Chapter 6: The Future

My Goals and Aspirations for Continued Healing from C-PTSD

The last six years have got to hold some meaning for me. There has to be a reason I want to live through all of this bullshit. I am fighting. I am fighting for my right for social security. I am fighting to live beyond this slump. I am fighting to defend those I care about. I am not going to give up.

I am going to continue writing and embracing the talent I have and the experiences I can share. I am not going to listen to the people that are telling me I somehow failed myself for breaking down. It isn’t easy to ignore on a regular basis, but I will eventually be away from people who tell me only the darkest reflections of myself and then I never have to see the people who tormented me when I was trying to heal, after they broke me. I can learn to see the greatness within me. It is not being arrogant to say that I am good at things. I am not belittling others acknowledging that I am intelligent.

My journey is not the same journey as yours. I can only speak from my experiences. I can hope that you see yourself in some of my struggles or that some of the things I have talked about make you feel a little better about how you are handling your trauma. That is really all that I can hope for with this work. That it finds a place within the people out there in the ether.

For me.

I am making myself a priority in my life. I deserve to be happy. I deserve to be loved. I shouldn’t have to hide what people who hurt me have done to make them comfortable.

While I was in Hawai’i getting to know my cousin again, I had spoken to my uncle, my step dad's older brother, and we talked frankly about my childhood and abuse. My uncle told me that he was sorry he didn’t stick up for me and stop what his brother was doing. It was a really big thing for me. I was being validated. What I went through was being recognized.

Then my uncle said something that made me see my step dad as a victim himself who did not know how to get his mental health under control without bad coping mechanisms. My uncle told me about how my grandfather on that side would come home drunk and chase all of the children with a large stick and if he caught them, he would beat them.

There was more, but right there, that explains a lot. My grandmother on that side was also a pot stirrer. She enjoyed the human drama and was not adverse to pitting her children against one another for her own private entertainment. Because they were clannish, outsiders were rare, but also, abused.

Years ago step dad told me of a tale wherein he and his older brother had stuffed horseshit into a redvine and made a smaller kid eat it. There is another wherein his younger brother and he decided to play a joke on a friend, where they were going to shoot with a blank shotgun shell that still had the wad, which shot the friend in the chest, causing his shirt to blow open and a pink belly so bad it bled. The name who was pranked just stood there in shock until he passed out and hit the ground. This whole production was in front of step dad’s girlfriend at the time, who was playing along.

My point in adding this information is two fold. My step dad had been abused himself and in a more brutal fashion than he abused me. The second is, even though he was bullied, he thought it was fine to bully others in return. He used those weaker than him to feel better about himself, because that is how he learned to act as a model from his own father.

For me to embrace my own future, I need to understand as many facets of the past as I can. My step dad was a victim of abuse. His model to be a parent was twisted and perverse. For me to understand my future, I need to understand the past of my abusers. Why did they do what they did, matters.

I have made the conscious decision to remove my step dad from my life. Yes, he was a victim of abuse, bad parenting, the environment that he grew up in, and how he has chosen to compensate for that abuse. Self-medication, embracing the anger and anxiety they have is negative ways, refusing to admit the limitations that he grew up with, refusing to see his behavior as destructive, and once knowing that his actions has negatively impacted the life of others, he has decided to double down and make excuses for his actions or place blame upon his victims.

My future must be the priority in my life. My healing must be the priority for me. I can acknowledge what his limitations are and the reasons for many of his actions without accepting him back into my life. He was a victim and he is an abuser. He does not want to acknowledge the damage he has done to others and that is likely out of toxic masculine pride. He is using a dark form of masculinity to live his life and justify the things that he has done.

This is also the reason that he has accepted the terrible woman that he married after his divorce. His low self-esteem is one of the reasons he abused me and my mother. We were weak and he was a bully. Bullies target those that they do not fear, because they are cowards, and they won’t work on who they are.

I am fighting against that path. For my own future I need to acknowledge the past of my parents and the impact of the abuses they lived through. To move on, I need to see them as both the victim and as the abuser. There is a duality in their existence. Who they were informs who they are.

