Warning: I never swear--except in this post, Part One

It's been a few days since I've posted. For me, that's sort of monumental. It's not unknown for me to post more than once daily. But something's been happening, and I'm trying to understand it well enought to express it.

For the first time in more than a year, I feel like me again. It's as if all the "new" (which constitutes old stuff I've refused to acknowledge) has merged with the familiar and brought me back to the place where I began.

This time last year, I was two separate people. Person One was a little girl begging to be acknowledged, crying for love and comfort, desperately sad, horribly used and hurt, confused, betrayed and abandoned. I hated and feared her. She represented to me all that was weak and vulnerable. She couldn't protect herself. She endured loathsome abuse that I could hardly bear to think about. I had consciously put her away because it was overwhelming for me to believe that she was me.

Person Two was an overachiever, organized, driven, and logical. She never cried--ever. Failure was not an option. Life was to be laughed at and never mourned. She was not afraid of anything except for the hidden things inside.

Still, Person Two is really an impossible entity. If I hadn't been confronted with my past, I believe I would have driven myself to a breakdown, eventually. As it was, I sort of had one anyway, so maybe that's all part of the package.

At some point I allowed Person One to become known. I began with my husband, then my father, and slowly continued to tell people of my experience--in summarizing sentences with very little detail. There were a few people who got more detail about the things I felt, but not about the abuse experiences themselves. I wrote a romanticized free-write about the way my cousin led up to the point when he actually abused me, and gave the impression that there was one rather sterile night when he raped me. It was too much to actually admit the truth and share it with anyone else. There were too many unresolved feelings, many of guilt and poor self-image. I just couldn't do it. And the truth is, until I was able to say what actually happened, and admit how I felt about it, I couldn't receive that which I needed to heal.