Idk who needs to hear this but as much as “nurses and people that work in the medical field in general deserve to be treated better” is a thing that is true and also should be talked about more, the time to do that is not and has literally never been When Disabled People Are Talking About The Medical Abuse They Face From Them
Anyway this is Still not a fucking “these two things can Coexist” post
i am an advocate for finding the right doctor, but seeing a bunch of doctors say “but there are good ones! you just have to find them!” is proof that they are so far removed from the reality of what people (especially marginalized people) experience when going to physicians, psychologists, psychiatrists, etc.
people die because of how doctors treat and dismiss them. poc are constantly treated like they’re lying. fat people do not get listened to because every symptom must be due to weight. addicts are regularly treated less than human or like their health doesn’t matter. women get told they’re exaggerating or are weak. mentally ill people get pills thrown at them after a 15 minute psychiatry session.
i’m not saying people should not try to find a good doctor or that good doctors aren’t out there- my current psychiatrist is fantastic. but a bunch of medical professionals acknowledging how shitty the system is in passing and telling people to just ‘keep trying’ shows how little they understand that patients are too exhausted, too traumatized, and too poor to go from doctor to doctor, hoping one actually takes them seriously.
i am an advocate for finding the right doctor, but seeing a bunch of doctors say “but there are good ones! you just have to find them!” is proof that they are so far removed from the reality of what people (especially marginalized people) experience when going to physicians, psychologists, psychiatrists, etc.
people die because of how doctors treat and dismiss them. poc are constantly treated like they’re lying. fat people do not get listened to because every symptom must be due to weight. addicts are regularly treated less than human or like their health doesn’t matter. women get told they’re exaggerating or are weak. mentally ill people get pills thrown at them after a 15 minute psychiatry session.
i’m not saying people should not try to find a good doctor or that good doctors aren’t out there- my current psychiatrist is fantastic. but a bunch of medical professionals acknowledging how shitty the system is in passing and telling people to just ‘keep trying’ shows how little they understand that patients are too exhausted, too traumatized, and too poor to go from doctor to doctor, hoping one actually takes them seriously.
“Some patients watch as the harm caused is covered up and no one is held accountable. Others feel they have no where to go to speak up and are left feeling isolated in their pain. As such, betrayal trauma is left unaddressed and festers like an untreated wound.”
“Each break in trust adds up. The effects are cumulative and carry over from one interaction to the next and in so doing, betrayal trauma breaks a person. Still, most patients have to crawl back to the very people and system that hurt them. They are forever tied to those who continue to inflict harm.”
“If I only had a common illness like diabetes I’d be able to access competent medical care without having to go doctor shopping.”
No, you wouldn’t.
The more time I spend talking shop with other diabetics the more I see doctors routinely screwing up our care and treatment. Everything from bullying us into weight loss to the point of developing eating disorders to withholding needed medication because they’re worried we’ll get fat if our bodies are able to process carbs into energy. People with symptomatic, urgently high blood sugars being given 500mg off metformin and sent home from the ER before they’re even stabilized.
It ain’t about disease rarity it’s about fatphobia, racism, classism, and sexism.
For the first time in my life, I’m tempted to become one of those people who like, send nice cards to their doctor’s office.
It’s so completely the opposite of my whole energy. I’m not actually going to do it I don’t think. Just the idea of sending someone a greeting card usually gives me crippling anxiety. And I’ve already repeatedly told my doctor and his secretary how awesome they both are.
But. This. Fucking. Office. Do you know how rare it is to find a doctor who will even take your medical issues halfway fucking seriously when you’re fat & mentally ill and full of mysterious autoimmune symptoms?
Let alone one who listens to me intently and respectfully and takes my issues with those things even more seriously than I do?
Do you know how rare it is to find a secretary who will go out of her way to contact me on my terms when I need to schedule a sick visit because I’m having a depressive episode? Like, I’m usually relieved if a secretary just doesn’t fuck with my appointment times in super obnoxious ways at the last minute. This is next level.
