Long and angsty

POSTED THE EVENING OF DECEMBER 14, 2016.

It took Marie a few weeks to reply to this letter here, but she finally did. And this really got our conversations under way ....

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Dear Hosea,

So. I’ll take Robin McKinley’s advice- “Begin in the middle and work your way out to the edges—don’t be stuffy.”

So the middle I’ll start with is your first question. You wrote, “What am I still overlooking?” And the answer is, in a word, me.

We’ll see how many pages I can expand that one word out to. (I have confidence in my abilities!)

But see, I don’t recognize myself in what you wrote at all. Maybe this is part literary pose or psychological gambit—apologies are rarely better received for being full of details of how the second party was really at fault too. But I come across in what you write as some sort of Platonic ideal of Loving and Understanding Womanhood or something: “Time and again… you offered me your heart in honest, vulnerable trust.” “Far better than I deserved, you cared enough to get closer than that.” “Inside, I was thrilled that you cared enough to help me out of the prison I had built for myself.”

Um. No. Yes, I was in love with you—but I hadn’t a clue, when I was 18, that you felt yourself in a self-built prison. Or indeed that you were at all dissatisfied with how you were interacting with others, including me. About as far as I got was that you might be shy about making the first move sexually. I didn’t even have the courage to offer you my heart, because I didn’t assume that you would want it (nor was I admitting to myself the true nature of my feelings for you). What I thought was, that your willingness to talk with me intensely one-on-one meant that you were “interested” in me, as I was in you, and that if I offered you my BODY you’d be happy I made the first move.

Here’s how I remember the conversation: I was panicking a little because I thought Ren Fayre would be the last chance before we were too busy with studying/finals to do anything. So I inveigled you away from our friends up to the privacy of my own room on the pretext of getting more wine—which you said you didn’t want anyhow, but you came with me. Then I said I wanted to tell you something rather personal, and you muttered something which only the most inveterate optimist would take as encouragement. And I said, “I find you very attractive.” This was, of course, your cue to leap on me with cries of lust, which you signally failed to do. Whereupon I said, I think, “You can do with that what you want,” and you said, “I don’t know what to say.” (I might have the order switched.) Exeunt omnes from my bedroom, and then you came over faint on the stairs.

If you understood at the time that I was offering my heart as well as my body, you understood more than I did myself—though it was true that you had it. In any event, I hardly think my communication qualified as a model of honest, vulnerable trust. But how could it have been, when I wasn’t capable of being honest with myself?

Skip ahead in your letter, when you wrote of how you “froze,” and how “I didn’t know what I felt. But that’s crazy—how can you not know what you feel? I had to know. Only I didn’t. I had to say something. Only I couldn’t. So I got more anxious… and froze harder.. and the seconds ticked away. Into minutes. Into hours, weeks, years.”

See, the parts of your letter that you said were crazy and impossible to understand or believe, were the parts that were the easiest for me to understand. Because they are familiar. Because that’s how I was, and unfortunately still am, about physical intimacy. Only, when I was 18, my whole self-image depended on denying that.

I was fine, just fine. My mom’s molesting me had had no long-term effects. I had no problems with either physical sex or romantic relationships. Okay, so I couldn’t orgasm, and froze whenever I tried to masturbate, and got anxious and ashamed anytime I felt physically aroused, and never dated when I was in high school, and had a panic attack the one time someone tried to kiss me, but that didn’t mean anything was wrong with me. Self-abuse didn’t count anyhow; it would be different with a partner. And the no-dating was just that in my high school all the girls who were really serious about college put off having serious relationships (so that meant we didn’t have sex, because of course one would only have sex if you were serious about someone—what, it’s not like someone would do sex for fun!). And then I got to college and one of the first thing I did was to prove myself normal by getting myself a boyfriend. With whom, of course, I would naturally engage in free love. But who understood that I was a virgin, so he didn’t try to advance things very fast. And I broke up with Mac not because his “not very fast” was still sexually aggressive enough to send me into panic attacks, but for VERY VERY GOOD REASONS that had nothing to do with being afraid to follow through on what I said, what I told him, what I told myself I wanted. What I did want, even. But panicked anytime I tried to do anything about.

