Archive for the ‘Tough topics’ Category
I’ve been fairly open in this blog about my experiences with abuse and its aftermath. To me, it’s a very matter-of-fact topic; it happened to me, I lived through it, I survived it, and it’s easy for me to think and talk about it because I view it as a factual event from my past.
The end of my abuse, the actual event that caused it all to come to a close, is where my one and only life regret resides, and I’ve come to terms with it as it revolves around the level we will go to protect ourselves and our loved ones.
My ex-stepfather’s name is Aaron. I will refrain for the moment from giving his last name, as my mom is currently embroiled in a court battle with him over my little sister’s college tuition, and I don’t want to jeopardize her education.
I will also point out that this story is quite graphic (and anyone who feels uncomfortable should stop reading immediately), and I am quite aware my mother owns this man’s life insurance policy. I want to make it clear that this is a retelling of an emotional story, and not anything more. Neither I nor anyone else in my family is foolish enough to go near this man again without notifying the police, lawyers, or authorities; we know the rules in this game.
And now, the story.
I don’t believe in regrets.
I don’t believe that changing one poor decision in the grand scheme of our lives
I often say that I have no regrets, but that’s a lie. I’ve got one single regret in my entire life, and it’s a hard story to tell.
I’m going to tell it.
….to be continued….
I am a New Yorker. It’s cause me nothing but grief since I moved to New England, aka “The enemy of anything associated with the Devil Team that is the Yankees,” but in my heart of hearts, no matter how much I like New England, I am a New Yorker through and through. Read the rest of this entry »
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After I wrote my last entry I ended up getting quite a bit of feedback from my friends, and one email in particular stuck out to me.
One of my friends wrote me about how she likes reading my blog because she can relate to a lot of it. In my last entry I talked about my own experience with sexual and physical abuse, and she shared some of her own experiences with me, quickly followed up with, “But I’m not saying my experiences were anywhere near as bad as yours…”
I have come across emails very similar to this enough that it’s become a pattern, and I wanted to share my view on something.
I firmly believe that the worst thing that’s ever happened to me is no worse than the worst thing that’s ever happened to anyone else. We all feel the same emotions, and feel them equally as intensely.
The “worst thing that happened to me” may have been psychologically harder to deal with “the worst thing that happened” to another person, but the emotional scars are the same – it’s just that it’s easier to categorize and put away the death of a grandfather than, in my case, an ex-stepfather forcing horrid sexual things on you, especially in a society like ours where “we don’t talk about THAT.”
It seems like there’s a fight to own the “Victim’s Seat” amongst people who have lived hard-knock lives, and I just leave it to them. If I wrote out my biography and submitted it to the “who’s had the worst life” contest I might get an honorable mention, but then again I grew up in the United States of America with vaccines, trash disposal, and shoes, so I think even with the bad stuff I’ve had it fairly good. Read the rest of this entry »
I get “notes from The Universe” in my inbox each day courtesy of tut.com. Sometimes the notes are fantastic, sometimes they’re stupid, sometimes they’re so far off in left field that I have to wonder what The Universe was drinking when it typed up a particular gem.
Today’s, however, was great; I loved it because it exactly matched my personal ideology (and who doesn’t feel a little more self-important when they hear their opinions spit back at them):
When “bad” things happen to “good” people, Carlene, it’s often because they want to become even better teachers, guides, and helpers to those precious souls who will one day need them to be their rock.
Which kind of means, Carlene, that only good things happen to people….
Having lived through a decade of sexual and physical abuse, having survived the normal cuts to the heart that come from being in relationships that eventually end, having lived life, I have always believed that every bump in the road has turned out to be a positive in the end.
People are often shocked when I’m so nonchalant about being abused; to me, it’s something that’s made me smarter, stronger, and has given me something akin to a sixth sense when it comes to testing situations or new people.
To me, the bad has given me too much in the way of good for me to regret it. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the hardest things to come to terms with when it comes to being abused is that, in the case of the abuser being someone in your family or close to you in your life, there can be positive contributions to your life from the very person who made it hell.
I was abused by my former stepfather from the time I was about four until I was thirteen. His contributions to who I am today are few, but still there: his presence in my life is the reason my little sister is on this planet, and his constant warnings kept me away from drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. He gave me the drive to do something with my life by beating it into my head that I knew how intelligent I was, and gave me structure in between the abuse.
Contrary to popular belief, abuse is not always a 24/7 thing, and that’s exactly why it’s so terrifying. Sometimes, the person abusing you IS a great father, mother, boyfriend or girlfriend much of the time. One day, everything can be normal; the family can be eating dinner together, going to the supermarket, you can be a kid for a day, or two, or ten.