My goal is to shed the behaviors that I learned as a child. I want to understand how my programming as a child has affected me as an adult and then counter that programming and the behaviors that stem from that programming.

I want a better future than my past. I want to have a better future than my damaged parents had.

The self-esteem of my parents is almost nonexistent. The self-esteem of my siblings is terrible and so is mine. My siblings also have terrible self-esteem, allowing themselves to end up in similar terrible relationships as my step dad has with the nasty crone monster that lives in his house.

I cannot allow myself to end up in a similar relationship that these people have fallen into. One brother does not live in the house of his significant other and their children, instead sleeping in a little room that he built himself outside of the house about forty feet from the main house. The other brother is constantly being disrespected and demeaned by his partner. She said to him in front of me, “I don’t love you, you are convenient at the moment.” My sister has fallen into a relationship with an election denying, flat earth believing, Qanon, and Alex Jones follower.

I want a better future than my siblings have accepted.

I am moving on from the toxic thought that I don’t deserve to have a loving partner rather than a significant other that sees me as a vulnerable creature that they can abuse and control because I will just accept it or falling into a relationship where I feel the need to demean and control my partner in order to feel like I am safe, as my step dad did with my mother.

I am going to get better, it is inevitable. As I write this I can feel myself organizing the steps I need to take to achieve my goals. I am starting to have better goals!

I would like to own a home, somewhere that I can feel safe and secure. In my home I plan to organize my things to a manageable collection of immediate interests and long term goal priority. Having that in mind, I will also organize the many projects that I want to take on, in a way that I focus on one at a time.

I am going to find a niche within the creative community and the audiences that consume the creations that I wish to take on. By this point there is ample evidence of my writing skills and I can admit that they are not where I want to ultimately have them, but also acknowledge that my talent is growing. Eventually I will get to the point that I can live on the funds my writing generates, it is inevitable.

I am going to get to the point where I love myself. Having safety and security will allow me to bring about a calm in my mind that I have never truly had. Loving myself is going to require that I get away from the majority of my family. This is not out of hatred, but out of the requirement to make myself the priority in my life and allow me to work through the damage these people had created in my mind, while I am not being actively hurt at the same time.

There is a possibility that I can later have a relationship with my mother and step dad, but that time is going to have to be after I take care of the damage they have done to me. I can only hope that my absence gives them a hint that they need to work on how they treat me. I am a blessing in their lives, I always have been, but I am a blessing that they took as granted and forced to profit off of, at the expense of my health and my identity of self. I may be able to love them from a distance, but I cannot sacrifice myself for them any longer.

I will grow to acknowledge my talents as the blessing that they are and not just things that I see as ways to disassociate from the life I have lived until this point. I am talented and intelligent. I am going to embrace the amazing person that I am.

I am going to love myself.

I would like to find a partner that is my best friend. I will not accept less. Having someone around you is not the same as having a partner. I will also learn to trust others. Not everyone is going to hurt me because of the trauma that they faced. I might have had bad actors in my life, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t kind people out there that will not look at me as a mark or target.

I would like to help in raising a good, strong, and kind child. I am forty-three and although that is not young, that doesn’t mean I cannot have children. If it comes to the point that I cannot have a child of my own, I will likely adopt one. The things that I have learned about myself and my struggles can be shared in a positive way with others. I am writing this book to do just that. Raising a child to be a force of kindness and love in the world would be fulfilling and a culmination of the entirety of my growth. It is a source of great pride for me to leave a place better than how I found it. If I can do this for the world, it would give me a sense of accomplishment that I can accept as a life well lived.

I want to be happy. The tiny spikes of joy I have found throughout my life thus far have been nice, but for the most part, until I started healing, the joy that people thought they saw in me was a mask. It was just something I would put out for the benefit of those around me, not because I actually felt it. In college, my therapist informed me that I had walled off my emotions in order to protect myself from the things I was going through in my childhood. Made sense, but it was a shit way to go through life and I had not realized I was doing it.