Panic attack is a bit of misnomer, technically. I didn’t have trouble breathing or anything like that. I just, well, froze. Freeze. I stiffen, and go numb in my body, and emotionally—either numbness, or some mingling of shame and fear and grief. “Frigid” as a word for sexual dysfunction has a lot of resonance for me.

And of course you were safe for me to fall in love with—excuse me, to become interested in, since that’s all I was admitting to—because you weren’t sexually aggressive at all.

Now, the weird thing is, I haven’t panicked or frozen the times (since Mom) I’ve been threatened with actual rape. I’ve been scared, but legitimately scared, and it didn’t keep me from acting. I suppose it’s because there was no conflict about what I should do—I knew I had the right to defend myself, and so I could.

But, see, Mom—she didn’t force me. I asked her to stop, but I didn’t make her stop. I didn’t understand what she was doing—she was touching me “down there” which wasn’t supposed to happen, but good girls always obey their parents, so I did. My sister or my brothers weren’t “good” like I was; they would have fought her and gotten away; I was a good girl, and so I didn’t. It was only when I was in 8^th grade and started to have sexual feelings myself that I realized—that my feelings were sexual, that what I was doing to myself was sexual, and therefore that what she had done had been. At which point I came up with the word “molested” and realized it applied, and realized that I would have had a right to resist back when it happened. Only, then I thought that my masturbating and having feelings proved I had deserved what she had done (why else would God have allowed such a thing to happen—after an AWANAS Bible study no less?—unless he knew in advance that I would deserve it?). So I made myself stop having feelings, and have never been able to undo it.

An aside—is it true Wife became aborn-again Christian? I REALLY hope that, if so, you didn’t let her poison your sons’ minds about sex. I really think I would have dealt much better with my sexual trauma, maybe not become frigid, if I hadn’t been extremely religious at that time. (Conversely, I might never have become an atheist had I never been molested—a truly frightening thought. Though possibly God’s obvious failure to protect me from Mom’s other abuses or to cure her alcoholism, no matter how much I prayed, might have had the same effect. As well as the other failures of my born-again minister uncle, the AWANAS leader, and the priests when I went to them for help dealing with her….)

Oh—but in the world-as-it-is I did become an atheist, and then later a feminist. And the feminists, unlike the churches, said that women were allowed to have sexual feelings. In fact, it was wrong for us not to.

Oops. By then I was frigid, and now THAT was wrong.

Maybe it’s because I thought my having sexual feelings proved I had deserved to be molested (after all, either way I was polluted. And if I was polluting myself, I had no right to complain that someone else had polluted me first), or maybe it’s because she didn’t use force, just moral authority. I could have resisted, but I didn’t realize I had a right to. But I also got very mixed up about coercion and consent, and intent and fantasy. I felt that to APPROACH someone who was unwilling or uninterested was the same as to force them. In fact even to THINK ABOUT them was really the same.

And indeed, on the receiving side, the few people I’ve ever tried to be physically intimate with—I always had to be interested in them first, before anyone made an approach. Any time someone’s made a pass at me who I wasn’t already thinking about, I—

Well, froze, like I said. But I’ve never, even once, unfrozen at all, even mentally, towards anyone who’s surprised me with a sexual suggestion or gesture. Even if I thought they were attractive, even if I was lonely or horny or wanting to get involved with someone.

On the other hand, it’s not permissible for me to make an approach either. THAT’S DOING WHAT MOM DID TO ME.

You’ll observe a certain problem with this, but since part of me is a twelve-year-old who thinks no one SHOULD have sex anyhow, that part of me regards the problem as a solution….

