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In the pantheon of trauma, the evilest, sadistic, and most vile leaves the victim alive and foreboding for the rest of his or her life. With a systematic depression and addictive behaviors, it brings us to a down swell of false pride and bravado. An experience that leaves us hollow and shallow, looking for the smallest depth of water to satiate the desired thirst for touch and acceptance.
What we do within these moments of trauma will guarantee us a false title through life as a victim. While I lived life as a victim for 33 years, I have turned that into the life of a survivor, thriver, and giver for the past 11 years.
It is with a desire to give you the enlightenment that I achieved, which can only be given through the eyes of a person who knows what monsters look like. They often do not come with different colors, horns, and many eyes. They come with loving hands, and touching condolences of acceptance and false love.
Be wary the stranger but keep your eyes on the accepted family member or family friend. They stalk their victims in the shadow of acceptance and take their prey with the smile of a loved one not knowing. The monsters footprints will be left all over the heart and soul of the children that it has left in its wake.
Little does the world understand or know of the monster, yet one in four girls and one in six boys will know the touch of this monster. They will be vastly turned into the deep so that their perceived bias and passion against sex abuse is turned into an evil that judges those that are falsely accused.
The same footpaths will lead us to false Robert Frost poems that make us feel that we are traveling The Road Less Traveled, but it is settled by the dust of the dead skin, and the dreams turned into ashes that have swallowed the footprints prior to our existence. Constant siren’s call of alcohol and drugs leave us to believe that we are confronting when all we are doing is numbing.
We are following the path of our predecessors of nonconformity and believing that we are unique and alone in this. I tell you now, and I tell you this with as much heart as I can muster,
“You are not alone; you have brothers and sisters that have known the touch of the monster.”
We know the Sinister eyes and the Blazing touch. We know the concerns of loved ones for the false accusations of endangerment to our loved family members. Too often we concern ourselves with only the capture of monsters and give too little attention to the survivors of monsters.
We spout the monsters virtues “They were great people. I would never have thought he/she would.” “I know them they would never have done this,” “ What was she wearing?”, “Why did they put themselves in this situation?” Never asking the correct questions, “Why couldn’t they control their actions?” “Why would it matter what they were wearing?”, “Why was he/she there to take advantage of their victim’s situation?”.
I would argue there are even more important questions to ask. What will the survivor do to find themselves in recovery? What can we as a society due to help the brave ones who can’t come forward yet? What should we start to stop this abduction of the heart and soul of children?
The measured step of progress is something we should always maintain in dogged pursuit of strong mental health. This is the endless path of recovery. Too many of my brothers and sisters are left on the side of the road in bright orange bags left there by people who cared enough to gather them up but wait for someone to come along and take them the rest of the way. The saddest part of this analogy is that too often those bright orange bags are destroyed in fire and compaction. Which rings true for the survivors of abuse, instead of incinerators and compactors its prisons, drug houses, funeral homes, and maybe just maybe crisis centers.
We as a society lack the compassion to help those in true need. We have lost people to drugs and alcohol but what we have truly lost is their contributions to society because they have only tried to hide themselves to no longer feel the pain of being raped in more ways than a physical manifestation.
We owe it to future generations to pick up those brothers and sisters in bright orange bags and passionately take them to those crisis centers where the healing journey can grow into the beautiful bright, tenacious dandelion that survives even the most ardent of poisons.
Thusly helping them follow in Robert Frost’s Poem and find the other path that is often the path less traveled.
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Photo by Oliver Roos on Unsplash
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