After that knowledge my therapist told me that I would have to relearn my positive emotions, because they have clearly been stunted and cold logic had been built up in its place. I want to be happy, so I need to learn how to be happy. Now I fan the embers of happiness that I experience. I build them up. I use binaural tapping when I do experience a positive feeling, slowly savoring the joy and happiness that I am feeling. The tapping remaps my brain to dig a new deep path of positive emotions, eventually I will feel happy. It is inevitable.

I know that this is going to be a lifelong struggle against deep negative programming about myself and the world around me.

Trust isn’t built overnight, but it shouldn’t take a decade to believe you can trust a person. At forty-three, I don’t have the time to go into a holding pattern with a partner for a decade, or even five years. I must figure out that when someone says they like, care, or love me, I should believe them until they provide evidence to the contrary, most times.

I want to get to the point that when I leave the house, I am not constantly looking for threats. Hyperawareness is exhausting. I do not like living in a state of constant distrust of everyone I encounter when I leave the house.

I am going to share two recent anxiety based outbursts that I had in the last month. I am going to preface this with the following; I am not okay with my behavior in these incidents. My therapist has told me that the outbursts where no over the line, but that I could have handled them better.

I was walking around my neighborhood playing Pokemon Go. I do this because it feels like there is a reason for me to be outside and that I am achieving something other than just walking. It gives me an incentive.

As I am walking down the street, one that I live on, an old man pulls up next to me and asks me,

“Hi there, are you surveying?”

“No.”

“Well what are you doing out here?”

“My business is my own.”

“Well I live on the corner and my house was broken into last month.”

“Uh huh.”

“So I am just checking things out in the neighborhood, like people I don’t recognize walking through the neighborhood.”

“Okay.”

“So why are you walking around the neighborhood with your phone out?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“Oh really? Fine.” He lifts up his phone and declares. “I took your picture.”

“Good for you.” And I keep walking away.

The man drives off and then I continue to my house. I look out the window and see him patrolling up and down the street for a while, clearly looking for me.

This didn’t end there.

For the next week I was looking for his dude’s car as I went out. I did not feel safe with the man in my neighborhood likely to pull up on me at any point and time. It gave me flashes of Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery, not that this dipshit would hunt down and shoot me, but that this rural area is filled with bigoted white people that, if they are willing to do this to me, they are likely to do it to a minority and with more entitlement than they are showing me, a middle-aged, white, CIS male walking down their street.

About a week later, this over entitled ancient piece of shit, pulled up next to me while I was walking to the government center. I turn and see it’s him, but I also see that he is slowly staying beside me, in the middle of the street, with four cars being held up because he was doing this.

“Hi, I want to apologize for the other day,”

“You should apologize,”

“What?”

“You should apologize. You don’t have the right to harass people on the street. Just because your house was broken into, you do not have the right to drive up on people and start questioning them out of nowhere,”

I keep walking into the government center parking lot the entire time he is following directly next to me and the cars behind him are clearly annoyed and he crossed the intersection without stopping before entering and moving slowly across at the speed of my walking gait.

This obvious entitlement and disregard for others pissed me off and my temper was lit.

“I was just asking a couple questions about why you were in the neighborhood, my house was…”

“Yeah, we covered that, we are done talking, leave me alone,”

“I didn’t take your picture that day,”

“Look, I don’t care if you did. I truly don’t, I didn’t do anything wrong so it will not come back to bite me in the ass. I am not interested in talking to you anymore, go away and leave me alone,”

“I don’t know why…”

Stolen novel; please report.

I snap. I get right in his face and I shout. “Get the fuck away from me you son of a bitch! If you bother me again I am going to call the police!”

He got it. He pulled away, I took a picture of his car and plate as he pulled away, clearly confused about what just happened, and he only drove about two-hundred feet away and stopped his car, probably trying to digest what just happened.

He has not bothered me again, yet.

This was a triggered reaction. This was my anxiety getting the better of me. This was my fight or flight reaction, that is broken, flaring out to get this dude away from me. I felt like a bully. I felt terrible about the exchange, but the dude pushed me into it.

When I spoke to my therapist about it, she told me that it was understandable. I don’t agree, completely. Sure, it was a trauma reaction, but it was still a poor reaction on my part.

