the mom went back into the undergrowth too.

It was so awesome and I was so flattered and such a privledge that the animals allowed me to be included in that episode, most animals would not let a human be involved in something like that.

I figured they must know each other as the mom would probably go down to the paddocks to get mice and ground squirrels.

I can't Control you

Once, in the middle of a particularly violent episode of my abusers' (this was the time he slammed me against the wall with his hand on my neck and my esophagus was crushed, I thought my eyes were going to pop out of my head and my jaw slammed shut so hard that I cracked a tooth) he sort of seemed to become lucid just for a moment and realized what he had been doing. He went over to the sofa and crumpled up on it, sobbing. The empathetic caretaker in me immediately rushed to attention and I slowly walked over to this crumpled pathetic buy crying for his mommy.

I was a bit baffled.

"What is the matter?" I said, stroking his hair.

"No matter what I do, it doesn't work", he said

"What do you mean?"

"I can't control you"

That kind of... it was like a slap- not a violent kind, but the kind they give you to snap out of it.

"Why on Earth would you want to do that?"

Then it hit me, here I was comforting and consoling the same person who minutes ago had tried to kill me, just because he had a fucked up imagination. My hand snapped back like it had touched a hot burner, and I hurried out of the room.

God Loves You

(Just wrote this, still needs some culling and spit n polish, but let's see how it goes over.Migraine thoughts.
A little bit tweaked and some added with Bear's suggestion)

I wonder what it’s like to be in the frame of mind
To unironically believe that
The creator of the whole Universe-
(Of space and time
Who set the speed of light at about       
700 million miles per hour
And Absolute Zero at -273 Celsius.

The One Who created Gravity,
Universal attraction, and Magnetism;

That created the hugest stars
we have given names to like W26 and
Rigel and Betelgeuse and VY Canis Majoris;

The creator of the minuscule:
Of the cell, the mitochondria
DNA
The molecule
The atom
Protons, Electrons, and Neutrons.
And gravitons?
The Higgs-Boson and Bucky balls,
And strings…..;

The creator of Time and
The dot, line, cube, and tesseract
5-cube hypercube with 32 vertices, 80 edges, 80 square faces,
40 cubic cells, and 10 tesseract 4-faces.
And so on in spacial dimensions
And Time Dimensions with the Past, Present, and Future
Possibilities are the second dimension of time.
What is the third? Only God knows.

That guided millions generations of
millions of species of organisms
for 550 million years
From unmoving filter feeders
To The Precambrian Reign:

The Dawn of Dance, of deliberate movement in the water
The Era of Aquatic Arthropods,
Such as Alpha Predator Anomalocaris.
Sexes arrived so that the DNA could recombine
and make individual individuals
To the time when a spinal cord was developed,
The birth of the vertebrates:
Then distinct head, a jaw, then limbs,
And the Tiktaalak dragged itself up onto the dry land.
It developed the ability to breathe air
And it laid eggs that had a casing that made then able to be laid
away from the uterine water
Then they started developing the young inside the bodies of the females
And scales became thin and hollow and good for insulation and turned to hair
We became endothermic
And about 200,000 years ago,
The human race came along
And some we became able to
Communicate ideas through speech
And writing came along, first animals painted on cave walls

And the outlines of women’s hands,
And then the abstract development of the written word:
“letters” pressed into clay.
We questioned our mortality,
And we hypothesized about a god.

This God did not prevent rape or war
Child molestation or cancer
Complex diseases of the mind, body, spirit and soul.
(If there even is such a thing as a spirit or soul.)

God created those things.

God created Trauma.

God created PTSD.
We imagined this god as petty and vindictive
In fear of mortality we imagined
Heaven and Hell andA megalomaniac that can only be satiated
With the sacrifice of its most beautiful and cosmically rare of all creations:
Complex life forms.

How very ironic.

That this God will look to our little galaxy,

To One galaxy out of billions, “The Milky Way”

With our little yellow star, 2/3rds of the
Way out from a super massive black hole
Near astronomical feature known to us as Sagittarius A.
The Milky Way is 100 Thousand light years across

On the spiral arm known to us as
The Orion–Cygnus Arm a thousand light years long
It takes roughly 350 million years
For our little sun to take one rotation
Around the black hole; 2/3rds of
The life span of the time everything we know of
has ever been alive.

