My abusers wanted me dead.

(TW: abuse, suicide, sexual assault.) 

Maybe they didn’t know it, but my abusers wanted me dead.

They might not have understood it themselves (or maybe some of them did) but they wanted me gone — to extinguish any part of me that made me ME. They wanted all of my compliance, skills, and entertainment value, with none of needs, inconsistencies, mess, or candor.

They only wanted a walking blow-up doll. They only wanted an unpaid secretary. They only wanted grandchildren. What they didn’t want was my humanity.

And I took that to heart. I tried to kill myself multiple times because I keenly felt that I took up too much room. I genuinely believed I was an abuser for the rare times I stuck up for myself. When I would get motion sick on car trips, I learned to hold it in so I wouldn’t create a problem. There are now parts of ME that want me dead.

This is not a unique situation. Everyone who abuses someone and violates their self-hood is complicit in that person’s disappearance.

I am still digging through my psyche and using what I find to build up a Self that I can live with. I spend all day in bed thinking about the ways they tried to kill me and how I survived. I didn’t survive, in a way. There’s no part of me that wasn’t touched by their stabbing fingers.

I am still learning to breathe.