We discussed how I could have handled it better.

I came up with; When the man pulled up, I could have stopped him talking, pointed to the parking lot across the street in the government center. I could have told him, I will talk with him about the encounter, but that he needs to pull into the lot and get out of the way of the people behind you. Once he parked I could have calmly told him, “You are going about this the wrong way. I understand you feel you are justified to cruise the block in a Neighborhood Watch capacity, but just like a security guard, you should refrain from anything beyond observing and reporting. You are not going to get a good reaction to stalking people through the neighborhood and questioning them. You aren’t sure what reaction you are going to get or who you are dealing with. You are an elderly man and a younger person might drag you from your car and hurt you over it. If you are armed while patrolling, you could likely hurt someone when you are not meaning to.

If you want to feel safer in your neighborhood and see someone strange, observe and report it to the police. You can get a dog that would alert you to an intruder, but this is unsafe and you should stop doing it.

That would have been a nice calm way to handle it and likely would have been received in a better light than my yelling and cursing.

I can do better.

The second outburst came when I was at the grocery store. I am not at all proud of my outbursts, I am covering them because you might relate and may want to find a way to contain your outbursts as I do.

As I am loading the supplies that I picked up at the store into my bicycle basket a woman walks by me and says, “Have a nice day…” I reply in kind and then she continues, “In Jesus’ name,”

“Aww man you had to go and ruin it using Jesus,”

“What?”

“You had to add Jesus to that courteous exchange,”

“What’s the matter with that?”

“Personally, I have found a lot of people in this rural town use Jesus as an excuse for hated,”

“Why would you assume that was what I am doing? Why would you think I am one of those people?”

“I didn’t say you were, but anyone who feels to invade the personal space of others with your personal religious belief, is also someone who feels entitled to weaponize their faith,”

“You don’t even know me, why would you assume that is what I am like?”

“Well, I know you now better than I did when you walked up and my now my experience tells me you annoyed the shit out of me, can you fuck off now?”

“You have a nice day,” She says with venom.

“Yeah okay. You too.” With an inflection of indifference.

How could I have handled that better?

When she said “In Jesus’ name,” I could have just scoffed, ignored her, or the way that I discussed with my therapist would have just been, “Uh huh.”

There is also a fun way!

“May the blessings of Muhammad be with you.”

That would have shown the hypocrisy in brilliant bright lights.

Again, not proud of how I handled this, but my therapist says it was understandable.

Why? Because my step dad weaponized and perverted Christianity in our home. Because that trauma has been deeply embedded within my mind and causes triggers that are constantly being lit up by bad actors claiming to be “Christians” across the country. The use of the religion has been the excuse to; Discriminate cultural minorities, discriminate against LGBTQ+, used to justify violence, used to justify the abuse of animals and the environment, and used to take the rights of reproduction from women in just recent history, in the longer history it has been used for this and more atrocities.

One professor gave me the gift of a story about ancient people's sexuality and I smile thinking about it any time I consider the issues about reproductive rights and the demonization of the LGBTQ+.

In the distant past homosexuality wasn't an issue people concerned themselves with when it came to other people.

Sexually is more fluid and should be seen less as an identity and more like a preference. You wouldn't call a person who really loves pizza a pizzarian right? No. They just like pizza.

They did hold homosexuality as a priority issue in one area of day to day life though, but only in one. Care to wager a guess?

Livestock.

If you have a bull that refuses to mate with a cow, that bull is problematic. You were invested in making more cows, which this bull will not do. Therefore this bull was a detriment to the farmer's livelihood.

That's it. Livestock.

Now, knowing this information. The fact that some governments demonize homosexuality, as well as a woman's right to choose to have a child, you can get a clearer picture of exactly how those governments see their people.

Knowing these things, helps understand the trigger that causes these reactions. In order to counter these reactions, I need to understand why I am reacting the way that I am. It isn’t an excuse, it’s an observation for why these things happened.

