A Personal Piece

 There's a notebook somewhere. It contains a piece of paper with "A Personal Piece" scrawled at the top and details every instance of rape and molestation that I had both experienced and witnessed as a woman who has traveled the world on her own. The list numbers well over twenty and is marked in Roman numerals.

One in particular that stands out is getting raped on the back porch of my mother's home and remaining silent about it. The next morning my friend and I agreed that he was "kinda rapey".

"Then why did you invite him?" you would be well within your rights to ask as I am well within my rights to deny an answer. His friend invited him. I never saw either of them again. I don't think that the immorality of being in one's early 20s should invite such a drastic and widespread harm.

There's a time I remember when I was 12 years old that my mother told me I would get AIDS and become pregnant by the time I was 13. She said I would die. I had never touched another man or boy. Her unfortunate relationship with sexuality was imposed onto me, and she claimed that everyone that disagreed with her was fucking one another.

Then, there's me.

I've come to terms with being an unattractive person, and it doesn't bother me much. I have value elsewhere, although it becomes muddled under facelessness at best and muddied by ugliness at worst.

You may disagree, and that's fine, but I choose to place my joy elsewhere, and I don't care for people's input on my looks in any way. I've had enough of that in the form of "You'd be pretty if you lost 10 lbs." from my mother paired with her food aggression and our poverty which sent me into a spiral of lifelong eating disorders. It has persisted from all angles for longer than I care to consider. I think placing my value on my work is coping with a reality that I can't change much. I think this is me rejecting myself.

Today I was writing a romantic scene and I started crying. I asked myself why I was crying.

"because it's sad."

I'm not sure that makes sense. Why am I really crying? and not only crying but panicking.

I thought long and hard in this conversation with myself and I came to the conclusion that sex holds the same inevitable failure that a lack of it does. I wrote in my planner: "I will be alone forever because I both fear and distrust intimacy. I have been rejected 1,000 times and will die 1,000 more. I am grateful for myself and my friends (who I also distrust and need to reach out to me or else I will feel rejection and avoid them)."

I'm happy most times, but it's times like these when I remember I'm a broken person no matter how much work I've done. I clung to my therapist telling me I was remarkably well-adjusted but "might have some attachment issues" and said "good enough" because attachment never seemed necessary to me.

It's unhelpful to focus on my pain. That's not good for anyone to do. I'm certain of it. I don't want it to mean that I am unable to love, for I am overflowing with love. I don't want it to mean that people treat me more gently or harshly than I deserve on my merit alone.

Now, it seems like a generational thing, too.

Who knows about that?

Should I post these deep vulnerabilities for the internet to see, to judge, to use as ammunition? To tell me the things my mother told me? To tell me "this is why nobody likes you"?

Does it matter? And if I turn my computer off, does it exist?

Did I throw my friends away based on my own insecurities? Why have I only traveled alone?

Anyway, I doubt I could ever write romance without an inevitable ending. Good thing I'm a horror writer.