The Inauspicious Beginnings of Social Phobia
Well, apparently it’s useless for me to promise myself that I will write in this space. The more sincere my promise, the harder it seems to be able to keep. There are words just below the surface that yearn to burst forth from my fingers, but they are held back. By what? I am beginning to think that maybe they are held back by the same force that has held me back from having friends or other relationships for as long as I can remember.
When I was a young child, I was gregarious, charming, hard-headed, outgoing, and outspoken. There was never much doubt about what I wanted. I was smart, too. Too smart for the public school I attended, it seemed.
Since I knew how to read and write in Kindergarten, thanks to a judicious Montessori school, it was deemed that there wasn’t much I could be taught in first grade, so I would go directly into second grade.
This was perhaps the first chink in the armor of my self. I was placed in the back of the room in second grade, and the teacher didn’t QUITE know what to do with me. I kept up all right in academics, after an initial dip of catching up time, but socially I was far behind my new peers. I had a hard time making friends, because I was considered a “baby,” and was generally shunned and ridiculed most of the year.
As third grade started, things had started looking up. People were talking to me once again, and I was back to my smiley, joking self. Some of my fondest memories of third grade was being kept in for recess with my fellow troublemakers, and having to hide the whites of our eyes in our arms on our desks, and the resulting hilarity as we tried and failed. I may have been OK if I had been allowed to continue on this track.
Third grade is also when my mother met a new man. He was tall and handsome and funny and rich. And within about three months of knowing my mother, he began sexually abusing me. I have already gone into some of these stories elsewhere on this site, so I won’t bother with details here. I knew that this felt wrong. I knew it WAS wrong. But I had never had a Daddy. I thought, “Maybe this is what Daddies do?” Maybe I just needed to get used to it. He loves me, right?
The pressure of the secret and the bad feelings started to cave in on me bit by bit, so slowly that only looking back now can I see the insane progression.
I have some really gorgeous pictures of me at 9 years old. One of the last times I ever thought I was pretty or special. I’m wearing a cute bikini, and the day is bright and the future is promising. I can barely look at them now without knowing that the very fact they exist makes them creepy. He took those pictures.
I started gaining weight after that. I’ll never really know if it was from puberty gone wrong, or something deliberate within my psyche that seemed to already know that I might be less desirable if I was bigger. It doesn’t really matter anymore.
He still continued to abuse me, but added in delightful comments about how big I was. I’m not sure what made me finally snap but something within me rebelled. When I was 11, I told my mother what had been happening. Instead of believing me, her only daughter, she questioned why I would lie about something that serious, and then brought him into the room so that I could look him in the face and tell him what I just told her.
That’s the day I learned that telling the truth does nothing. Even when you can get people to hear you, they don’t listen. I took that lesson very much to heart.
After that, the sexual abuse stopped, but there was plenty of verbal abuse to go around in that household.
The next year I was in a different school. I was quite fat by then. I was followed home from school, made fun of, and was well on my way to my future social phobia. My mother thought that after this year I needed to go to a more sheltered school, so she tried this Christian school that had a “learn yourself” approach where they basically gave us workbooks to complete by ourselves. I completed their entire sixth grade curriculum of books in September. That’s then my mother put me in Catholic school.
To me it was just another place full of people that wouldn’t like me. I did get teased some, but not as much as before. I think maybe it was in some ways the best thing for me. I somehow muddled through my middle school years as my mother finally actually married him, a year after I told her what had happened.
A year later, I started high school at yet another Catholic school. Things weren’t great at home with all the fighting, so school was a sanctuary for me.
Then there was a boy. A senior, but that didn’t bother me. Oh, how I loved that boy. More than he will ever know. More than I could ever tell him. With him, I felt my first real stirrings of real sexual awakening. And I didn’t know what to do with it. I was SO scared. I thought that it would feel the same as it did with HIM, even though my heart told me it wouldn’t. I wasn’t able to get past it. I ruined things. It made the rest of my school year hell. I could barely stand to look at him and know what a screw up I was.
At home, my new “stepfather” had cheated on my mother and was thrown out. Then my mother decided to remember what I had told her. She said we could use it in court.
I was a bad friend that year. I stole some things from a very good friend that I loved very much. I also stole things from stores. I never knew why I did it. A counselor in later years suggested that maybe I was trying to steal back something that had been stolen from me. Or maybe I just wanted someone to ask me what was wrong with me, and actually listen to the answer. Whatever it was, here was another relationship that I had managed to ruin. Another link in the chain of descent.
That winter, while I was still a Freshman, we went on one of our ski trips, and another Senior from my school was there. His parents were friends with some other adults there, I think. I barely knew him. He cornered me in the bathroom, and tried to kiss me. I was a little flattered by the attention, but soon grew uncomfortable. He forced my hand down to touch him, and asked me if I would kiss him there. I started crying, and told him that I didn’t want to, that my stepfather had made me do that before. He said that I should know how to do it, then. I can’t remember how I got away from that. All I know is that was one of the last straws of my innocence, floating away from me. Men only wanted one thing. They didn’t want to know me, they didn’t care to know me or what I wanted, they didn’t listen. They just wanted to fuck me. That’s all I was good for.
Sophomore year, I thought maybe I could get through it now that I didn’t have to see the one I had loved. And my stepfather was gone. But I was wrong. It was harder. My old friend and some others wrote mean things on my locker. I knew I deserved it.
I tried to kill myself.
I spent nearly four months in a mental hospital.
I came back, and somehow got through the rest of high school. I didn’t let anyone close. Honestly, it surprises me every day that some of these people befriend me on Facebook. I didn’t know them that well. I didn’t WANT to know them. Because of they found out what I really was, they would look at me the way my mother did. With disgust.
I feel like I’ve drifted through life on the outside. I’ve only had one long-term relationship that failed miserably on both sides. I spent far too much time with my children in homeless shelters and on welfare. I really don’t have many friends, and the few I have reside exclusively online. I don’t know how to talk to people. All the therapy I have been through has merely kept me going. My kids are the only thing that keeps me living.
I WANT to talk to people. I have made a few tries here and there. Like at the An Event Apart conference. I’m pretty sure my feelings were so openly uncomfortable that they made others uncomfortable, too. Great way to make an impression. How does one even begin to change that?
I feel like most of my life I have been holding on to a chain that hangs in a bottomless chasm. And every once in a while, I fall down a link. One day I may not be here at all.
And all I want is to change that…
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