Essays From The Shadows
Volume One
I struggle with certain emotions. I mention this because sometimes, if we talk about things we find difficult, it helps others recognise themselves. It can give shape to feelings they already have but don’t yet understand.
In the first few weeks of talking to other male survivors, I spent a lot of time learning new words and expressions. Words to describe things I already knew and did. Sometimes I would have to look them up, read articles, and work out how they happened and what they had been doing to me.
I think the one I really don’t get is pride, in myself. I understand it when it’s about someone else — at least I think I do. I’m not sure. When someone says to me, “You should be proud of yourself,” I blank. I have nothing to reference it to. I just kind of respond with, “If you say so.”
As a child, it wasn’t something I was taught to feel. When your self-worth is systematically erased, it takes things like pride with it. Like anything in life, if you don’t use it, how can you learn how to wield it or apply it to yourself?
Recently, I’ve tried to engage with it and understand how it works. That mostly involves waiting to see what I feel, and working out whether it might be pride — or just indigestion. Sometimes it’s simply recognising that I’ve done something I’m perfectly entitled to feel proud of. A kind of ‘well done you’ but with emotions attached.
Affection is another one — a veritable minefield for survivors. Something easily misconstrued, but also just difficult to get close to, for fear of what it might be or what it might turn into.
Always alert to danger, and wary of situations where bad things might happen, it is easier to just stay away from anything even slightly affectionate — and definitely no touching, hugging, or heavy petting.
Personally, I have a thing for seeing fathers with sons, young boys, teenagers, even as adults. I might spot them in my peripheral vision and lock onto them, and I wonder what that feels like. How is it to have a father look at you in that way? What is the somatic feeling of a father slipping his arm around your shoulders and pulling you into a fatherly hug?
It is possible that when I was very young I had some affection; I’m not ruling it out. The truth is, I have no memory of it. Not a single time was I hugged, hair ruffled, patted, kissed, or even touched with affection in any way.
I know what I know. It leaves a gap, bruises the soul, leaves you with a need, a yearning, a deep wound that never quite closes.
I imagine I stare with a hunger and longing whenever I spot one of those interactions in a park, on a street. Sometimes, right in front of me.
The deep, searing thing that cuts through me while I watch is the belief that I must have done something, when I was young, to mean I was never allowed any of that. I never asked. Then again, you don’t know what you never had. You get by without it. You make do.
Loneliness is another ache I know about. One of my regular punishments was to be locked in my room for days at a time. I got used to my own company and my thoughts. I learnt how to lose myself in books and imagination, to offset the space of being alone again.
At 12, I went to boarding school, learning to manage without my family, returning for school holidays and no longer feeling part of anything. At 15, I went into care and was not part of my family for ten years. You learn to be resilient and independent, to cope and make your own decisions. You also learn what loneliness feels like, and it becomes your default position.
If you don’t rely on anyone, they also can’t let you down. If you make your own decisions, then you have nobody else to blame. When you learn a lesson, you learn it well. If you don’t trust anyone, that makes it lonelier than you first imagined. Eventually, you adapt. Humans always do in the end.
The process of therapy and recovery has taught me some of what all this has been doing to me. Not just the physical and emotional damage, but the serious gaps it has left in my ability to function in ways most people take for granted.
My current homework is all about learning to trust people, being with more people. Moving out of the shadows. Letting in more light.