When we were at this place on the rotation of the galaxy lat time

It was the Precambrian explosion.
2,000 rotations ago of the third planet from “The Sun”,
It is said, a sacrifice was made of the only son of this God,
Who was himself.
Two thousand years is not even a drop in the ocean of existence
For some reason this species think it is more special than the others,
More Intelligent.
But if we really were, why are we forcing other creatures to learn our language
Rather than learning theirs?

Billions and billions and billions.)

So I wonder what it’s like to be in the frame of mind
To unironically believe that The Creator of all this
Loves you.


Not to stop the wars, the hatred and the racism
Not to help the tiny Mission off the downtown core
Who gave soup and blankets to the needy
From burning to the ground in the autumn air

Not to stop cancer or AIDS or Rheumatoid Arthritis or suicide
Or any number of painful incurable condition to all
The people and everything that relies on pain to keep them alive:
Anything with a nervous system and a brain it can go tragically wrong

Life is so precious

and it is squandered

And we are not holding hands for love and comfort to drive

This tiny planet to a positive place
So very Beautiful yet so Terrible

that we can barely dare to look

Instead we gnash our teeth and shout
“THIS IS OFFENSIVE!”

As the pale blue dot plummets through
Space and Time
But then again is all that is a bit harder to swallow
than vegetarian carnivores in a garden
with a talking snake and magic fruit
that gives knowledge to anything that consumes it.
You wouldn’t want to do that now, would you?
You wouldn’t want to KNOW;

That you unironically believe that

his god loves you and will put all of this aside so that

your baseball team will win.

 "God Loves You" R1
n. pearson Oct 20 2013<photo id="1" />

The Mortar: How This all Fits Together 1

I know how you feel, I've been in chronic pain since 1986. I've fought it for normalcy, to try and keep a job (but I've always been discriminated against because of the number of times I've had to go to hospital, my bosses called me "unreliable" because of my trips to the ER), and trying to have a normal social life going out to the bar and so on.

Sorry in advance for the novel, I just found it really cathartic to write again, and I wanted to get across the idea that I understand about the drinking but I didn't feel I could talk about it without taking about exactly where I was coming from. In places here and there are links to my blog, it is just links to deeper discussion of my trauma- more details of the story, as it were. Some people have really wanted my to write an autobiography, mostly fans of my mom, bleah. Haha. I'm sure if they saw the side of my mom that I have been exposed to, they might not worship her so much.

I've been in chronic pain since I was 17, so my whole adult life. I never had supportive parents, home life was so bad I moved out as soon as I could, and soon after my parents moved to the other side of the continent, and having no extended family, I was literally alone as a young adult, and got used a LOT because I just didn't know how things worked, and I didn't have anyone batting for me in my corner (mentoring or anything). I literally went through the "school of hard knocks".
 
I never felt love from my parents, there was blatant favouritism towards my younger brother, and it was made very clear that they hadn't wanted a girl. What happened was beyond sibling rivalry, it was constant clear harassment that just kept getting worse as the years went on (as an adult my brother didn't even bother to hide his pathological hatred of women and would brag about beating his fiancée in a loud voice in restaurants, for some reason my parents never did anything about his behaviour (which is why it led to that) and he never had to have any responsibility or accountability for his actions, that included never even having to apologise for anything he did such as intentionally destroying my things or killing my pets- although it is relevant, it is another story altogether.

My mom would always call me ugly, and would tell me that my life choices were limited to being a nurse or a housewife. Nothing I did was good enough for her. and she wielded my need to be approved of and loved like a club, whenever I would get on my feet in life, she would pull the rug out from beneath me and I would be scrambling to pick up the pieces. From early on, I accepted the fact that I was ugly- why else would she say such a thing? And that I was useless and unwanted, and the lowest of the low, that everyone had rights to trample me, and that maybe, just maybe, if I was nice to everyone, and honest, maybe someday someone would see me and believe me and be nice to me.

My dad was violent, mentally ill of some kind, although he was never formally diagnosed. My parents divorced when I was about four, I guess it was, even though my mom will never talk about it, I can't even get a straight answer about my own life from her. My dad never made it a secret that he didn't want a girl. After the divorce, he would call once every two weeks and talk to me for five minutes and my brother for twenty. I would have terrible panic attacks from this, I didn't know why my dad didn't love me. When I had an anxiety attack, I'd get punished for "hitting the wall", as it was called. (The walls were not actually hit, it was a euphemism for "acting out", but I wasn't having a tantrum, I was having a panic attack.) One of my mom's favourite means of passive aggressiveness was to use strange euphemisms that no one understood but herself and punish for them.