In practice, the only times I’ve managed to end up in bed with someone (regardless of how it turned out once we were), we’ve circled around for a while eying each other and verifying the other’s eying, and then usually I make the final approach.

Which, of course, is what I thought I was doing with you, that Ren Fayre. If I had realized I would take you by surprise, I never would have approached you. Not because I didn’t want to be rejected, because I seriously felt that approaching someone who wasn’t interested was the same as raping them. I thought that you were incredibly forgiving to be willing to TALK to me ever again after doing something so heinous as to admit to interest in you when you didn’t return it.

You’ll notice I wasn’t quite sane on that issue.

(That’s where writing one of my fan-fiction stories was cathartic; I got really clear that Severus having sexual fantasies, however ugly, about raping Lily, was actually distinct from his raping her. And that, therefore, my having sexual fantasies was different from my acting on them. And that forcing is different from asking, as long as the other party is free to say no. It’s only if the other party isn’t free, as I felt I wasn’t free to say no to anything my mom did, that even asking can be coercive.)

But see, this all makes a lot of your specific regrets irrelevant, Hosea.  

You wrote of beating yourself up emotionally after I propositioned you. “I wanted to run back to you, to hold and be held, to open all my walls. I also knew that after you had made yourself so vulnerable, every hour I waited was a dagger in your heart. So not only did I want to run back to you, but I knew that I had to. I knew it was cruel not to.”

Only, see—if you had, you would have run yourself headfirst into the meat grinder of MY problem. Once you demonstrated that you hadn’t already been thinking about me that way, my reflexive response was OMG I’ve just tried to rape him. It would have made no sense to me if you’d subsequently come back to me and said, “After reflection, yes”—as I said, even now I’ve never actually done that. I have no idea what I would have done, but I don’t think it would have been conducive to your further emotional opening. And your staying away wasn’t a dagger, because I wasn’t waiting for you to reconsider.

In fact I tried VERY VERY HARD for months after that to persuade myself that I’d given up any untoward feelings for you WE WERE FRIENDS JUST FRIENDS. A lot of my craziness the next year came when I reluctantly had to admit to myself that my feelings for you were, um, perhaps still more complicated and intense than JUST FRIENDS comprised. Whereupon I told myself that I was obsessed with you, and if only I could pinpoint the nature and origin of my obsession I could free myself from it…..

So my first guess as to what I would have done if you HAD gotten up the courage to approach me after fainting is that I would have pulled OH NO I ONLY HAVE FEELINGS OF FRIENDSHIP FOR YOU REALLY on you. To, I assume, your confusion and distress.

Whereas, if you hadn’t fainted; if you’d responded as I expected and wanted you to, with shy gladness that I’d broached the matter….

I assume I’d have treated you as I did Mac, and those other people I tried to get intimate with before my first round of therapy, post-college, after I admitted to myself that I wasn’t ALL RIGHT NO PROBLEMS WHATSOEVER MOVE RIGHT ALONG HERE where sex was concerned.

In fact, as I did treat you your senior year, when you did get up the courage to kiss me. Tried to be intimate with you, got aroused, froze in mid-caress, and broke it off before we could try to “go all the way” without admitting, either to you or to myself, that the problem (or the primary problem) was the sex, not you. [Hosea adds: I remember the story a little differently, here.]

In fact the proximate cause of everything going south that fall, from my point of view, was when I asked if you’d seen it coming, seen us drifting in the direction of intimacy, and you said no. Which I interpreted as meaning that you hadn’t thought about becoming physically involved with me before you did, and that therefore, obviously, once you DID stop to give it some thought, you’d realize you didn’t want me. So all that remained was to wait in despair until you figured that out.

Which, years later, I thought was a crazy thing to have assumed: why would not seeing it coming prove that you really weren’t interested? Some people—lots of people—pretty much anyone sane on the issue, really—would have reacted to your answer by determining to make you want them now, to try to make it rewarding enough for you to want to continue what you’d drifted into.

Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies—how could you want me when all I was thinking about was how soon you would wise up and dump me like you clearly wanted to only just hadn’t figured out yourself? I really told myself this: I cared about having a relationship with you, it was important to me, therefore I paid attention to what was happening between us, saw us drifting towards a physical relationship, was frightened by the prospect but wanted it enough to try despite my fear. You didn’t see it coming, therefore you weren’t paying attention, therefore it wasn’t of any importance to you and you didn’t care. Which meant I actually believed, during the period before you fulfilled my expectations and told me it wasn’t working, that the reason you hadn’t already done so was because you didn’t care enough about the issue (me) to think about it (me) long enough to realize you really didn’t want it (me).

In other words, your not breaking up with me at once was, to me, the final proof you really didn’t care. Ain’t logic wonderful?

It’s only writing it here that I see that it’s actually perfectly consistent. It’s how I was, so of course I assumed it’s how you were. And it’s the rule: anything (sexual) that takes someone by surprise HAS to be intrinsically unwelcome, even if they don’t understand what’s going on well enough to resist it openly at first…. Indeed, especially if they don’t understand well enough to resist openly at first.

But, see, I raised the issue with you. Because I was afraid and wanted reassurance? Or because I wanted an excuse to tell myself it wouldn’t work so I could back out before my sexual incapacity became obvious to both of us?

Both, I rather think now. And also, of course, I pretty much HAD to force you into rejecting me overtly (which you hadn’t actually done before—fainting may not be encouragement, but it’s also not an explicit rejection—as indeed, you say now, you didn’t want it to be). To prove that you could and would.

Aargh, short version of the rest of my sexual life. So. I graduated college unhappily aware that maybe I had some issues I perhaps had to work on. And started therapy. Fortunately, along with issues relating to my mom’s drinking and my dad’s suicide and being molested, you came up in my sessions. I say fortunately, because I’d already gotten most of the way to admitting that my “obsession” with you was simply that I was in love with you when I called R to find out how you were doing at graduate school, to my shock got you on the phone instead, and you told me you were going back home in part to be with a “special friend.” That would not have been a good way to discover the nature of my feelings for you.

Were you really aware all along of what was going on with me? Your letter makes it sound that way, but I don’t know how much of that is retroactive analysis. But of course you wouldn’t have had my reasons to need to deny the nature of my feelings at the time.

So. Worked extensively with my counselor, got through some things. Met a guy through friends who felt possible, tried it with him, to my delight was able to achieve sexual intercourse. Penetration, even!!! Of course I still clicked off my feelings in the middle, but that part would come with time and practice. A month later I took the job with a company that transferred me to Salt Lake City, away from both therapist and boyfriend, but that was okay because I was fine now, just fine, all fixed.

Woke up in 1990 to realize I hadn’t been with anyone since, was living in a city I hated, doing work that was fundamentally meaningless to me (though I was decent at it), my friendships were mostly quite shallow, all I really had in my life was an adequate income and I didn’t value that. So, Landmark. Which is really good about supporting you about getting in motion in your life, and keeping in motion. Setting goals, and staying in movement on them despite one’s fears. So. I decided to change careers to something that was meaningful to me. I tried actual dating—blind dating, even. I contacted you. I reconciled with my mom (who had, in the intervening years, finally done an alcohol treatment program that stuck—but I had never trusted her sobriety, or her). I forgave her for molesting me, even. I moved from Dallas to the Northwest. And I got involved with someone I met through Landmark in Seattle, who was very patient about my sexual problems.

Only—he had to continue to be patient about them, because they didn’t shift. The best I managed was to increase the length of time I could stay engaged. And I didn’t love him, and realized I wasn’t going to fall in love with him, and staying involved with someone just to be involved with someone—that didn’t seem right. And when the sex wasn’t even working… So I broke up with him, but there wasn’t anyone else I wanted. Well, except. And the blind dates had been a horror to me. (And probably to the perfectly-nice-enough guy who tried to kiss me.)

