survivors manchester

The Word is the Only Thing

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by Nick

The word is the only thing that keeps me going sometimes. Not that I feel like killing myself, no not that. I was thought that bit alone time ago now. It’s more than that, you know the emptiness inside. Not that I can’t fill it up with worthwhile things, because I do, but it drain out of you and you empty, the wrong words can do that. Sometimes it’s a place or memory that sticks in the head.

You can’t forget that you trusted once, took a kindness from someone because of loneliness of childhood. That one act of trust took you to place that you never want to go back too. You know being part of something but having no say or control over it. You draw to it because you know in yourself if you can understand what happen and why it might help. But over time it folds into the past and it belongs there, but look back not with angry but with understanding.

Can I forgive? Yes I stated by forgiving myself and moved out to the rest of the world. It’s being freed for the past not hunted by it that counts the most. I saying this because it might help so one else whose up against the same sort of thing.
So where do I start? I am older now, but back then I was but a child and I just did not know that people befriended you because they needed sex or maybe it’s more than that. It about control and you become a fly in a wed, and they close in on you, your just food, nothing more. That the bit that you don’t like, the fact you made nothing. First comes the silence and then the guilt but worse still the mistrust in others, that’s the thing that dose the damage over time and how you pay for some ones careless actions, well crime for the rest of your life.

Funny thing is that I often listen to people talk about abuse in meetings at work. But no one says anything about helping. It like you gets over a set age and people forget that that you might have been abused as a child. They think that only child are abused and don’t seem to think that children grow up in to adults’ and have to live with what happed in the past. Worst still is they say stuff like children who are abused never get over it and are scared for life. So it makes you feel like dirt.

I was at a meeting and this woman had come to talk about child abuse. She said that children that are abused tend to drift into crime, can’t hold down a job and find it difficult to from loving relationship with others. I said that was not true, you can find a way out and go on to the next day and the next year and put the past behind you and learn to trust again. But I shut up and sat down, because I did not want to “out” myself. (It hard to talk about the pass, it took my ten year to tell my wife about it, because I was so afraid she think less of my as a man).

Then the women giving the tark said to me and everyone in the room, “What would he know he’s a man” and they all laugh. That when I felt empty inside because the words and the laughter drain it out of me and I was empty.

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