A strange rule she made was "if you tell the truth, you won't be punished", if you lie, you will both be punished". I don't even want to guess how she thought this would work, but this sparked my brother's sadism at a very young age. He would do stuff just to see me get punished unjustly, and he was very blatant about it. Since my brother was younger than me, he wouldn't get hit as hard as me- often I would have red marks and sometimes blisters from the hole in the wooden spoon. It didn't matter if I tried to talk to her like an adult and really explain that I didn't do the thing I was being punished for (usually I didn't even know what it was about, it was simply, "You know what you did". I stopped caring, and grounding didn't work on me, I would just draw or read or sew in my bunk. Once she was really mad about whatever it was that set her off, and she hit me in the arm and the handle of the wooden spoon broke on my arm. The look on her face was priceless. She didn't hit with an object for a long time after that.

She married my step dad when I was 10, he didn't adopt me or my brother, and in the early 80's it was unusual and confusing to have a different last name than your parents. In my young mind, I thought that we didn't get Bob's last name because of something to do with my dad, but when I was about 40 he told me that it was just because he didn't want me, and so he didn't adopt me. For him it was simple as that, he didn't really think of how destructive the repercussions of that sort of thing would be to a kid. Whenever I had an idea, he would day "just keep thinking, Nicky, that is what you're good at". It was his way of telling me I'm stupid, and that my idea was dumb and useless.

So, I was ugly and stupid and unwanted. "Just a girl," which meant I was around the level of garbage- a nuisance, best to stay out of everyone's way best I could. These were the adjectives I grew up with, a fact that I accepted about myself.

When I was 12, we moved from the States up to Canada, and I would see my dad once a year. When I was 14 he married my step mom and that year he started getting strange- I soon learned I had to lock the door when I was changing, and weird things would happen. He would sometimes quickly grab my breast and then pull away, and a few times when I was kissing him on the cheek as I arrived or left visiting him he would turn his head quickly and stick his tongue in my mouth.

I went to the school counsellor about this, and she said, "you must tell your parents, they will do something". So after school I told my mom, and she said that I have to make the choice whether I ever see my dad again. That was too hard and confusing for a fourteen year old to make. (I also told the same counsellor about the problem with my brother's sadistic behaviours, and same thing, "talk to your parents about it, they will know what to do". Mom was "too busy" and Bob said "we're not the kind of family that talks about things". I didn't know what to do.

During my teens, my mom was becoming quite a bad workaholic, and I really needed to talk to her, but she was always "too busy". There was a weird parallel  with my life though, for example, when I was going through puberty, she co-authored a book about what girls my age were thinking and feeling during their first period. She was too busy with the book to be bothered with me though, and when I got  my first period, she just told me to "read the box and follow the instructions, it's under the bathroom sink". It was like there were two of her- the version of her being a loving and caring and responsive mother (the version she let people see) and the real her.

I was really horse crazy, and the best thing when we moved to Canada was there was a riding stable within bike riding distance from home and school. The summer I was 12, I started to volunteer there- it started off badly though. I was so excited and wanting to impress the people in the office with my enthusiasm and knowledge, when we got in the office and I was brushed aside by my parents, I had an anxiety attack. That made a bad first impression on the barn manager, and even though I didn't know it or remember it until it was mentioned almost two decades later, it affected how I was treated there.

School was no better. Mom made me wear her hand-me down clothes, and I would get chastised and hounded for it. I had to get braces, and wear one of those ungodly headsets.  would get pushed into the lockers in the hallway, and I had some good foresight about what kind of white hot pain I would experience later.
 

Two years later, when I was 14 I was able to get paid by the stable and I took on the job as teacher's assistant. All the TA's kept one eye on the office door- one by one someone's dad would try and sneak into the office and have a "secret" meeting with Jean, the manager and owner of the lesson horses and many of the show horses. We all knew what the meeting meant. Some time in the near future, because of getting A's, or a birthday, or because she was "Daddy's Girl", a horse van would come up the long driveway and the TA would be upgraded from staff to Horse Owner, often a very nice show horse, too. I waited for my Day.

So there was bullying at home, bullying at school, and now bullying at the stable. Still, the stable was the only place I wanted to be. I had always loved the gentle power and beauty of horses. I believed they just knew if you were a good person, they would accept you.