Plus, of course, I had utterly failed in my first teaching post, and I said working as a substitute would be a way to work on my classroom management skills so I could go back and try again, but I could see after a year or two that I was getting better, but not good.

And then, of course, there was you.

So it seemed to me that most of the risks I had taken hadn’t had a very good return, so I didn’t want to take risks any more. Which is not an attitude that Landmark supports, so I stopped.

But as far as the sexual issues were concerned—well, Landmark always said it wasn’t therapy. So maybe another round of therapy would do the trick. Early 2000’s, this would be. I was active in Peace Action, trying to stop the Iraq War (which anyone who was paying attention could see Bush was starting on false pretenses), working at [the place I still work today], gardening…. And the therapy—well, I felt better about some things. But the frigidity—that wasn’t altering. And then it hit me how old I was. That even if I did conquer my fear of sex, I was already too old to have children. Even if I was cured totally the next week, I’d missed out on my chance to have a normal marriage-plus-kids. I’d never been sure I wanted that, but I felt deprived to realize it could never be an option. And so I decided it was all hopeless, and gave up.

Which pretty much destroyed my relationship with my mom. I revoked having forgiven her for molesting me. I felt like, as long as I pretended I was okay sexually, or hoped that someday I’d be okay, I could forgive her. But now I was acknowledging that what she’d done had consequences I apparently couldn’t recover from. She’d essentially crippled my sexuality, in the service of a moment’s gratification of her own. I was hugely angry; it seemed grossly unfair that SHE’D committed the crime, and I was the one suffering life-long punishment.

She responded to my anger by deciding that I’d made the whole thing up. I was crazy, she had no memories of doing such a thing, she never would do such a thing, and besides she likes men.

This did not make things better between us.

I’d never tried talking about the abuse with her at any length—not the sexual abuse, not the physical or verbal abuse, not the neglect. She tried, if I remember, to talk with me a little about the last, to apologize, when she was doing her twelve-step program in the mid-nineties—but I didn’t trust her and didn’t want to indulge her in any conversation about painful matters. And if she even tried to apologize for any specific actions I don’t remember that at all. The only two times I mentioned the sex abuse at all—once when I was 17, once when I first did Landmark—I mentioned it, she said she didn’t remember (which I easily believed—she had a lot of alcoholic blackouts in those days), but she didn’t try to deny that it might have happened without her remembering it. Of course those two times I wasn’t attacking her about her action.

Her denial made me angrier. I said I’d tell the family; she said she’d disinherit me if I spread such lies. I said fine.

One of my aunts had a fairly long conversation with me detailing her reasons for thinking that my mom herself had probably been sexually abused. (Which hypothesis does in fact make sense of a lot of my mom’s behavior—she’d be a good exemplar of the sexually-acting-out victim, as I am of the sexual avoider.) But she was enough younger than mom that she was going by inference rather than observation. Everyone else pretty much ignored what I said.

I could be around her, those last several years, basically only by ignoring who she was. If she was just a little old lady in a wheelchair with oxygen in her nose (she died of COPD), pathetically eager to be loved by everyone and being super nice and empathetic and charming to everyone around her to make them love her, my reflexive be-nice-to-little-old-ladies programming would kick in and I could be nice to her. (God knows how these reflexes will play out when I’m a little-old-lady too!) But as soon as I’d think “that’s mom” or she’d do anything to remind me, I’d be in the middle of my anger again.

I couldn’t go to see her when I knew she was dying; all I wanted from her was her to acknowledge the wrong she’d done me, and what she wanted from me was to pretend it had never happened.

My brothers and sister, though—since mom’s death we’ve been closer. A lot is because, when mom’s will was read, I hadn’t been disinherited. I said, why not, she said she was going to? Turns out she did talk about cutting me out, and they said no. All three of them. They said the estate should be split four ways, and it was.