When I followed each of these incidents with what I should have done that was less dramatic or explosive, that is the goal. That is what I want to be like in the future. I do not want to snap. I do not want to yell. I do not need to live this way to maintain the boundaries I need while I am outside the house and within my everyday relationships.

The Impact of C-PTSD on My Life and Relationships

This one has been the hardest to address in my life. My trauma gave me a lot of poor ways to handle relationships, especially with women. This cost me friends, family, and partners. It gave me a twisted sense of what a relationship was supposed to be like. I pushed boundaries, I objectified, I felt that I was somehow better than my partner, I was not romantic sexually for the most part, it was not an intimate act that allowed me to feel closer to my partner, it was an act for pleasure alone.

I have had to address this and a lot of other toxic traits within my relationships in all facets. My step dad had put this programming into me. My uncles, my granddads, my network of friends, all of these people pushed a narrative of objectification of women and the desire of personal pleasure above the desire to find a lifelong partner.

My interpersonal relationships were like this too.

When I was about twenty-eight, my mom had said to me, “Why do you still hang out with friend X, he doesn’t have a car, he doesn’t have a good job, what are you getting from this?” I am getting a friendship, I am getting a long term friend who has experienced a lot of things with me throughout the years. I am gaining a person who cares about me that we both benefit from. She couldn’t understand this.

Later on, after brother two was released from jail and he was getting close to the end of his in-home incarceration, she was in a panic about him planning to leave the house and move in with his girlfriend and their daughter. Why? Because his income contribution was making life a little easier for her. She was using her child as a form of income, as well as treating him poorly about everything he did while in the house, just as she is doing to me as I am writing this.

I had to explain that the man needs to get out and begin his own life with his family. She cannot have everything her way. She doesn’t get to collect money from one of your children each month, and treat them like a loser and a burden, then demand they stay in that hell for your benefit. That is unreasonable and extremely fucked up.

I have to explain this to her, at length, slowly, and repeatedly. Now that I am here, I pay her three-hundred a month. This is supposed to be an offset for the utilities that I use, as well as to make life a little easier. She is completely ungrateful for the gesture. I understand that the funds aren’t anywhere near what the market value for renting a room, but you know, I’m sick, I have no one else to turn to and she is my mother. Should be reasonable while I am fighting for my disability, trying to survive, trying to keep myself healing so that I can get employment and leave.

It’s not in my mom’s mind. In my mom’s mind, I am a worthless parasite who needs to leave immediately. I try to remind myself constantly, that my mom is a damaged person, just like my step dad. She never felt in control in her life, so having children gave her instant power over another human being. She didn’t really care about raising the child, just having one. We were never taught the basic understanding of living in a civil home. My parents didn’t have experience in that, so how could they teach it?

I have told my mom several times in the recent past, that I don’t see her as one of my parents. Looking back I had, but once I realized how young eighteen was, it was hard to see her as an actual adult, and definitely not like a parent. I placed her into the category of “ditsy old sister.” It’s offensive, I get that. I do not tell her that directly, I say, “More like an older sister.” I am the oldest of five siblings. The age gap is about four years between each kid. This means that my youngest sibling is about twelve years younger than me.

My mom being only eighteen years older than me, makes it seem like she barely understood how life was before she had a kid, out of religious pressure for the unborn. I have told her for years I wish she would have aborted me and learned the lesson that sex has consequences, went back to school, focused on herself, and then decided to work on her trauma before adding another generation to this trauma cycle. This offends her greatly.

This is the road that I have taken, without the abortion because I know how to not impregnate someone. I am now well traveled in the world and in my country. I am educated and understand the world far more than I did even in my late twenties. Now dealing with the trauma gives me the hope that there was some good that came from this mental breakdown. There has to be some good that came from this.

My step dad raised me in the practice of transactional relationships in all things. This is with friends, other family members, partners, work, day to day life, everything. Everything has a price and can be negotiated depending on the relationship strength. I was given chores at four or five because, “You need to earn your keep.” I needed to earn the food and shelter I was being provided by this man.