Then, there’s the change, the sudden feeling of your sixth sense – which develops to an exceptional level when you live under the same roof – SCREAMING at you to be careful, because storm clouds are brewing on the horizon. You walk around a corner, and the other side of that person is waiting.
Abuse is scary to confess. I was being hurt by my stepfather, and if it had been my own father or mother I would have had even more of a difficult time seeking help. Confessing can feel like you’re turning your back on your family, forgetting the times that were good, the love they gave you as a parent. It can feel like there’s no light at the end of the tunnel.
One in four of us are hurt by someone at some point in our life, 25% of us, 6 out of 24 kids in any given classroom have been hurt. I think it seems easier to live through abuse than decide to talk; personally, the huge fear of “being found out” kept me silenced for years. If kids in school will pick on someone for wearing the wrong shirt, it’s terrifying to imagine how they’ll react to if they find out you’ve been molested or beaten.
And yet, had I known the numbers, I would have realized that in my high school of 3,000 kids, 750 of them had been or were being abused in some way. That’s way more than the track team or chess club, and sometimes I wish we had managed to find each other and realized we were far from alone, maybe start a support group.
What else I wish I’d known when I was in the darkest depths of despair was how wonderful the people around me would actually be when my “terrible secret” finally came out. My mother and family stood by my side, the few people I told at school were incredibly supportive, and when I finally decided to be open and honest about my experiences I was shocked at the outpouring of love I received from everyone, from young kids to adults.
I call myself an unrelenting optimist not because I walk around like a ray of sunshine. I call myself an unrelenting optimist because living through my darkest times have taught me that in the end, everything will be alright.
There is a lot of love out there. Being abused doesn’t make anyone less wonderful, it gives us a different plot in our life stories. I want to send a letter back in time to my 13-year-old self, thinking the world was over because my terrible secret had been discovered and printed in the newspaper for the world to read.
I would tell her that before the age of 30 she would have learned to stand up for herself, earned a college degree, started a successful business, found wonderful friends, gotten engaged to a magnificent and supportive man, and most importantly learned to turn the fear into a tool to help others. I would tell her to keep an eye out for a little site called Facebook, because she was going to be shocked at the people who would turn out to be friends and fans.
Most of all, I would tell her to find her voice and use it. It’s frightening to acknowledge that you’ve been abused by a person who has also loved you, that a person who raised you and has given you positive qualities could hurt you down to your soul. And that’s why there’s such a silence around the topic, and that’s what I hope will begin to change. Soon.
I have a Twitter account that I keep (I’m RockstarCarlene), and one of the people I follow is Demi Lovato (ddlovato). This girl is a diamond in the rough, a rising star, Barbara Streisand in Funny Girl. I love watching her perform, and that means that as a 26-year-old I regularly tune in to the Disney Channel and download songs from Camp Rock onto my iTunes. That is more than mildly embarrassing, but when I set out to write a blog about myself, making myself look cool was not on the agenda.
Miss Lovato had a Twitter post a while ago that irked me (irked or not, I still think she’s fab). She posted that if she didn’t have to be a good role model for her fans, she would have tattoos and piercings. If I’m doing the math, that means that tattoos + piercings = bad role model. Going by that equation, and given that I currently display both tattoos and multiple piercings in my ears, the entire purpose of my blog is moot.
What is it about this type of self-expression that invites such criticism? I hear it from friends of mine all the time – “Tattoos are trashy,” “Well, your tattoos are okay but I normally hate them,” and even from my own husband-to-be, “I wish you didn’t have them, but I love you no matter what.”
My own personal tattoos are reminders of the hardest times of my life, a life that has survived everything from extreme poverty to sexual abuse, and all the normal tough stuff, too. They’re colorful. They have a good message. Yet, I feel like a shoplifter anytime I catch someone’s eyes flicking towards my wrist…guilty. As though my little cursive reminder to “Let it go,” a reminder that once jolted me from a downward spiral of self-mutilation, is a dirty thing.
“Hi, my name is Carlene. I am a girl with tattoos. I’m also a small business owner, a musician, and a wonderful person.” Can people look past the ink on my skin, the tiny earrings up my ears, and see that for themselves? If I put my brave front aside, the truth is that it hurts my feelings. It makes me want to hide behind long-sleeved shirts and long pants 12 months out of the year, makes me want to make excuses that I was 18 and stupid when I had them done.
I wasn’t 18 and stupid, I was 19 and knew exactly what I was doing. When I’m home by myself I love my tattoos – I love my guardian angel fairy on my ankle and the phoenix on my back that marks my father’s death. I love my reminder on my wrist that keeps me from ruining the relationships in my life by not fighting over foolish things.