These people are gems and I just feel like they should have a visual reminder of that fact to pin up on their wall and look a every day. I am not the sort of person who has this thought process under normal circumstances but this. Fucking. Office.
- if they do not like that you research your disorder/s and treatment/s - if they do not explain the reason/s behind certain treatment/medication that they are prescribing you - if they are reluctant/refuse to let you access your medical records - if their first response to symptoms is medication without any talk therapy - if they say they “don’t believe in therapy” - if they say they “don’t believe in medication” - if they insist on seeing your parent/legal guardian without you being present - if they tell you that there are no other treatment available if you complain about your current treatment/medication not working/having unmanageable side effects - if they diagnose you without explaining how they came to that diagnosis, what it entails, and which treatments you have at your disposal - if they fall asleep during a session (you’re laughing but it happened, several times, and i’m not boring) - if they assure you that you cannot have [insert disorder here] because you are too young/wealthy/poor/fat/skinny/smiling/old/whatever bs (the only valid reasons for not having a disorder is if you do not meet the minimum criteria for it, age/body/ethnicity/etc are not criteria) - if they tell you that you obviously do not want/are not ready to get help (that’s a super abusive technique, would only see this as a valid comment to make if you are pressured into seeing them by someone who has authority over you) - if they insist on you continuing to take a medication despite the side effects very negatively affecting you (for example: if you are recovering from an ED and you get the “gaining weight” side effect and that is very triggering to you) - if they are flippant about/disregard your feelings
i’m probably forgetting a lot. feel free to add.
EDIT: I made a blog to vent about bad mental health practitioners @shrinksfromhell. Check it out and submit your stories!
You can also apply most of these to standard physicians. Useful list, folks.
These people are supposed to be providing you with a service. If they’re doing a terrible job, it’s time to “fire” them and find someone new.
more things:
-they tell you that they do not “believe in diagnosis” when you bring it up as a goal for your recovery.
-they refuse to take into account a previous mental health professional’s diagnosis/reports or get in contact with them
-they threaten you when you try to keep details private that you are either unready to share or are afraid of the repurcussions of sharing
ie. a) you: “i was traumatized but don’t feel comfortable sharing the details right now/can’t talk about it without getting really upset/will have flashbacks or dissociate if i talk about it.”
them: “well if you don’t want to tell me then we can’t work together”
or
b) you: “i’m self harming and wanted to tell you because i want to be honest with you, but i know i am not in danger of dying and do not plan to kill myself/do not want to die”
them: “how are you self harming?”
you: “i do not want to share how i’m self harming because i am scared of being forcibly hospitalized, but i know that i am not in danger of dying and do not want to die”
them: “well if you think it’s so bad you can’t tell me, then you obviously need to be in the hospital”
-tells you that your diagnosis is too rare/serious, and they will need to see you express symptoms in person before they will believe you or treat you for it
(bonus points if it’s a previous professional diagnosis from that psychologist they refuse to contact, double bonus points if you also have an extensive personal acccount of symptoms going back several years ad several writeups for mh professionals but they refuse to look at it)
okay well that got a little. personally charged. these are all things that have happened or are personally happening to me right now and i’m so. fucking. tired.
if you need an ambulance and you use a wheelchair that doesn’t fold, they will force you to leave it behind. wherever it is, wherever you are. just abandon your autonomy and ability to move around and potentially tens of thousands of dollars of equipment
imagine if you needed an ambulance and they said fine but you can’t bring your legs
people have taken issue with my use of the word ‘force’, so, after rolling my eyes so hard i can now see my brain, i will clarify that, no, they can’t 'force’ you to do anything. they will simply not take you to the hospital if you refuse to leave your wheelchair behind.
…but don’t they give you a wheelchair AT the hospital?
@lonewolf23k I think you’re missing the point. Not all wheelchair’s are the same.
