I Will Not Abandon Myself Anymore

Trigger warning: what I will share with you now is a memory of raw, unfiltered pain. If you are in a delicate space at the moment, or if you just want to enjoy a day unbothered by the depth of human darkness, then please stop reading now.

Please read the paragraph above again and make sure that its content has reached your conscious awareness.

If you are still reading, then I will share a memory of mine that reappeared about a week ago. At the time I must have been 7 or 8 years old.

I sit in a corner of a big room. The room is well-lit although there is no sunlight because I am in a basement. I feel myself shivering from fear. I don’t know this place, and I don’t know what is going to happen but I have learned from experience that if something feels that bad, it is usually worse.

Men after men enter the room. They greet each other enthusiastically like old friends. I count ten men arriving, all gathering in small little groups. No one really takes notice of me and for a split second I even let myself hope that this time will be different and nothing is going to happen to me.

Unfortunately I am wrong. After an hour or so the first man comes into my corner and rapes me. He doesn’t say a word, he just uses me to ejaculate and is done within under a minute or so. Right after he goes back to his group of friends and the next men comes and rapes me. After everyone used me, I have some time to rest but men keep coming in random intervals until late at night. They don’t always rape me, weirdly enough, some of them want to cuddle with me also.

The whole evening my father sits right next to the door on the floor, his knees to his chest, blank eyes staring into nothing. I feel him dying inside that night.

I have written to you for almost two years now and I have never shared a single word about my past. It is the same with friends and family. If on a rare occasion I speak about what happened to me during the first 12 years of my life, I have very mixed experiences of how I will be received. Quite some people can witness my share without collapsing into it or being repelled by it, but many can't.

As a result, I wasn't just abandoned by my own parents in a cruel way, but I also keep accumulating rejection from new people in my life once I open up. It feels incredibly lonely at times. It is especially painful in my attempt to find a partner, but it is not limited to that. Loss is my constant companion. Loss doesn't bother to knock before entering my life anymore — it already knows under which rock the key to my heart is hidden.

My life story is so intense and so interwoven with almost every aspect of my existence that hiding it is impossible. And once I share about my life, what I have experienced is so primordially evil that it exceeds the capacity of many. I am learning step by step to open up in a more sophisticated and orderly way, and I have gotten better at judging which person might be able to hold it — and still so many people decide to step away from me.

Rejection in and of itself is part of human life and a necessary process to filter those people who belong in our lives and those who don't. Yet in my case, the way people leave is often quite hurtful. Most people who disconnect after they learn about my past are simply overwhelmed and can't take it, yet I have never heard anyone name that as a reason. I would honor and accept that. Instead, they choose a story that fits their experience of self, and so what I hear time after time is so sad in how predictable it is: over and over again those people tell me that I am too much. That I haven't integrated enough. That they don't want to be my therapist.

And for such a long time I believed it! But now I have reached a turning point. All my life I have blamed myself for being too much, too intense, which then created exactly that intensity once I opened my soul. I had secretly accepted that I am broken, someone to be ashamed of, someone who needs to be hidden from society — and that is how I lived my life: no social media, my cat and I in a small wooden cabin with no neighbors, on the other side of the world.

AI gave me some huge biceps 😅

This ends now. My past is as valuable and honorable as anyone else's. The next person telling me that I am too much can continue to believe that if it is necessary for their own inner coherence. But I know that I am not too much — I am just too much for them to hold. Their overwhelm is no proof of my brokenness, but merely a sign of our different capacities to hold pain.

This text marks my initiation: from now on I will not be scared to be seen, I will not hide my past anymore. I have understood that hiding myself not only decreases the quality of my life, but it also makes it impossible for my tribe to find me. There are so many people who will treat me and my life story not as a burden, but as what it truly is: a gift.

Not only have I integrated my past pain, I have also deeply understood how it later made me hurt other people and myself. Even more than that: I have learned to break free from the unhealthy patterns of my personality. It is no longer a trap I am a victim of, but something fluid that I carry with ease and grace. I can share with people how to do that, but only if I show myself.

If you are interested in my story, please read my book. Don't worry that it will flood you with pain. It will ease you into my story step by step, little by little, and along the way it will show you the gems of insight I have found by diving into darkness. Ultimately it arrives in a place of full clarity about the nature of who we truly are.

Thank you for reading this. I hope you stick around, but if you don't, that's okay too.

Much love,

Tom