A lesbian trauma odyssey. Read on, if you’re interested in drama and slice of life. Some posts will inevitably be longer than others, it will all depend on my energy and ability to stay focused.
It probably started a long time ago, well before the portions I’ll pick out. Therefore, there’s no good place to start. The best I can do is describe my state of mind at the time, which is difficult. Because it feels like forever ago. Because I feel as though nothing I say can really do justice to the totality of the situation that is my life. Because happenings begat happenings, all of which steamrolled into the person and mind that I am now. And try as I might to vomit it out, it’s as if it’s stuck, and the best I could do is muster a dry heave, palms planted desperately against a cold cement floor.
I had been dating men. Even falling in love with them. While I was lukewarm on their bodies, the attachment was real, and so I lead myself into believing that it was just the way it was supposed to be. Surely it wasn’t a crime to love a mind, and thus I wasn’t picky with form, because form mattered little in the scheme of it all - especially if he had a good heart. In fact, I had prided myself on my nonpickiness, something I later came to regret as I realized how deeply I had neglected myself for 28 years.
I was with Amae at the time. He loved me, but he was selfish. He lived to protect himself, and wasn’t interested in sharing the kind of relationship that I wanted or needed. He would lie, and gaslight me as he lied, all while trying to convince me that I was a narcissist or a psychopath as I reacted in tears and panic attacks to his manipulation. All of it, so that he could justify being in love with another woman, a married woman, of whom he nurtured a relationship with primarily online. The nature of which was largely hidden from me, and even while I was laying in the hospital having major surgery, he chose to spend time with her rather than stay by my side. Eventually, we broke up, and stayed broke up. And a month before that is when I met Pilz.
Roughly 6 months after that, my father died. A shell of a father, who after years of being his caretaker, was found laying face down in a pool of his own fluids and sputum. They say his lungs seized up. A terrible way to die. Alone, on the floor of his room, afraid.
I end up needing to pause and breathe through the wave of pain and grief I experience as I type this, shaken by something I cannot fully grasp. Death. A father who was more of a burden than a parent, who tortured my family through childhood, who drank and smoked himself into his own demise. His life was a tragedy, and thus I feel as though I’ve upheld his legacy, born of his trauma, shouldering the load of his abuse through the altered lens of my maladapted psyche. I was the only one who loved him, when he died. Somehow, caring for him gave me purpose, and his life gave me hope that if anyone could love a monster like that, then surely someone could love me.
And so I stayed with awful partner after awful partner. An oversimplified resignation, I was also wheelchair bound at the time, struggling to thrive through cancers that left me overwhelmed and near-helpless. It left its mark on me for many years to come, I’m sure I’ll need to retread this at some point. The disorganization of blogging is frustrating.
At this point, Amae and I had kept contact, but we never did end up reuniting or fixing things, only attached until eventually that faded, then broke. My fathers death was a major blow, I was catatonic for months, paralyzed by the new financial burdens it gave me, and the constant nightmares of him dying alone somewhere, calmly begging me to let him go, and that he loved me after all. I couldn’t function. And during this time, Pilz became my best friend and acted much as a lighthouse, someone who told me I was loved no matter how far they were from me, no matter where or what we did.
Pilz was a woman that I had met on Facebook. As Amae was from Germany, I had initially sought to learn German in an attempt to feel closer and better connected to him mentally and culturally. When we broke up, I was determined to carry on with learning another language, and take that part of the relationship for myself. And so I joined an English/Deutsch learning group and sent out an introduction paragraph, bonding immediately with an alternative girl who I would weeks later discover to be gay.
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