Ramblings
2002-04-05 || 11:05 a.m.

Hey, having a black day.

Well it started yesterday; don't know why - it just came out of nowhere. I hate that. I know its me, probably some sort of chemical imbalance. But I hate that feeling of helplessness and most of all hopelessness.

what I need to do is to go and carry on with my spring cleaning. That should help. I've still got the shelf above the doorway to do in the kitchen - the one with all my shit on. God if I didn't have so much clutter I wouldn't have to do so much dusting but I think I like it so much because I have some sort of personality defect. Having stuff around me says to me that I do actually exist. Sometimes its just so hard to understand. Is there a point to any of this? I wish I knew. Some days I truly believe that there is and others ... well, there's nothing.

Up until four years ago I had unshakeable faith. Really. Rebecca remembers it happening. It was frightening and horrible. It was like everything shattered and nothing made sense anymore. All the belief systems I had spent the best part of 25 years building up suddenly turned out to have been built on sand. Although my life had been quite hard up until then, mainly due to me and the way I just AM, I still had faith in the things in which I believed. By nature I'm an optimistic pessimist. I truly believed in reincarnation and I felt sure there was a way to link A followed by B followed by C to the spherical randomness of time. One day I woke up and I just wasn't sure anymore. This may not sound too terrible. I mean isn't it just philosophical wanking to be bothered about a loss of faith? But for me it was awful.

My life's been crap. I like to think I'm an intelligent, resourceful, kind, caring person who strives to do the right thing but this only applies to other people - not to ME. I don't apply any of that to me and that is wrong. For a start its had an adverse affect on Rebecca. When I had her the one thing I was certain about was that she wasn't going to have an upbringing like mine and her relationship with me would be nothing like mine with my mother. Stupidly I thought (well naively really) that this could be achieved by just doing the opposite to what my mum did. Of course, its not as simple as that. I just created a whole new set of problems. My own mother constantly put me down. By the age of three I can remember her saying stuff to me like ' I don't like you, I have to love you because you're mine' and ' the fairies took my real child and left me with a changeling' (!). I was sensitive and this hurt. By eight I can remember having made the decision to never, NEVER speak to any children I may have in the way I was spoken to. I can vividly remember the night I lay in bed and decided this. It was important. A milestone. I understood the power of words. Being hit never really bothered me, but the spite did.

I was lucky. I had my dad. Although unfortunately he was quite weak and didn't stick up for me but he did love me. Unfortunately (again) for his own sanity, he worked abroad when I was a child so I didn't see him that much. But when he was at home we just used to play together all the time. I know it made my mum jealous. Me and my dad would spend all our time outside. We played a lot of badminton, football (I always had to be in goal!), cricket, skipping, tennis. Any sport. You name it.

Well, this is all bollocks isn't it?

childhood memory wanking now.

Anyway, the criticisms have left me extremely self-critical. Of course, as a young mum bringing up a daughter mostly alone I kept my promise and never spoke to Rebecca the way I was spoken to. However, she picked up on the way I speak about myself and now lacks self-confidence herself. I could really kick myself for that.

What was I going to talk about next? Oh, yeah, my relationships. I went from being verbally abused as a child to being verbally and physically abused as an adult. The verbal abuse is not so hard to talk about but the physical abuse is just shameful. You can't tell people because they just really do not want to know and I don't mean this in a critical sense. I mean its difficult for everyone. Its the reason why society sweeps it under the carpet. The reason why the police call it 'just a domestic'. Its even more difficult when you walk about constantly trying to put the world to rights and yet you can't deal with your own situation. Ridiculous. Its coming up for five years since I was badly attacked but even on that day, knowing that he would have killed me if I hadn't have got away, I still couldn't tell anyone. I just walked around the streets until the evening and then went home to find him in bed claiming not to know he had done anything. Maybe he had forgotten. I cannot say.

Has writing this down made me feel better? No, not really, but I shall leave it here for posterity. Maybe it will help someone else, I don't know.

The thing that makes me feel the worst of all is that if I hadn't have been abused as a child I don't think I would be the kind of adult I am today and yet saying that makes no sense because I am certainly not advocating child abuse as a good thing. But I do think that I reacted to my suffering in a way unique to me and that's the best way to look at it. Of course statistics show that c.80% of victims become abusers themselves. That's high odds to try to fight against. In reality its true. A few years back, at Christmas, I spoke to my mum about the way she treated me. I tried to do it in a kind way, I didn't want to hurt her feelings, after all it is in the past, but I wanted to know why - how she felt. I told her how she had made me feel and she said to me that of course she knew how I felt because she'd been treated the same way as a child. I said 'well then, why on earth did you do it to your own child?'. She replied that that is what you do isn't it? It was done to her, so she did it to me, that's just the way you do things.

Just as a final postscript here, her own mother is pretty frightening. When my sister was small she had toilet problems. She got really badly constipated. I would say it was stress. Anyway, my grandmother told my mum to tell my sister she didn't love her and she would soon be shitting fine.

I can't see why they couldn't see that my poor sister would probably have never shat again had that been the case. Thankfully that was one piece of advice my mother did not follow.

So, having lost my faith in anything other than the here and now, what do I hold onto? Well, faith and reliance in a spiritual sense is no good unless you have sorted the physical reality. Putting up with crap yet looking forwards to the great hereafter is just a good way of keeping us plebs in place. The meek will inherit the earth and all that just says to me religious capitalism. Have faith in other people. Do the right thing to those around you. How do you know what is 'the right thing'? Well, if it feels wrong its not right. Which leads onto another great philosophical question - is there such a thing as an innate sense of right and wrong? well it could be called your conscience but do we all have that? God, I don't know.

I suppose mainly I try to watch what I say and what I do. I'm aware that there's a fine line for many and a small comment could be a big deal to someone else.

The other thing of course is always to be aware of injustice and to SPEAK OUT. And this of course is a lot harder than it sounds.