Mind, the money is sitting doing nothing in a CD because I’m reluctant to touch it, But it helps me with them.

The other thing was, I’ve been using fanfic to explore some issues, and one of the things that I finally got clear on—well, with my siblings I realized that we hadn’t had at all the same experience of mom in our teen years. Even though they lived through her alcoholism with me, her verbal abuse, the fear and mortification of not knowing what horrible or humiliating or embarrassing thing she would do when she was drunk. So we had that as a commonality.

But I was the only one she molested, and as far as I recall I was the only one she ever knocked off a chair. And it’s not just the sexual problem that I developed as a result that made my experience of her different after she did that.

The thing is, once she had molested me—or more precisely, once I understood that that’s what she had done—there wasn’t anything I could believe her incapable of doing. Not if she was drunk enough. I lived for years in fear that she would try to molest me again—or try it with my little sister or brother—and I watched her, in fear, for years ready to intervene if she tried.

But I feared other things too.

For example, she always had this habit of saying, when she was angry at one of us, “I wish you were dead! I could just shoot you!”

So when I was a little kid this was very unpleasant and hurtful to hear. But of course I didn’t take it as a serious threat—she would never actually act on it.

But after she molested me I couldn’t assume that anymore. If she’d do that, she could do anything. If she was drunk enough. Even if it was something she’d never even think about doing, sober.

Which meant that I went through my adolescence with a much higher level of fear than my brothers and sisters, even while we endured (otherwise) the same experiences. We all saw her do things while drunk that she wouldn’t do sober—but only I seriously believed that she might do ANYTHING. My body must have been saturated with adrenaline, for years. Or rather, not steadily, not all the time, but any time she approached black-out drunk.

And, most of all, my siblings don’t know, don’t have any way to register, that my experience was different from theirs. That I was experiencing terror plus disgust, discomfort, mortification, while they only felt the last three. We all went through the same thing; why am I alone overreacting? They have to feel that, a bit.

So the fact that they are still supportive of me means more.

Aargh. Aren’t you glad you asked?

But, back, finally, to your letter. You, of course, are benefitting now from my mom’s failure; your willingness to apologize means more, in contrast with her refusal.

You said you wouldn’t ask for my forgiveness because you had done nothing to earn it. So fine, I won’t worry about offering it. But you’ve done something else—maybe made it possible for me to forgive myself.

Because the anger and bitterness I’ve felt toward you (and you’re quite right, of course, I’ve felt a lot) is nothing compared to what I’ve felt over you. Towards myself.

I felt I should never have loved you. I felt I deserved all the pain I got, because my love for you had been crazy. Stupid. Self-destructive, and worse, self-deceiving. I felt I should have turned off my feelings (y’know, like the song in “The Book of Mormon”: “Turn it off, like a light switch”—isn’t that how feelings work?) once I knew you didn’t want me. Which means, er, after that Ren Fayre. Or before, since I should have seen the truth from the start. Or after your senior year. Or.

But at any rate, loving you made me no better than a stalker. I should have given up my delusions that you could possibly have feelings for me. (The phrase from the end of “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” has always resonated: “for knowing it was false she yet clung to the lie, the unpardonable lie of her bitter desire.”)

I should have left you alone.

But now you confirm, you didn’t want me to.

In fact, reading your letter, in retrospect your desires, and what you communicated to me at the time, look remarkably consistent over the course of our relationship. You didn’t know how to deal with my feelings, or with what I wanted of you. You didn’t want to deal with them; they frightened you. But you didn’t actually want me to withdraw them entirely either, and you didn’t at all want me to go away.

Making my feelings for you, well, still probably stupid, and (given my own issues) doomed. But at least not based totally on self-deception. So maybe not unpardonable.

So. Thank you for giving me an opportunity to forgive myself.