My mom had all but completely shut me out. She was beginning to become Important, and she had no time for family matters, what she considered a nuscience. My brother become more and more of a terror, and I had no way to cull the behaviour. My parents were just not interested in parenting. My brother knew he could get away with bloody murder, and so he committed it on a regular basis. One time, when I was 16, I was so exasperated with my mom I said "when are you going to talk to me, when you retire?" She said I should make an appointment to see her. I was speechless. I really needed someone, an adult, to listen and to be proactive and to care. My mom liked to put on this show in  front of people that she was living and giving, she really got off on that shit. So I had no one that would listen to me. I started cutting. Mom and Bob saw the cuts, but said nothing. I started considering suicide again.

I made my dedication clear by living and breathing Horse. I got very good at drawing them, I learned everything I could and spent as much time there as I could. I tried to do everything I could to make it so I would deserve it, The years ticked by, and the girls that got their horse became meaner and meaner. I was actively snubbed- some of the girls went to my school, and as I was bullied there by them, I was bullied at the stable. I knew in my heart my day would never come, we weren't wealthy by any means, and my parents had told me flat out that I could never have a horse. But working there, the unconditional acceptance of the horses made everything bearable.

Then, in late summer of 1986, the Impossible Happened. One of my mom's colleagues was going on sabbatical for a year, and I was allowed to have one of her horses and keep her at the stable for a whole six months! She was a palomino Appendix Quarter Horse, a beautiful horse that I had gotten to see when she was four days old. All my years of persistence and work were finally paying off.  I was ecstatic. I had misjudged my parents, they were hearing me after all. I would have somewhere to belong, to be, maybe even the Mean Girls would become my friends.  I was afraid of jinxing it somehow. This was going to be almost as good as owning a horse, and I would be able to ride at any time I wanted, even on the beautiful wooded trails that the river nestled in. I don't know how I slept at all coming up to The Big Event.

The Best Day Ever
http://sparklegnu.blogspot.ca/2012/03/best-day-ever.html

So in the accident my nose was crushed and my cheekbones were caved in and my eye sockets fractured clear to the back of my eyes. I didn't know at the time though that I'd lost her, I felt that I was running The Gauntlet, that if I stayed committed to my riding that there would be no way I wouldn't get a horse now. I was in the hospital for six weeks and missed half a semester of graduating year of high school. My mom would not let me repeat the grade, even though it was an acceptable thing to do. While I was in the hospital, Tara's owner sold her to someone in another city.  I lost my dream horse, I lost my physical identity, but I kept my spirits up, I was extremely tough and I could handle this. I had no idea about the nightmare that lay in my future.

As the bones knit, I would have incidences of pain. Pure, exquisite, white hot pain, a bright white star of pain in my cheekbones. I would hallucinate, and vomit so that I couldn't hold down my meds. I had to go to the hospital regularly for pain control shots.

The first few times my mom or Bob would accompany me, then sometimes it would be one of my mom's colleagues from work. I thought they were doing it because they liked me. I thought them being called "Aunt _____" was mutually agreed upon, and that they were like a surrogate aunt because I didn't have any extended family. I thought they cared. "Aunt Wendy" came with me for a breakthrough pain shot. Depression often accompanied the pain. "It should be my mom at the ER with me, I wish she cared." Wendy didn't make any eye contact, and she looked really uncomfortable or something. Something was off. "She's paying  you, isn't she". Wendy started at the floor. There was an uncomfortable silence and the air become as thick as water. I never saw her after that day.

I met John. He was like no one I'd ever met. I had never been in love before, and when you are that young and in love, that person is your whole world. We were together just short of three years, when I learned he was cheating on me. My whole world shattered, I was broken.  He asked me to marry him.

About six weeks after asking me to marry him, John committed suicide.

I had a nervous breakdown. I had to move back in with my parents, which was awful. Bob became extremely abusive about my grieving.

Emotion is a Pejorative
http://sparklegnu.blogspot.ca/2012/04/emotion-is-pejoritive.html

I took two years of Psych, trying to understand it. At the end of the 2 year program, I met a guy who I thought was very sweet even though I thought he was a bit pushy in the relationship. I was living in a really crappy area of town, the kind of place that the police would ignore if you called them about noise complaints and such.

I stared going to bars more, I needed the noise, I needed to dance, and I needed to numb myself with drink. I made friends with local musicians, and would go to as many shows as I could.