Later in life I wanted to buy a computer but didn’t have the money. He offered to loan it to me, but made sure to say that the kindness he was showing was not the loan itself, it was not charging me interest on the loan depending on how long I took to repay it. When I was young and we went to my grandparents on his side, I was expected to do things around the house for them without incentive or reward. My skills allow me to pick up pretty much anything with intuition alone, so I was skilled in a lot of things that needed to be done.

I clipped all of her birds’ flight feathers so they couldn’t fly any great distance. I was to clip their beaks from time to time as well. Program the VCR? Yup, that is a Jesse thing. Set the digital clocks? Jesse, get on it. The computer is acting strangely, is Jesse coming over soon? Oh, the yard work is underway with my stepbrother who lives there, Jesse, go help him.

My grandparents were clannish people. That is generally patriarchal. When my granddad became disabled after being hurt, it was like all the powers of his station were transferred to his wife, their mother. Suddenly the man was given very little respect. I mean, he used to beat his children with large branches, so I suppose there was some justification for it. It felt like it was some primal gesture, like you see an old wildebeest in the herd and you are ignoring them because they are going to lion shit soon.

My grandmother expressed her new found power to force conflict and division throughout the family. An example of her making sure that I was aware of not being in the family, regardless if I had been there since I was two years old, was to ensure each and every time that she was writing my name, she would insert an “i” before the last “e.” Jessie is short for Jessica. I made this clear each and every time it happened and she would not stop adding that fucking “i.” She enjoyed pitting my stepbrother against me in all ways. This had a strange moving goalpost as well. When I would succeed at something, the success would be given the asterisk of, “Well Jesse is a year older than the stepbrother.” Now, if the stepbrother was a success in something that I didn’t have immediate success, the achievement was inhanced with, “Stepbrother is the same age as Jesse, how come Jesse can’t X?” See how that works? If he fails, he is too young to compare to me, if he is successful, that is reason to demean me.

This also continued with my step dad. I had a very different standard than my stepbrother. He was the golden child of the family, even above my step dad’s later children with my mom.

It is really hard to build a relationship that is healthy when you are always being told you don’t really matter. Who can thrive when they are constantly being told they are a failure, an outsider, someone to be suspicious of and treat as a second class member of the family.

These kinds of relationships are clearly toxic. My relationship with my family was completely out of balance. No matter how much I achieved, it always seemed to be not enough, nor was it in any way praised. I was not a member of the family, I was the family bastard. More like an indentured servant that the family had to tolerate so my step dad could keep screwing my mom. Honestly, I think my mom would have been fine if they had sent me to a foster family and just forget about me.

Today, I am still very much seen as an outsider, this is clear. I am seen as a burden that stopped being helpful. When I was healthy and working, I would send money to my mom to help her make ends meet. I would directly deposit part of my paychecks into her account. I love my mom and I don’t like seeing her deal with hardship. When my family first moved to this area and my girlfriend and I had moved in together, I would periodically go, buy groceries and helpful things for the house, drive two-hundred and fifty miles to drop off the cargo. After I dropped it off, I would immediately turn around and drive home.

This put a lot of undue pressure on my life with my girlfriend. I was constantly putting my family before myself, but also above my partner. There was never any real appreciation for the gesture either. Looking back, none of it mattered in any way when I broke down. Years of financial help from me to my mother and my siblings at the expense of my own security and relationship gained me nothing in this family. It was just expected. I was expected to sacrifice myself for them and I wasn’t supposed to complain.

This toxic programming is one of the things that I struggle to fight with everyday. People-pleasing does not guarantee a positive experience. In fact, it is most likely going to cause a lot of problems in the later years, especially in the labor sector. Remember that fawning reflex I talked about earlier? Now, imagine an employer taking advantage of that and you and seeing no problem with doing so. You believe that pleasing the person will gain you good will. What you are actually doing is giving them permission to abuse your willingness to be helpful. I worked extra shifts, covered a shift on short notice, and drove to different locations dozens of miles away to “help.”

Because of the above, I had to begin creating boundaries that I was very uncomfortable about doing. Imagine being one person for decades and realizing that the person you are, is someone that people enjoy exploiting, then, you turn around and use your frustration at being used out on other people in your life. My partners didn’t get my full attention, rather, they were given some attention and a heaping spoonful of my displaced anger. How could they not resent me for that?

