Alone

The purpose of this blog was not to share my personal struggles. It was meant to be an educational blog. It was meant to be a place full of information and full of hope. But today the loneliness is too much to carry. I'm not sure if anyone will be able to learn anything from this post, but I need to talk to someone and this is the only place I have left.

I need to bleed.

Now, it would be a simple thing to take a blade and draw blood from any convenient vein. But I'm not yet far enough gone to loose sight of the fact that doing this would only compound the weight that I'm carrying today. It would create another secret. More shame. More to hide.

It would isolate me further.


So I chose to bleed ink onto paper, staying up all night with my journal. But my journal has become empty. No one but me reads it, so it only shifts the secrets from my heart onto paper. The secrets remain secrets. In black and white, the loneliness just becomes an even bigger, greyer emptiness.

I wanted to share my biggest secret. I created this blog for that purpose, but decided to use it for something less self-centred instead. So I joined what I thought was the appropriate community to share it with. But my secret isn't wanted there. It is too big, too extreme, or perhaps to explosive. Perhaps they fear that my secret will light a fuse that can blow up the entire community.

I don't blame them. They have hundreds - no, thousands - of other members. The many is always more important than the one.

And so I am left feeling more alone than I've felt since the first time I found out that there were millions of other boys like me, who were used and abused like me. None of these millions of boys/men carry a scar that is quite the same shape as mine. They don't have blood on their hands. Their feelings of guilt is the product of stigmas, myths and ignorance. It is the handiwork of perpetrators who had spent months, perhaps even years, carefully grooming them to take the blame on themselves.

My guilt is different.
My guilt is rational.
My guilt is real.

Today I have to face the fact that, even in a group of male sexual abuse survivors, I don't fit in.

I believed that I was on the road from survivor to thriver. I had no idea that the road ran this close to the edge of abyss, that it would be this easy to slip back into the deepest darkness of depression where even God seems unreachable.

Is there anyone out there who is like me, or will I have spend the rest of my life wearing masks, pretending to fit in in groups of people who will never really know me completely?

I'm not sure if I have the will to live life like that...