Personal wheelchairs are expensive pieces of equipment designed to meet a person’s specific needs and are very different than the type used in hospitals to ferry patients around. And being force to just abandon it randomly not only leaves the wheelchair at risk of being damaged or stolen, makes it difficult to retrieve after a hospital stay, and can leave the owner very vulnerable. I want to compare the situation described as somewhat like being forced to leave your car, unlocked with the keys inside, in a random location while praying nothing happens to it. Except worse.
A Hospital wheelchair is primarily designed for medical staff to transport a patient from place to place rather than independent mobility. They also aren’t designed with the same supports or features that a wheelchair bound individual may need to get around.
Assistive devices related to mobility are rarely interchangeable or ‘one size fits all’.
@lonewolf23k also i don’t want a fucking stranger to be in control of where i move or how. especially given how routinely abusive hospital staff are to disabled people.
would YOU like to go into a hostile environment where many people want to hurt or kill you, without your legs?
As I insinuated in my last post ‘Akane Knows Sign,’ Kagari loses his voice whenever he’s stressed (depressed?), like really stressed.
The reason for this is bc the Medical Facility somehow loses any sort of knowledge of the human psyche and believes there’s no consequence in ignoring a child for years, telling him to keep quiet, and dosing him in mind-numbing & probably debilitating drug when he’s slight stressed then leaving him there. (I’m not even a small fraction educated in medical to know that it’s shit logic.)
Of course, Kagari’s mind immediately cuts his voice off when he’s stressed bc he’s been forced to. He has been told, out loud or in-between the lines, that his voice didn’t matter, that it was pointless to say anything bc it would be ignored or punished, so it turns from not saying to just can’t.
Before Akane, the team didn’t really know what to do with this. How do you help someone when you can barely help yourself? They try (Gino is a bit nicer, Masaoka teaches him new recipes, Kou either does some sparring or helps pick out a book, Yayoi shows him music, and Shion babies) but there’s only so much they can do. It also sucks that when the stress and depression build on him, he goes into a corner and curls up, staring at the far wall. The division can’t do anything due to the fact that he can’t be bought on missions. (Technology can only go far on a physically fine body.)
This isn’t to say that Akane magically saves him with sign. Abuse like that doesn’t go away so easily or ever. It’s just nice to know that he does have a voice that’s fluid and doesn’t rely on the slow pace of texting. There’s also the fact in how the silence that’s haunted him can be filled up without the need of actual sound. He keeps his voice. It helps greatly that Akane is a mythos literature nerd who excitedly talks abt different cultures’ myths while also enjoying back to back conversation. She invites ppl to conversate, which Kagari needs.
“what do we do about people who fake disabilities to get ssi” we throw them a fucking party for pulling off the most difficult and unrewarding grift of all time. literally i don’t care
i wholeheartedly embrace the fuck-the-systemness solidarity of this and therefore have to make sure i understand both sides … so we’re saying ‘fakes’ do not hurt the ppl with true disabilities who have to fight tooth and nail for benefits?
sadly i have firsthand work experience in this area, via medical office with FT social worker, and i promise, the folks ‘faking’ would be the last people you’d want to party with…thankfully our docs were EXTREMELY rigid about identifying said grifters. honorable mentions, 100% real:
• 40 yo M: “can you just give me disability, i need time away from work to pursue acting career. they don’t give us FMLA or anything”
• mid-aged couple: sentenced to community service by local court, requesting SSID status to exempt them from having to fulfill. the task what assembling mailers
•45 yo F: “i just want the placard for better parking spots at work. can’t you just get the doctor to say i’m disabled?”
•50 yo M: orthopedic injuries presented to obtain opioids and SSID benefits, MD reviews all MRIs and CTs, clean. patient denied both requests. storms out of office, throwing his cervical collar down in waiting area on way out as limp magically disappears
i’ll open myself to critique here, suffice to say, i cannot help but think such characters have not contributed to the current screening state of this program. and anyone not getting what they actually need bc of it is anything short of infuriating for me. it’s super fucked, thinking about every single actually disabled person denied for every person faking that has been approved. not who that limited pool of collected public funds is for.