The thing about people-pleasing is that you mainly do it for people who are treating you poorly in some way. You are attempting to win over someone. You are attempting to be liked, at the cost of those who should matter to you, because those people likely came into your life because of who you are around them. You are cheating the people who really care and pampering the people who couldn’t care less.

Everything I covered above is the negative impacts that my trauma had on relationships. Additionally, by keeping the needs of others as my priority, I failed to think about what I wanted and who I wanted to be. I put myself and those who really loved me second in my life. Eventually those who care walk away if you are always going to be second. Why would they stay? It becomes a subconscious effort to drive people away, even though you want to have them in your life, but you just don’t know how to express it in a healthy manner and you don’t care about yourself enough to prioritize your own happiness that could be supported through those people who want nothing more than to just love you and enjoy your company.

There is a big problem in living life in that way. It is going to be a chaotic and lonely existence if you cannot acknowledge the problem and address working on it.

Reflections on my Journey with C-PTSD and the Lessons Learned

My journey has been a hard one and it continues to be a challenge each day. I am seeing improvements, but they are small one at a time. Much like looking at everything that you want to do around a dramatically messy house and seeing the entirety of the issue and becoming intimidated by the scope of the entire task.

“Just a piece at a time counts.”

The scope of the problem is intimidating. Just like an addiction. You aren’t likely to stop smoking all at once, but if you cut down from a pack a day, half a pack is progress. When you cut sugary sodas out of your diet, having a can once in a while isn’t going to destroy your progress. It isn’t the end of the world if you struggle a little with the changes in your life.

As I said above, when I snapped at the old man and then later at the woman at the grocery store, I was upset with my behavior. I did not like the outburst. I felt like I had failed myself and my work to change. My therapist was quick to pull me out of that mindset. My outburst was understandable, not validated, not acceptable, but understandable. I have triggers. The old man stalking me and invading my boundaries triggered me because of how much it felt intrusive in my day and the entitlement that man felt about harassing me and likely others made me extremely uncomfortable.

Later when he wanted to apologize, I saw him being inconsiderate to others, following me in the car while I was on my way to take care of business, making excuses for his behavior because his apology wasn’t going exactly as he had planned pushed me over the edge and I yelled at him in profanity.

My therapist says that I likely terrified him. I know in my heart that was exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to ensure that if he sees me on the street again, he will leave me alone. I do not want to have future encounters with this person.

Now that I know exactly where he lives, I have debated on apologizing to him. Explaining my reaction and having the alternative conversation that my therapist helped me to identify as vastly more productive. I haven’t. I won’t. Regardless of my behavior, I have achieved what I wanted to. He will not bother me again. I no longer look over my shoulder for him. I no longer feel like he might hurt me or others with his behavior. Although I had brought this to the attention of the police and they let it slip that the man does it all the time, they refused to do anything at all about the man’s behavior. A part of me understands that, for the most part, he has committed no crime.

My behavior likely made him think twice about doing this to anyone else. In the greater scheme of things I may have done more good than harm. I can live with that.

When I snapped at the woman at the grocery store, part of me felt bad. She really could just be a good Christian woman who wanted to use her faith as part of a pleasant greeting. There is that possibility. There is a shame in my behavior that day that I have trouble allowing to rest or shaking off.

When my therapist told me that my reaction is understandable, I had to allow her words to make my feelings on the subject tolerable. I could have handled that better, no doubt. Looking back on my life and traumatic events throughout my childhood, my issues with the faith started with my step dad. He used Christianity as a cudgel and would beat others with it liberally.

My family used to go to Church every Sunday, that was until the staff in charge of the Sunday school were unable to answer some really basic questions. Humiliated, my step dad stopped going because I would not unquestionably swallow the God pill. Worse, this man who would crush down on my neck so hard and so often I hear a grinding sound when I move my head and my neck is in constant pain, felt that he was a righteous man. How much further deluded can a person be? You harm others, abuse a child in your home, you chastise the child for having questions that embarrass you in church when they are simple questions that should be asked and answered easily.

