When You’ve Been Severely Ill Throughout Your Early Adulthood, It Means Coming Up Against This Again

January was a tough year but we made it

HELPPPPP

everyone talks about cutting off a toxic parent

but no one ever talks about the pain of wanting a parent but knowing yours cannot love you the way they should

Here's something that's been mindfucking me for the past two damn weeks. So not only do I need surgery to have my colon and rectum removed & to get an ileostomy, but I also have to see a pelvic floor reconstruction surgeon.

Because with my Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, I'm high risk for prolapses, and guess what being sex trafficked for the majority of your childhood does to your developing pelvic floor? Spoiler: nothing good.

So because of this blessed combination of genetics and abuse, I have multi-pelvic-organ prolapse, and no ability to withstand pelvic floor therapy. I tried. I just literally cannot fucking do it. And there's the fact that pelvic floor therapy might not even work for the severity of my issues anyway. Ergo, surgery.

Now I get to have two surgeons argue over the best way to butcher my body into something livable and I can't even explain how fucking tired I am. I don't even know what to feel about it beyond exhausted.

And then I have friends who are also going through things and I want to be supportive & I try to be, but I just can't do all the things I want to do because I'm spending half my fucking day in a dissociative fog because I just don't know how to process any of this.

My parents: what trauma?

Me: uh-

everyone's like wehhhhh why doesn't doctor house gets suuuueeed! like my man. literally every patient he sees is someone that's been trying to find a diagnosis for ages. i could live with a little medical malpractice if it were coming from someone ready to break into my home to look for allergens and not simply half heartedly listen to me before suggesting I lose weight and take ages of back and forth arguing to order a single test

It's a really weird moment, going to a 2nd opinion doctor at a big university hospital and being told "your doctor is right, there's nothing else we can do for you besides remove your colon and reconstruct your pelvic floor surgically."

Moment of silence for my asshole. RIP

I hate how abusive parents love to imply that you know nothing about the 'real world', as if they're sheltering you and protecting you from the big evil out there, so you're 'naive and innocent' and don't know how bad it is outside, but what they're really 'sheltering' you from are survival skills and vital knowledge of how to function in the world! They sure are not sheltering you from evil! They're not sheltering you from abuse! They're not sheltering you from cruelty and violence and apathy in the face of suffering! They're not sheltering you from how it feels to be unprotected and isolated in an environment in dangerous individuals! You have all possible experiences of that! You have intimate and extended knowledge of that! You even know how to survive living with them! But self care and taxes, that is the gatekept information. God forbid you know how to live independently.

feeling trapped

i think one of the things i'm struggling with the most is the feeling of being trapped. it's what the majority of my nightmares focus on, either with memories of real events or invented trauma-based dream nonsense, but i haven't parsed out exactly why this is such an issue for me still.

for all intents and purposes, i'm not trapped anymore. i've been out of that environment since 2008. i've been no-contact with my abusers since 2018. i'm married, living in a different county, in my own house with my partner and two dogs. i am the least trapped i've ever been.

though i do feel trapped in my body- it's maddening sometimes, having to deal with my chronic illness and disability on top of this mental health baggage. it's frustrating. but i don't really think that's what the issue is, with this trapped feeling.

i know it somehow relates to my trauma, but i can't put my finger on why my brain feels the need to process this now. what even is there to process? i was trapped. often physically, always psychologically, but like why does my brain keep telling me there is something deeper about this that i'm not understanding? it's like having a word or phrase on the tip of my tongue. there is something but i don't know what.

one of the reasons my therapist suggested writing online, anonymously, is because my trapped feelings can be triggered when i want to talk about my trauma but get stuck in the potential consequences of doing so with my identity attached. my abusers have both, separately, threatened me with lawsuits should i ever attempt to report them again or go public with my story. defamation, libel, countersuits if charges are pressed again. as if i would even want to go through the trauma of legal proceedings, all over again, since all it ever did was make my life harder. that court experience was worse than some of the rapes i remember.

so i'm writing, to see if putting this out into the world helps this feeling. or maybe it will help something else inside of me. part of me wonders if i'm just using it as an excuse to lean into the trauma more, since feeling broken down is more comforting than feeling strong, even now. the pain of it feels safe.

I have a medical issue that's triggering sensory flashbacks multiple times a day for the last couple of weeks and I'm SO TIRED AND OVER IT.

There were people complaining about how I'd ruin my rapists life by reporting him but I'm 32 fucking years old and cant function like a normal human. Someone complain about how they ruined MY life.

Being sex trafficked as a kid in broad fucking daylight in the United States is dystopian af, and gave me a dissociative disorder. I'm on three psych meds. Every time I go to the hospital or a new doctor, they see "PTSD" in my chart and tell me my symptoms are anxiety, and that has almost killed me THREE TIMES.

My trafficker is free. My rapists are all either free or dead. The one I took to trial got everything expunged from the records. Somehow he even got the news articles taken down.

And I'm just... Still here. Still trying to cope. Still living in fear of people who probably don't think of me at all.