Silences

[Originally written on 24 July 2005]

I’m struggling at the moment with a few difficulties, all of which can be placed under the umbrella of not feeling able to speak out about really painful and unbearable realities that I’m faced with, and have been for most of my life. These issues are really important and I know there are so many other people faced with them who need to know that it’s not just them. I have wanted for a long time to do something to make sure that others don’t suffer in silence the pain that I went through.

It’s hard, though. I worry about not being believed, about being subjected to even more abuse from others who don’t want me to speak of what I know. It silences me - take this post for example, so fucking wishy-washy, dancing around the truth, or even definite statements.
[...]

I’ve started this post so late, so that I know I won’t have time to really write anything of substance before I have to get some sleep. Great self sabotage!!! So I will list the things I want to write about, and get back to them later.

My family couldn’t handle my disability, or any way of being that was different to their own. (Sexist, homophobic, and racist too. Real charmers.)

As a result, they neglected and abused me emotionally and physically.

When you are disabled, people don’t need to physically hit or attack you to abuse you - all they need to do is refuse to give you the necessary help and support. Ie. I have cerebral palsy, my balance is shit, walking up and down stairs and steps is fucking scary especially as I’m terrified of heights. My family refused to help me down stairs and steps (even ones without hand rails) when we were in public. Once they took pictures of me crawling backwards down a flight of steps, at age 13, in a skirt, on a very windy day, at a crowded tourist attractions. I was forced to resort to crawling because they refused to help me, they stood at the bottom, took pictures and laughed.

This is just one example from 20 years of consistant abuse, ignorance and denial of my needs - not just my needs as someone with a disability, but my needs as a human being. I cut off contact with them a few years back, and my life has improved by leaps and bounds. I had nightmares 3 or 4 times a week from age 7 to 27. The week after I told my mother that their treatment of me was unacceptable and I no longer wanted contact with them, my nightmares STOPPED, and I only have them once every couple of months.

I had to learn how to socialise with people as an adult. I had no idea that having conversations with people involved ‘back-and-forth’. I only knew how to bombard people with words as my family had done to me.

I have to live with the knowledge that, for all intents and purposes, I have no family. It is not safe, physically or emotionally for me to be around any of them.

This hurts.

To quote from one of my favourite tv shows “Sometimes my life sucks beyond the telling of it”

The CP is not the worst thing that has happened to me, not even close. Disability is a neutral thing, it is the prejudices of the rest of the world that make life hard.

I am SO FUCKING ANGRY at what has been done to me, at what has been done to others like me. There is of course more to my life and my story than what I have written here, and this is not me at my most coherent.

For many years my goal has been to write about these things, bring them out in the open - force the world to see what is being done to too many people with disabilities (note - these things do not happen to all pwd’s - I know many who have loving, supportive families. This is how I know that these other things that happened to me and many others are wrong.)

Sometimes it is hard to fight.


I just want to have a family that loves me. (Treacherous voices in my head tell me I am being whiny and self-absorbed. I know I am not, and I know there is a problem with that attitude of thinking that anyone who speaks of their pain and suffering from *their* perspective instead of hiding it neatly and tidily away is damned as whiny, self centred and many other ‘bad’ things.)

The pain does not get any easier.

The loss cuts deeper by the day, I cannot get used to this.