My step dad once saw me in a t-shirt with a dragon upon it and forced me to take it off before I could enter his home, afterward forcing me to say, “Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior.” How is that supposed to create a desire to be of the faith? How is someone not supposed to acknowledge the hypocrisy of a man like that acting in that way and then telling you that you aren’t a good Christian?

In later life, he recruited my brothers with the same level of bullshit. Now, these lawless, self centered, damaged people all see me as a heretic and a person bound for hell.

Overall, I do as much good as I can each day and I don’t require the promise of paradise to do it. As Richard Medrington wrote in God Bless The Atheists,

“God bless the loving atheists who lay down

their one and only life for their friends

Who seek for no reward save that of knowing

that they do what seems to them to be right”

I know in my heart that I try my best to live a good life. One where I do not purposefully hurt people, judge harshly, demonize others, or cause chaos and destruction. If the God of my understanding decides to send me to hell, then I likely wouldn’t have liked their heaven at all.

When that woman invaded my personal space with her “in Jesus’ name,” she triggered the pain of all of those memories and experiences.

My trauma with the Church is also constantly evolving. I have friends that the ‘Merica Christians think deserve hell and damnation just because they love people that those Christans are currently demonizing. The ‘Merica HypoChristians want to control whether or not my friends can terminate a pregnancy and also want to remove birth control as an option to prevent it. They tell me that my Muslim friends aren’t to be trusted. They tell me that foreign people in our lands should be mistreated and hated.

The Church pays no taxes and collects an enormous revenue all the while manipulating our politics and causing upset and harm throughout the world. None of that is emulating the life of Jesus Christ. If your savior says love everyone and you decide to cut out some people from “everyone” you are not a Christian. End of discussion.

I have good reasons to be against the ‘Merica Christians. The trauma that I suffered under others in the name of Christ made me think long and hard about whether or not I want to be within their fold and I chose not to be for good reasons. I can be a good person without it.

Now that I am older and I have such a wealth of experience within the world, I am learning what has caused me issues in my life and I am doing my best to disarm those triggers. I know that I hurt others during that journey. I have no need to prove myself to others, especially when most of those people don’t take the time for some deep analysis, or rather, a lot of people do not have the means or understanding of how to work on it.

I think everyone should see a therapist, we all have a great deal of baggage that influences our behavior each day. Growth is part of life and you start to die when you stagnate because you think you already know everything.

I try to understand the point of view of others. The black and white binary that our society pushes upon us is foolish and toxic. There are shades of gray in everything.

When you live in a clannish the secrets stay within the family. I am breaking that code of conduct here, but what do I care? I’m not really a member of the family anyway, right? Everyone who is not family, blood family, is not to be trusted. They are outsiders. That fosters tribalism. You can go this far and no further. That becomes an echochamber of beliefs that often have no merit or evidence to make them substantial. They are weak against opinionists that tell them what they want to hear, with confirmation bias. This is why the great big orange moron crybaby was so appealing and still holds their attention today.

The possibility of 45 taking office again is less impactful now. I dread it. I worry about friends that he and his followers declare unfit to be a person in this country or an enemy to their agenda. I think of my government as unfit to govern and perverted by decades of corruption. All of that aside, I can feel myself getting better, in spite of all the chaos, in spite of my traumatized family labeling me horrible things.

I am building my boundaries and refusing to allow people to invade them. I am taking my meds, just like Carrie Fisher told me to. I am doing the work that will make me a functional person, one that is better than the person who has fallen into this state. I will be a person that I feel is a good companion to a partner and hopefully a good father one day. I have faith in myself growing and I am embracing that faith with both hands. I am listening to the people who say nice things about me and I am allowing their words to feel like truth in my heart. I am healing myself in this dark place and someday I will look back on my struggle with pride that I didn’t give up.

Know this from the bottom of my heart. I believe in you. I know you can do this. I know that looks nearly impossible to address your trauma and come out better for it. I think you are extremely brave to have started down this path.

You can do this. Truly. You will be you again. You will love. You will thrive, I promise.