The grifters you have mentioned are painfullyeasy to identify. Many of the literally told you that they were faking it. They do not nearly justify the incredible difficulty involved in the process of actually getting approved.
You can be fully, provably disabled and you will get denied. People who judge your case often ignore evidence collected from everyone from family members to doctors to deny people. The reasons they give that you can keep working display a stunning amount of ignorance to how disabilities actually work or are intentionally attempting to deny people the tiny pittance of money given to people who desperately need it for basic survival.
The average approval time in my state is 21 months. Nearly two years going without what you desperately need to survive. If you try to earn some money in that time just to keep yourself alive it will be used as evidence against your case. No matter how damaging that work is or how unsustainable it is in the long term. For this reason many disabled people are forced into illegal and dangerous work simply because they cannot survive for two fucking years without any help, such as sex work. If they get caught trying to survive it will be used to deny the claim.
Now one might think that you could maybe save up before hand and make it through the process that way. Not so. With only a few exceptions, if you have at any time in the process more than 2000 dollars to your name it will be used as evidence against you. This 2000 limit will continue indefinitely as long as you are receiving benefits, and the government will monitor your bank account at all times so if it goes over your benefits will be canceled.
They will frequently demand for you to justify how you survived in the intervening period. How did you pay rent? How did you buy food? They will use your answer against you when they make your decision.
The amount of pointless, redundant, and difficult paperwork involved is another major barrier. Of course while they may take upwards of 6 to 9 months each step of the way, but you might receive a piece of mail that you have to respond to within days or it will be used against your case, or your case may be denied outright.
The form I had to initially fill out was 21 pages long. My wife and I both had to fill out another 14 page long document. I had to fill out details on the make and model of my car, because apparently people are worried that I might be driving a sports car. If you car is too nice they will use it against you. You are only allowed one car ever even if practically you really need two.
I attempted to apply for disability a few years ago. I messed up a couple questions because I did not understand them and it was used to deny my claim. I had to start from scratch, including resetting that 21 month waiting period.
The fact that I am a stay at home mom taking care of my daughter best I can is used against me.
The entire process is so strict and difficult to navigate that there are successful businesses called “disability advocates” that are practically required for a successful case. Fortunately their are laws that say they can only get paid if the claim is successful, and there is a cap on how much they cost so its nothing to lose. Of course this involves filling out even more paperwork, communicating with people, more work and more effort.
You need medical professionals to back up your claim or it will almost certainly be denied. Only Doctors are good enough. Mentally disabled and can’t afford several weeks of sessions? Physically disabled but you can’t afford a specialist doctor? Your chances of approval just dropped like a rock.
If at any time you act in such a way that isn’t stereotypically disabled there is a significant chance it will be used against you. The minimum capabilities required to go through the process are practically evidence against your case as well - for example, being capable of a coherent explanation of your symptoms and difficulties, Even if you broke down crying during the interview for a half hour because it is so difficult, is seen as proof that you are “capable of communication”, which was the exact reason given for my last denial. In the minds of the people making the determination I was capable of communication, which meant there had to be some job somewhere I was capable of performing.
If you have good days that fact will be used against you. If you go to an interview and don’t show glaringly obvious symptoms there is a good chance it will mean you will be denied.
The entire process is designed to discourage attempts. It is split into three stages. The first stage has only a 30% approval rate. The people you are talking about above never get far enough to even count against that approval rate. There is evidence in the form of leaked documents that people who do qualify are rejected instead simply to lengthen their approval process and discourage people to get them to drop out of their attempt. The first appeal has around a 10% approval rate. Only at the third stage, an actual court hearing with a judge, is there an approval rate in your favor at just over 50%. These three stages each may last between 6 and 9 months, which is why the approval process takes nearly two years.
At every step you will have to fill out more redundant paper work.
Those approval stats, by the way, are assuming you got one of those disability advocates. If you didn’t your chances drop significantly at every stage.