So maybe the real truth is, “Hi, my name is Carlene. I am a girl with baggage who sometimes needs help remembering to be grateful for the small joys in life. I have trashy tattoos and overly pierced ears. I like that about myself, and I understand that maybe you don’t. I’m okay with that.” Criticism is okay; hiding who I am in the face of it is not.
Carlene song lyric of the day, from Scars (copyright 2009):
…and if you check her sleeve, her story is there for the world to see…
To me, growing older isn’t about age, it’s about becoming your best self. Everybody always says, “If you could go back but know everything you know now, what would you change?” I think it’s like using the warp whistles in Super Mario Bros 3; I wonder if Nintendo was disappointed they put the effort into designing worlds 2-7 when everyone just wanted to go straight from 1 to 8.
Ian asked me that question the other day, and I told him that I don’t think I would take back anything, that I liked who I am now. “But what about the abuse?” he asked, “Wouldn’t you undo that?”
There’s a loaded question; if I could go back and get my childhood back from the man who stole it, would I?
I often shock people with my complete disregard for social niceties and my lack of fear – or, as I like to call it, my excess of bravery. Is that the price of a lost childhood? To not possess any fear of living my life as fully as I want to? If that’s the case, I would call it freedom.
As shocking as it seems to equate ten years of mental prison with freedom – being manipulated, living my life in fear, lying to the faces of the people I desperately wished would save me – when it left my life it took with it the fear factor.
When I decided to change courses, to start pursuing music again to feed my soul, I heard the same negative shocked reactions, just phrased differently. “Well, Carlene, you know how hard it is to make it in the music industry,” “Why are you going to Nashville when there are recording studios right here in New Hampshire?” “You know that everyone there is trying to do the same thing as you, right,” “But what are you going to do with your business?”
That’s where the unexpected benefit from living through childhood abuse kicked in. I am no longer the type of person to listen to what my awesome Sandler Sales training course referred to as “head trash,” at least not when it comes to people trying to take a crap all over my dreams. I don’t just have dreams, I have goals, and I make those goals realities on a regular basis by thumbing my nose at the people who don’t “get” what I’m doing and dealing exclusively with the people who fit effortlessly into my life.
I don’t have to explain my goals as though they’re indecipherable. I want to share my music with people who appreciate what I have to say. Period. That’s the end of it. And at the heart of that statement is the key to self-improvement.
While I can only speak for myself, I will go out on a limb and say that many of us keep our best selves hidden. The quirks and qualities that make us so brilliant and fun to be around are the things we are terrified to show the world. If someone mocks us for those quirks and qualities, they’ve found our hidden heart and stuck a knife in it.
The way I became free – free from the abuse, free from the fear, free from the inability to find the proverbial cliff and jump off without hesitation – was to make a conscious decision to put my hidden heart on display. Want to see it? Here it is:
My name is Carlene and I am totally uncool. I have big feet, size 11, and my toes are long, which grosses me out. My right boob is bigger than my left, and I wear push-up bras so no one can tell. I think I am technically 5’11 and a HALF but I lie and tell people I’m 6’ tall because that half inch is just more interesting. I had braces for two years and my left front tooth still sticks out farther than my right. When I laugh, I actually “guffaw” just like Goofy. I have scars up and down my arms from cutting myself as a teenager, and I am embarrassed when people stare at them. I hate when there is a “w” pronounced in food – “Fewd.” I secretly wish I could stop playing guitar while performing because I’m not very good at it, and also so I could have long fingernails again. I had acne F.O.R.E.V.E.R. and I still get zits at 26 years old. I went through high school believing everyone hated me…then I got Facebook and got real. I love to listen to my own songs but don’t want anyone to know, so I hit the “Next” button on my iTunes so the play count stays low. I believe in the Universe the way that some people believe in Jesus. I secretly love the Twilight series and Nora Roberts novels. I would put a Darwin fish on the back of my car but don’t want my car keyed.
There you are. There’s my hidden heart. Stab away, I’m not ashamed.
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Picture this: a tall, gawky girl made completely of elbows and knobby knees, on the sidelines during gym class, watching her classmates run back and forth on the basketball court with delight, literally bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet. This is me in the sixth grade, at the height of a terrible home life where I was sexually abused and beaten into mental submission by my then-stepfather on a daily basis.
That girl, caught up in the moment and bursting with the joy of being alive, is who I was then and who I still am today.
My name is Carlene. I am an unrelenting optimist, and it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.
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