One night the neighbours were having an exceptionally loud party, there was angry/afraid shouting in a woman's voice and smashing sounds against our shared wall. The next morning they brought out one of the guys who lived there in a body bag- apparently they had been drinking a lot and doing coke and the women were some prostitutes they had hired and there was an overdose. I'd had enough. So I agreed to move in with my boyfriend.

It started out really nice, but soon enough he became extremely possessive and gradually became abusive. He would have temper tantrums over the slightest thing, often something of his own imagination. He would accuse me of flirting with or sleeping with just about anyone he could list, it was absolutely mind boggling.

He would scream my name and if I wasn't prepared to "go upstairs" with him (which was pretty horrible, he would say terrible things to me and about my body), he would scream in my face and choke me and shake me...

Noise Through The Walls (DS1)
http://sparklegnu.blogspot.ca/2012/04/noise-through-walls-ds1.html

I'm The Best You're Ever Going to Get (DS2)
http://sparklegnu.blogspot.ca/2012/04/im-best-youre-ever-going-to-get-ds2.html

Following the abuse from Dan, I felt so beaten by the world, so deflated. I turned to the familiar- some of my step dad's work colleagues, they let me move in with them Janet and Gord. That is another whole nightmare on it's own. They were controlling and crazy. I had nowhere else to go.

Because of my pain and injuries and the traumas I'd been through, Social Services decided to help me, and they got involved, saying that I was in a really rare case where I was in an abuse situation with my landlords. Social Services helped me get an apartment (with a bathtub!) and I tried to put the pieces back together of my shattered life.

Social Services had me take a course about the dynamics of abuse, where I learned about boundaries and active listening and how to recognise an abusive relationship. This is when I learned that I had been abused my whole life- that the norm for me was abuse, and being the unwilling and unwitting reciprocant of being used and abused. I am a helper, a people pleaser, and abusive types seek people like me out and like a vampire, bleed us dry until there is nothing left but dust.

 I tried going back to school, majoring in Anthropology, but my neck was extremely sore and I couldn't focus.

After a four year wait, it was now 2001, I got into a pain clinic. A mere 15 years since my first persistently painful injury and six since my second. I didn't even know there were pain clinics.

The pain clinic said they couldn't do anything for my facial pain, but they might be able to help my neck- the physiotherapist coined it "multiple whiplash syndrome". I had been choked and strangled so badly by Dan that I has entrapped nerves in my neck, the origin of the extremely bad neck pain and the numbness and tingling in my hands. This is when I learned that Dan had actually done some permanent damage. I discussed trying to press charges again with the pain clinic psychologist. He said that I didn't have a very good chance because of the time that had passed. Great. So the waiting list to get into a clinic to give me a diagnosis exceeded the Statute of Limitations. That's some great care for your citizens, Canada.

I didn't know how to cope with that information, so I coped the only way I knew how: I went to the bar to talk it over with people I knew. That was a Tuesday night. A night that I struggle to remember, and struggle to forget.

What It Was Really Like
http://sparklegnu.blogspot.ca/2012/03/what-it-was-really-like.html

I didn't recover well from the rape. A body can only take so much, I guess. A mind can only take so much. Stress and bad memories blossomed into PTSD and the pain became worse, everywhere: chronic pain became Multiple Trauma Intractable Complex Chronic Pain Syndrome. I developed stress disorders like Fibromyalgia and ulcers and osteoarthritis. I didn't know who I could trust, the world seemed to be saying simultaneously "trust no one".

I completely shut down.

The last glimmer of god left my eyes- if god is forgiving and lets rapists into heaven then I want no part of it.

An Open Letter to Experts on Chronic Pain who Don’t Have Chronic Pain

Hi there, and thank you for sharing your expertise on chronic pain with me. Oh thank you, you look just fine too. Oh, you think that means I’m not suffering from pain? Well they do call it an “invisible illness” for a reason- yes; it was from that accident many years ago, the bones calloused around a major nerve causing an entrapment. You don’t believe me? You think I must be a malingerer? You’ve seen my x-rays and CT scans and are an expert at reading them, then I suppose.

Oh, you haven’? How silly of me, of course you haven’t!  I had no idea that your street knowledge and guess work was so astute! What was that, you say? Nothing is better than your favorite brand name over the counter medication? That will work? Well, I’m glad it works for you but I’m afraid that my doctor and I both agree that that medication is not strong enough for my pain and if I were to take enough of it to work I would be doing some serious damage to my stomach or liver. They do make stronger medication just for people with painful conditions like mine.

