“So many times I didn’t have any hope. Now I love my job and my life. It’s so worth it to stay alive for these times. I’ve never been able to imagine things could be this good. I feel like I’ve landed into someone else’s life. And it’s good.
~ Chris
Donna Raffanello, Can’t Touch My Soul: A Guide for Lesbian Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse
“So many times I didn’t have any hope. Now I love my job and my life. It’s so worth it to stay alive for these times. I’ve never been able to imagine things could be this good. I feel like I’ve landed into someone else’s life. And it’s good.
~ Chris
Donna Raffanello, Can’t Touch My Soul: A Guide for Lesbian Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse
I wanted to say to my online friends how much you all mean to me here. I know that I’ve said it before, but I wanted to say you all mean so much to me. I don’t do healing work easily or well when I am alone. I do it best when I am in community. Community is very important to me. I wouldn’t be where I am in healing if it wasn’t for each of you. You all mean so much to me.
Here is the thing; in the last four months I have gone to two museums with a friend. I haven’t been able to do that for years. I have gotten out about once a month to see a movie in a theater. So as desperate and alone as I am feeling, I have to keep reminding myself that I am making baby and important steps towards where I want to be in my life.
My health issues continue to improve. That helps me to be able to be more active and to do more and to make plans. Once I am done with the tests on Wednesday I will probably rest up a couple of days and start looking for a new place to live, because I have to move in about four months or so, and it is unfortunate but that might take up a lot of my energy that I would prefer not to, but I probably have to move by May. I am biking more miles, on average, a lot more. I am taking out my camera more and taking photos more and started posting to my blog. This is all huge for me.
I spent some time yesterday making some plans on some things I would like to do in the near future. I’ve written some activities down and hope that I can do at least some of these things. I’ve done this in the past and unfortunately couldn’t do any of the things several winters in a row, due to winter conditions, but also due to health issues. I hate when that happens.
I am exploring joining a newly forming writer/poetry group. I’m not sure about this. It is definitely something that I have wanted to do for a huge amount of time. I actually did try that in the past and it went very very bad and I will try to write about that experience in the near future and post it. So I am very hesitant. It would have to be run by someone who managed the group very good and made a very safe space and where I could feel comfortable and where my mostly abuse writing could be acceptable. I’ve experienced where it was not and I am unwilling to repeat that ever again. I won’t ever accept being mistreated in the context of creative work again. So for me it really depends on this person and what kind of person they are.
When I think of all my plans what I keep coming back to is that I live much too far out in the suburbs, way too far, to be able to do things that would be very manageable in the winter if only I was living in a place in Minneapolis, especially south Minneapolis, which is really the area I would like to live in the most. I also think that this is the area I want to live in for doing my healing work and for connecting to others on the basis of Reiki and energy healing and possible interactions and friendships. So this is my big hope. I am having trouble believing that all the good things will come to me, so if you can believe and hope for me, please do and that will be great and will really help me, because I could really use all the hope and belief that I can get right now.
There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great, and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something better tomorrow.
~ Orison Sweet Marsden
I belong to a survivor email group, through yahoo. Something happened there a couple months ago. It was very upsetting at the time and it still is. Someone wrote to the group and wrote that it was stupid for survivors of abuse to think that they could stop abuse, any abuse, to change anything, to have a positive impact on the world, that abuse never will be stopped.
I was one of the people who wrote back expressing the opposite belief. Several people believed that she must be uncaring. I was one of them. She wrote back claiming to be caring, claiming to care about survivors, that she was a survivor, and that we all need to abandon hope in order to move on and to have a better life. She wrote that survivors were hurting themselves by believing they could make a positive impact on the world. Which pretty much proved to me that she didn’t and doesn’t care about survivors.
I used to think that nobody told others to abandon hope. It sounds so, I don’t know, Old Testament or something you would read right before being cast into the fiery pits of hell.
Sometimes abusers join survivor groups. Sometimes victims are still acting out their own powerful programming. I don’t know what the real deal is with this person. But they are wrong.
Myself, I’m a pretty positive gal, one could even say hopeful about most things. At the same time I tend to grasp a lot of the issues/problems/challenges I am going through and tend to understand many political issues, perhaps not with as much depth and knowledge as I would like. Do I think I can stop all abuse? Do I think that I can stop any abuse? Don’t know. But I will keep trying.
There’s a story I heard some time ago, it’s just a story, but it is sort of one of those stories that when you hear them, you know, you just know that is what you think, that that story is a part of you, and that it matters to you and perhaps it always will.
This woman, okay I changed the gender, but the concept works for me better that way. This woman is walking down the beach. The tide is going out and leaving many starfish stranded on dry land. You can see they are trying to move towards the water, but slowly. Many will die before getting to the water, from lack of oxygen.
There is a group of people standing around and talking. One woman is walking down the beach and is picking up one starfish at a time and throwing it back into the water. She keeps doing this until she reached the group standing around. They point out to her that there are miles of beach ahead of her and there is no way she can make a difference.
She picks up the next starfish, throws it in the ocean. Turns to the group, says, made a difference to that one. And moves down the beach, continuing to throw starfish back into the sea.
Can I make a difference in someone else’s life? Can I make a difference in another survivor’s life. Can I stop abuse, even for one person? Can I change the world?
Don’t know. But I make a difference in my life. Having hope makes a difference in my life.
Kate Is Rising 