My Personal Recovery

Recently, I discovered an important fact about myself. I am a child abuse survivor!! And, I have been in recovery for a long time.
For a very long time, I have been in denial about that fact. That is why I have been an intimacy junky. Much of my life has been about seeking and finding intimacy, wherever I could find it. Also, I have (I think successfully) done a great deal to avoid the label of “victim.”
I focused on my toughness and survival skills to support my denial pattern. In my recently published book (Rich White Folks) about my life, I avoided an explicit discussion of how I was continually abused from about age seven until I was eighteen and moved away from the offender, my stepmother. In the two-hundred pages of text that comprises my personal memoir, I alluded to the abuse, but never openly discussed it. Underneath and in between the lines, I played a game of “now you see it” and “now you don’t.” In spite of my writing cleverness, the story is all there in the subtext, about life with my cruel stepmother.
The real story recently surfaced again, very provocatively, while I was looking at some old photographs. These childhood photographs caused the images of abuse to resurface vividly. The images became even more acute and emergent when I read aloud from my personal memoirs. I would often catch glimpses of the abuse that was happening under the surface of the written words and photo images from the past.
My limited work and attraction to the current mental illness Recovery movement, have all, up to this point, been a reminder, a confrontation and a healing of this unresolved, or partially unresolved cancer in my life. At last, I can say, “I am free!”
Who knows? Maybe my life’s path has been significantly expanded, or it has been clarified. Who knows where it goes from here? Maybe life will be better, sweeter,
and richer.
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