What was that? You think it’s an excuse to take strong pain meds? You think I am a needle craving back alley lurking junkie just shopping for meds, do you? Some kind of slobbering guttersnipe? Thank you for your kind thoughts, but I believe that medicinal information is between me and my doctor. I realize that you think that my doctor must be some uncouth pill pusher, perhaps from the very same back alley you imagine me slathering around in for my next fix.

Oh, I get it; you just don’t think I am trying hard enough to get better. I see what you mean. You think my pony tail is too tight or my hair is too heavy and causing these headaches? You think my breasts are too large and causing these backaches? That I should change my weight? Good Heavens! While I am flattered that you feel that my bosom is ample and my hair long and lovely, I assure you it is not the cause of the headaches, and my doctor hasn’t associated my backaches with my cup size. The weight is an unfortunate side effect of my medication and the unstoppable pain. Some people gain weight, others lose it uncontrollably. Oh, you think I should exercise more? I do what I can, but, yeah the back pain. My doctor said I better lay off that for a while. Yeah, I remember when I was toned and fit too, changing like this definitely wasn’t a conscientious decision, it’s what happens when you are in pain always. Toned and fit, those were the days.

Oh, the pain? Ha! Of course it is all in my head, that is where the pain receptors for the brain resides, you silly goose. And yes my headaches do reside in my head. Do correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m quite sure that is why they are called head-aches.

Tell, me, oh wise one (how I wish I shared your expertise on my condition), why you think it is perfectly fine for someone like you to come along and question my copious amounts of pain whilst never wondering about the pain of a cancer patient. Is it that you believe that cancer is the only thing that can cause serious pain? While I have the utmost sympathy for people that suffer from cancer, I don’t want to demean or belittle those who have serious pain and no cancer. You say I should just get over it? You think my pain is psychosomatic or somatoform in nature? I assure you it is not, and I assure you if I kept my medical records in my pocket I would be happy to share it with you, if it were your business of course. Which it isn’t.  And  unfortunately for you and my pocket, they are a little bit bigger than my grandmother’s photo album and I’m afraid I keep them safely stashed at the doctor’s office.

“Stash” Ha-ha, you don’t miss a thing do you. Yes I have tried Medicinal Marijuana. Yes, it does work for some people, but not for everyone. Strange to have to rely on a drug that helps so many that you can get arrested for. Medicinal marijuana comes in pill form, sprays, as well as the herb, but it doesn’t work for everyone.  Everyone is an individual, you see. Oh really? I have the exact condition as your co-worker’s neighbor’s aunt’s best friend, did I get that right?  They know of an herbal extract that will have me cured within two weeks? I assure you that would be nothing short of a miracle; I will definitely get right on that. I wonder if it makes your brain wonderful and smooth too, like yours appears to be.

Oh you think it must be lovely having all this time off to myself to do with what I wish, do you? Yes, having to make last minute cancellations on appointments and visits with my friends is certainly enjoyable, how I love to spend the day in the dark in bed with pain signals barraging my brain like an army attacking my nervous system, dead as a dodo, aside from the interruptions of retching my guts out. Yes, nerves, I see you caught that too, what a sharp one you are! It is true that the side-effects of constant chronic pain is to not only rattle the sensations but to rattle the nerves too and anxiety and depression are common acquaintances of chronic pain. It does put stress on the coping skills, you’re right. I’m sorry that my change in personality has disappointed you. I don’t enjoy being a nervous wreck either.

But you were talking about the indefinite vacation! It’s great being unable to hold down a job, having no money, not even enough to pay for medical procedures that might make one better. I’d love to be able to work, to have work friends and be able to afford to go to dinners and save up for vacations. In fact I’d be happy without all those things if I could just live a life of normal levels of pain, when things are working as they should and I’m not getting pain for no reason.

Oh the pain clinic you say? That pain clinic? Well sure I’d love to go there, looks like a proper spa it does. But my disability pension does not cover for such luxuries as that. Besides, my doctor said they are really like boot camps for people with newer injuries and their method would be not only ineffective but dangerous as well.

Oh but we mustn’t get your knickers in a stitch, life goes on. Oh, what, so I won’t take any of your suggestions and let you control my life (which I happen to know more about my condition than your 5 minutes of ideas) so you are saying that I like being like this, and my pain isn’t real and I am simply doing this for attention? Well I hope you have a good day then, and I’m sorry I wasn’t able to make it to your awesome party last week.

-N Pearson 07.2012