❁ The Garden ❁

I'd like to apologize to those who follow my blog and have read me along the past few years. I haven't updated my blog for a while; a lot has changed in my life. I've moved to another place, i'm independent, I have new friends, and more importantly I'm finally becoming someone.

I'll update more often with poems and lyrics like I used to.

I just want to write sort of a self-centered right now. After all, that's what a blog is made for, isn't it. Plus the anonymity helps a lot.

The picture you can see is the one and only I have of myself that I'll ever post here. It's not recent, but it's the very rare proof of what my life was, before.

On this picture I was 19-ish. As most of you know (even though I deleted my old entries on this topic), I had been diagnosed of anorexia nervosa when I was 16. I had been once previously, when I was 9. Until recently, I couldn't make a link between those two dark episodes of my life. Now I know that my main diagnosis was not my eating disorder, but Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
The only thing I could remember from both was the need of stopping to feel anything and to completely forget I had a body. I didn't want to be thin. I didn't care. I didn't see my body changes. I can only see them now on the few pictures I have. I can just remember the numbness, this feeling of total emptiness, but at the same time something dark lingering inside myself.
The first time I managed to recover quite quickly thanx to the help of one of my dad's friends, who taught me a very simple gesture that made me feel safe. I just had to put my hand on my heart and suddenly feel safe. The second time, recovery was much harder and took about 7 years. When this picture was taken I was already on my way to recovery. I couldn't see what others saw. I was always told to be skinny. I couldn't see that girl myself. That's why I took this one and only picture of my body. I remember being shocked and not recognizing who was on it.

For many years I've felt guilty. I've felt guilty for everything: for the deaths of many of my friends, for not having been able to help my best friend when she needed me, for my younger sister's disease and her almost death, ... It felt like everyone I loved was doomed to die. I was guilty for not being perfect enough, for not being gifted in sciences like the rest of my family, for not fulfiling my family's expectations, for being sick, for causing my family so much pain when all I wanted was to take care of them, ...
Recently, the black veil over that shadow hidden inside of my brain was removed. My first reaction was to continue to feel guilty for everything that has happenened to me. I thought it was my fault.

But it has to change from now on. My friends and my love died. But it wasn't my fault.
I was sexually abused by a music teacher when I was a child, because "I was too pretty and gifted for a little girl". It wasn't my fault. I don't say he is a monster, as most of the times men who inflict such things on children have experienced themselves abuses in their past, but still, he is the one bearing the guilt. I was a child.I didn't want this. I didn't want to be treated as an object. I wasn't a "doll".
I was sexually abused by 3 men, before they tried several times to kill me by pressing a pillow over my face. I miscarried in a girls bathrooms in my highschool 2 months later. I was 16. Again I won't judge those men. I don't want to try to understand any more. It was not my fault. I was 16, I was alone. I preferred to deny everything and forget rather than face the truth. I know it was for the best now. Otherwise, I'd have never been able to live. It'd have been too much to handle.

I'm not guilty. I'm not a victim any more. I survived all this because of the unconditionnal love and support of my family, and that is the most important part of all this darkness. I had the chance to have them to carry me towards the light at the end of the tunnel. Now, I want to help others who don't have such love and support around them. No one, boy or girl, should experience such things. I want to make a change.

This body bears my guilt. It will 'till the end, but I have to take care of it from now on, and carry on.