Almost all of these things are so strict in the name of “catching frauds” who may not absolutely need it.
The process is extremely difficult, humiliating, is difficult to survive, and is likely to fail. Almost no one gets approved their first time attempting the process, even if they plainly on the face of it absolutely need the benefits , because the process is so difficult. So a fraud would have to go through that entire painful process and succeed. So what do they get?
It will be around 700 to 800 dollars a month at most. Not enough to really live on, your going to be making hard choices between medicine, food, and shelter. You wont ever have nice things or live comfortably. And it comes with major restrictions that will force you into poverty and keep you there as long as you are part of the program. Any reasonable attempt you might make to better your own situation will be used to take your benefits away, you are not allowed to lift yourself out of a painful, difficult life of poverty. Many disabled individuals have to continue dangerous and illegal work, like sex work, in order to make ends meet.
By the way, if someone is doing sex work on the side and is caught, that will be reported as “fraudulent” abuse of the system. There are a good deal of other types of “fraud” claims used to deny benefits to people who need them and inflate the reported fraud numbers to justify these harsh screening methods.
This is what is meant by the original post. The screening process is so impossibly over the top and the benefits so little that the idea that fraud is a real problem on any scale is laughable. But it continues to be something people are obsessed over. Obviously we would not like actual frauds, but the entire structure of disability benefits is built around the obsessive attempt to prevent even one fraudulent case no matter how many actual disabled people suffer and die for it. “Fraud” is first and foremost an excuse to deny disabled people the tiny amount of help they desperate need just to survive.
So if somehow in some extremely rare case a person actually goes through that entire extremely difficult process just so they can live in poverty and pain with a pittance of survival money then I literally do not give a single fuck and neither should you. Stop obsessing over the minuscule chance of fraud and start recognizing that the insane screening process and laws in place are not due to supposed fraud attempts, it’s due to a desire from those who put those laws and screening process in place for us to just die because they see us as nothing but a drain on society.
Statistically speaking your “extremely rigid” docs are most likely denying tons of legitimate cases because they do not understand disabilities, which is extremelycommon (far more common than not), and using these honorable mention cases as justification for how good they are at clocking ‘fakes’. They are the reason we have to perform humiliating stereotypes of disability at every turn or be denied. They are virtually certainly one of the biggest parts of the problem.
a few things to keep in mind as you talk about the current situation with roe v wade:
women are not the only people who can get pregnant, and therefore are not the only people who get abortions or the only people affected by restrictions to abortion access — sincerely, a man with a uterus
the recent legislation against trans people transitioning, particularly as it relates to trans men and transmasc people, has been justified by the politicians supporting it using the argument that transitioning jeopardizes our reproductive potential, which they see as more important than our actual lives. if you support the legislation against us or have been silent about it, you cannot claim to be fighting for reproductive rights. you don’t get to only care about it when it affects you — if you let them get away with that rhetoric against trans people, you give them the power to use it against you. if you can’t stand in solidarity with us, you will end up standing against yourself
please don’t forget us in these conversations, and don’t be silent about the attacks on our bodily autonomy
all of this is connected — criminalizing transition, overturning roe v wade, it’s all working toward the same goal. if you care about one part of it, you have to care about all of it, or any efforts against it willfail
if you don’t care enough about us to fight our oppression for our sake, do it because you cannot fight against your own oppression without fighting ours too
Hmm I wonder why someone who has just been electrocuted and is being forcibly restrained would enter into a panic and frantically resist? Surely nothing about this situation would register to the brain as a serious danger to one’s safety and naturally trigger one’s instinctual fight or flight response? No it must be the fault of an obscure mental illness I’ve just invented.
Excited delirium, originally identified by pathologist Charles Wetli to account for the deaths of nineteen Black prostitutes due to “sexual excitement” while under the influence of cocaine; the women later turned out to be victims of a serial killer.[26] The condition is primarily found in people under police restraint, especially after being Tasered,[27] and, while it is not in the ICD-10 or DSM-5, it is promoted by a number of doctors, many of whom are on the payroll of Axon, the manufacturer of Tasers.[27]
[Then the header of the Wikipedia page “Drapetomania”, as follows.]
