don't know why. but i do.

Telling stories is hard work, especially when it's a good story, a meaningful story, one that requires. There is the planning, the thinking, the rearranging, the re-rearranging, the decisions of which part do I tell you first, and is writing the story out of order going to detract from the things and the stuff.

And there's the remembering.  It is hard work to remember.  I'm thirty-three, did I tell you that?  I should have a brain chock-full of thirty-three(ish) years of memories, and I don't.  What I have is a big, foggy mess, and memories pop out of the fog like the boogey-man.  Sometimes that guy just startles me for a moment, and I am able to move on.  But there are times when I am completely overwhelmed by the memory of how a moment felt to me.

I'm in one of those icky overwhelmed moments this week.  I try to find the words to describe what it was like to realize I was the object of intensely perverse desire, and I fail.  I'm sure there are words I could use, but my brain just can't sort it all out.  My sad little brain is running in circles trying to create reason where there is none.

It's funny, sort of, that this is giving me so much trouble.  Nothing actually happened.  Nobody touched me, nobody made me do anything.  But the feeling is so powerful, even today.  It still chokes me, it still has its fist planted firmly in my gut.

And I realize this: I have been walking around the elephant that is my past.  I have glossed over situations that are shocking for a reason that escapes me.  I'm sure self-preservation is a part of it, after all, I did live with and near my family for quite a while.  This avoidance served its purpose, but ignoring the things that happened, making light of the events of my life is not going to cut it any more.

I need to process.  I need this process.  I need to pass through.

Because I will not be owned by the choices of the people around me.  I will not be held hostage by the fog in my mind because it might hurt somebody's feelings.  I need to be my own priority.