I'm just curious...I really want a show of hands here. I know this is true for myself, and I knew it's true for some of my girlfriends: Are you telling the whole story? Being me, I have a lot of really badass strong friends (male and female) who have been through some serious shit. I'm talking serious beatings, poverty, verbal abuse, rape....the stuff that's hard to talk about. I feel blessed because, generally, my friends and I feel safe enough to share the horror stories but I've been noticing: there are a lot of dirty details we omit when we talk to certain people. Maybe it's our family, or our boyfriends, or teachers we admire, or certain friends who maybe intimidate us or make us feel just a little bit insecure.
I find myself censoring what I have to get out because I'm afraid of how it will be received and how it will impact the ones I love and the relationships I love (or maybe just don't want to make any worse.) I found out the hard way, a lot of people just can't stomach what my every day life looked like. To them- it sicks them out and that just honestly bums me out and makes me feel like maybe I'm just this dark cloud. Maybe I'm a bummer? But I've learned to acknowledge who can and can't take what I have to say. I say it directly, and openly, and repeatedly: I was sexually abused/raped/molested by my mom. You can take it or leave it. I'm sure you've heard me say it plenty (especially if you read this blog) but I don't think everyone realizes, being able to say that publicly, casually, or among friends is such an amazing, freeing family. I can be honest, I can omit what I want or need to, and I can just let me be me. Whatever that may be today.
That being said, sometimes I don't always feel like I CAN be honest, even with those who may be able to stomach it. There are parts of my story, parts of my past, and parts of my thought process I am not proud of- even if I'm not responsible for the way or the extent to which things happened. It's embarrassing, I don't personally feel good about those things that DID happen, even if I can openly name the generic term that is associated to the act (rape) and I kind of honestly feel trapped by the details.
If I don't talk about the dirty details of my sex life, why in the hell would I admit to the dirty details to my "sex life" as a five year old? What's the art of being direct without being TOO direct? How much can someone else really hear? At what point have you crossed the "TMI" line and why do I have to feel like something that weighs heavy on me and I didn't ask for could ever be "TMI" for anyone around me? It's TOO MUCH INFORMATION for me too!
I was talking to someone once and she mentioned how a near stranger walked in one day and started opening up to her slowly about her childhood and the excessive sexual abuse she had endured from her father. She soon divulged that the first orgasm she ever had was in fact from her dad and she went into some detail about how it felt and how she felt emotionally. The person telling me this story about the stranger then tells me in a "How gross and inappropriate is THAT?!" kind of tone that that was just TMI for her. Now, right off the bat, I can tell you- that story was TMI for ME because most of the time, I can't take any sort of sexual anything being recounted when it's any kind of negative like that. I start feeling triggered and vulnerable and gross. But then I thought, "Hey! What if I wanted to let go of some sort of trying story of mine about something like that. I HAVE STORIES LIKE THAT TO TELL. Would you be grossed out by me? Would you tell my story to some other person and talk about how I unloaded this awful story on you?"
I don't know. Just food for thought. Just what exactly do you omit?
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