Drapetomania was a supposed mental illness that, in 1851, American physician Samuel A. Cartwright hypothesized as the cause of enslaved Africans fleeing captivity.[1]: 41 Slave life was so pleasant, the official view was, that only the mentally ill would want to run away. In actuality, the desire for freedom is a natural human impulse.[2][3]
more on the effects of T in females. vulvodynia and clitorodynia mean that this woman is suffering from chronic, shooting pains in her vulva and clitoris.
I don’t even want to write about this, but I want it to be written, and maybe, if I peel back the layers slow enough, I can explain why.
[content notes: graphic description]
I don’t like reading posts like this. Not always. That’s layer one. Sometimes I get something out of them, and sometimes I don’t. It’s hard to gauge what ratio of comfort to discomfort I’ll get from them – what will work as reassurance and what will just make me feel sick. And I think that’s mostly a matter of how it’s all framed. I guess I need a window into what’s happening as it’s being written, some kind of clue into what the author is experiencing as they’re sharing it, something to orient me, because otherwise, I tend to get sucked into the story itself, experiencing that and that only, stuck inside it without a context to step out into, and come away feeling worse. I want to put up some kind of barrier there. I want you to hear the author, me, thinking this through, as a sort of overlay, holding the subject at arm’s length. I don’t know how to do this otherwise.
Layer two, then. I don’t want to face up to it. Not for what it is, but for what it means about the relationships I still have now. We never talked about it after it happened. Now I’m wondering if we should have. But you won’t understand what I mean by that until I tell you.
I don’t want to put words to it. But I know, also, the strange relief I’ve found in hearing others’ reflections on their own stories, especially stories they wonder don’t “count,” and I’ve found a strange gratification in mentally retagging this memory as CSA, almost as much as I found relief in finally, finally letting myself ID as ace. By now I’ve mostly quieted a voice that says it’s silly and pathetic to even write about this with the tone I’m setting. And maybe that, itself, is a layer three as much as a reason to write this anyway.
My culture gives us very specific narratives of sexual violence – a short script, narrow roles, cardboard characters with tightly scripted lines that don’t account for the diversity of reality. Any deviation from the imposed mold feels “fake.” The way I figure, the more you hear the real stories that don’t follow that short script, the easier it might be discard it altogether. It should help. I can hope.
I, at least, know I wouldn’t be writing this at all if it weren’t for the others who wrote before me.
I don’t really know where the layers begin and end, really. I won’t be numbering any more.
Here’s what part of my mind tells me: CSA by grown adults is done by parents, or family, or mentors, or coaches, or teachers, or older friends, or older partners, and above all, by pedophiles. Labeling something as CSA goes hand in hand with accusing someone of being a pedophile. Or so I’m supposed to think, I guess. It’s different maybe if the perpetrator was the same age. But a grown adult? Has to have been a pedophile for it to really be CSA. Which, I’m not sure he was, so it can’t be. Determining that is part of the criteria. If I don’t think of him as a pedophile, then it can’t have been CSA. That’s how it works, right? Just because I know how I experienced it doesn’t mean I know how he did – and that’s what matters, right?
Or so I tell myself.
I’m putting this out there because I can’t stand the thought of someone thinking I hadn’t already thought through all this myself.
That’s one of my hangups, in all this. Calling it CSA feels like it wouldn’t be fair to him, or to her. Abuse is only done by abusers, after all, or something. And if I can’t be sure enough, can’t be confident enough in categorizing either of them that way, can’t make myself believe in that, then I know I’m not supposed to call it CSA at all.
And then, as a complication, there’s the small matter of having seen, more than once, in multiple ways, an element of my experience written in as an explicit exception to what counts as CSA.
As we’re all supposed to know, it can’t be CSA if it was a legitimate medical examination by a doctor.
Which, it was. A legitimate medical examination. I have to assume.
I find myself wondering now if the people who know me will draw a link between this and other things they know about me, like this will explain why I think X Y or Z. I shouldn’t deny it, I guess. Seems fitting, almost, in a twisted way. I’m anxious of people attributing to it overly much, though, even if it contributed somehow, as much as anything.
There’s really too much in the way of disorganized anxious thoughts to fit in one post. I’m trying.
But yes, that’s one thing I want people to understand, I guess: that doctors aren’t exempt. That a medical license doesn’t put you above the possibility. That seeing someone say “no one should ever touch a child there, except for a doctor” made me want to curl up behind a locked door and turn to stone.
I didn’t recognize it as wrong at first either, you know? I didn’t have a concept for it. He was a doctor. It was a part of the exam. And more importantly: I didn’t have a concept of getting to reject to what adults decided to do to me. I didn’t have a concept of… anything being sexual except for sex itself – or, well, no, that’s not true. But I didn’t know that that was an applicable way to describe how I was experiencing it. Which, I was. It was. Because that’s a pretty normal reaction, I think, when a man has his hand inside your underwear.
I don’t want to hear again about how this is acceptable and fine because of the context. I’ve heard it enough from myself.
I want to finally let myself believe that the way I felt, and feel, actually matters in any kind of way. No matter what adults I couldn’t say no to decided was best for me.
It would be better if I could let it rest, but I can’t, until I figure out what this means, among so many other things, about still talking to her.
The other day, I saw this billboard that must have been part of some awareness campaign. It had a picture of a child’s painted fingernails, with a letter painted on each nail, that read the word “molested.” And it had a caption something like, “kids won’t just tell you,” and then something about learning to recognize the signs. Which is a good point, I guess, but made me feel pretty stupid, seeing that while in the car with her.
Here’s another thing I’m hung up on: everything I’ve ever heard about parents & CSA of their children by-other-adults has been about their children telling them.
There’s nothing in the script for if they already know.
There’s nothing in the script for how to bring it up, years later, if they were there when it happened.
That’s what’s actually even harder to write about, actually. My mom being there in the room, which I guess made it feel more like something that was supposed to be happening and that I was just supposed to endure it, the way I endured anything else about being a child subject to the will of its adults. God, you know I don’t even remember how old I was? I was younger than ten, I know that. I feel like I might have been about six, maybe. Maybe younger.
What confounds me still is that it’s not like she was completely impassive as she watched this unfold. Her face contorted and she started crying. I didn’t get why. I get it now, more. Doesn’t make it better. Actually makes it worse.
I remember her saying something like, “I’ll never let anyone hurt you,” which at the time was an utterly mystifying thing to say because the discomfort wasn’t the kind I would have labeled as pain, so I was confused why she was even saying that. He wasn’t hurting me, I remember thinking. It was just… really uncomfortable. Really, really uncomfortable.
What it felt like at the time was… more than I would have allowed anyone to do, given the choice. Not something I would have given permission for if asked. It’s not like I was given any kind of opportunity for giving informed consent. Not in the slightest.
It fit the bigger picture of what I knew about the world, though, because I effectively grew up being taught that I wasn’t allowed to set my own boundaries.
I think I’m disassociating a little bit now. Was a bit before, too. That’s okay.
Uneventfully we left the doctor’s office and I mostly forgot it happened and we never spoke about it. Ever. Because, I guess, there wasn’t really a reason to. As my guardian she could have done something and she didn’t. Doesn’t seem like there’s any reason to bring it up, now, if she won’t.
But, ever since I realized I could describe what he did as… molestation, if not CSA, it’s been plaguing my thoughts when I’m with her. She could have done something; she didn’t. Why didn’t she? I’m not sure I want to know the answer. I’m not sure it would leave me any better off than before.
It’s an ongoing dilemma of mine. It’d be nice if it could just be over.
