u/gentlelad24601

I have been where you are now

And yet, here I am on the other side

I promise you that it will be okay

These milestones

Seeing your name written on a cup

Cutting your hair

Trying a packer or two

These milestones matter

I know you’re scared

But you are not alone

This playlist is for you to listen to when I am away from my phone

It is so that you remember even from far away

Even from those Texas landscapes

That there is nothing wrong with you

I love you

It is not too late

And there is still time

I greeted my body

No longer as a temple

Or a mode of submission

But as a place to call home

I tasted myself

I touched myself

“When was the last time someone asked you what you wanted?”

The elf in my fantasies asked

“What do you want?”

I want to cum

And after years of feeling like a broken piece of damaged goods

I finally fucking did

I saw the post here yesterday about Leland. I know it took everything for those girls to come forward.

Pedophilia is RAMPENT in the CoC and I hope that more of them are held accountable.

That’s it, that’s the post.

“If you were free, what would you do?”

And I was frozen

The invisible man still in my head

My life is servitude, my life is submission, my life, my life, my life—

Was not mine

Every morning, I wake up and remember

That there is no god

No fishbowl, no panopticon

Praise, punishment, praise, punishment

Over-and-over-and-OVER

From infancy into my teens

Through song, sermons, social conditioning

Chained by illusions, fear, anxieties

A product of a system that disguised child abuse as love

I am no longer yours to command

Because you are not real

You

Are

Not

Real

There is no such thing as god

But, there is love

And every morning, I tell myself that love is enough

There

Is

No

God

And

Love

Is

Enough

Every morning, I remind myself that

I am enough

I just moved in with a close friend. We put up our art on the living room wall yesterday and my nervous system felt so much better. There’s something about naked walls that I find deeply unsettling, jarring, and dysregulating. I have a habit of intellectualizing patterns of my behavior (finding the root of the trigger) and I thought that these feelings were mostly tied to my history of housing insecurity since getting kicked out as a teen.

But, today, I was talking about how much better I felt with our art on the walls. And my friend said, “It makes so much sense. You told me about how the CoC feels about interior design, so I can imagine that it was R-O-U-G-H.”

I can’t believe I didn’t put that together! The CoC prides itself in bare walls and—I’LL SAY IT—ugly structures because it strips them of the “sins like vanity and pleasure.”

So, anytime I see an ugly building or bare walls, my nervous system is reminded of the CoC and I feel triggered. C-PTSD and religious trauma are so peculiar. Like what do you MEAN I’m “triggered by a wall without art??” It sounds ridiculous to non-CoC folks, but it’s the truth.

Anyway, do any of ya’ll also experience this? Furthermore, do you have other gaps that you didn’t notice until your friends pointed them out?

It feels like deconstruction never ends.

When I was young

I fucked my boss

I fucked my T.A.

I fucked another boss

I fucked my boss’ son

I fucked my producer

I fucked, I fucked, I fucked

Older boys, bad boys, boys who were in positions of authority over me

And for what?

To “take my power back” from an imaginary man in the sky???

The power was inside of me all along

Because there is no god

And I am enough

I don’t know when I’ll have sex again

But, I do know that whenever it happens

It will be the first time that I have ever made love with someone

What we were taught about forgiveness

Perpetuates cycles of abuse

It’s not even about what happened then

Time passed, I changed

It is about the man you are now

Bootlicking a dictator

Sucking the cock of an imaginary god in the sky

Oozing with your Christian nationalism

Enraged by trans people

Enraged by queerness

Enraged by me

Your SON

I am more of a man than you’ll ever be

“You’ll have to accept that there are things I’ll never accept about you”

I accept that when your daughter died

So did her hope of ever having a father

I want you to tell me how you feel

I want to tell you how I feel

I want you to ask to kiss me

I want you to kiss me slowly

I want to do everything slowly

(Without the expectation or pressure of sex)

I want to cum from riding you with my pants on

There isn’t a poetic way to say that, but I’ll say it again:

I want to cum from riding you with my pants on

There was not another shoe

No thumb to be pushed under

“Do this, wear this, say that”

“Go here, go there, eat this”

An accessory for stupid small-town social capital

M e a n i n g l e s s

A l l

O f

I t

F u c k i n g

M e a n i n g l e s s

A meal for salivating mouths hungry for power

Seeing a scared, naive little boy desperate to be loved

I am not desperate anymore

I am me

I am enough

I am loved

And I am no longer afraid of you

And finally

The older boys stopped feeling inviting

Freudian fucking wolves with teeth bared

False grins disguising their weapons

Fuck you

I refuse to ever be a fucking victim again

You are a predator

And I am done being your prey

Within a month

My cheeks became sunken

The circles under my eyes returned

With every demand

With every verbal cut

With every tease

My pants became looser

My belly shrank

Hollowed out to be your trophy

But I am getting out

And I will gain the weight back

You are a predator

And I am getting out

I spent my life having to take care of adults and children

I didn’t have a choice

It was my duty as a woman to marry and raise children in the church

I didn’t have a choice

Submersed in water, a cannibal ingesting the blood of sacrifice

I didn’t have a choice

I dove headfirst into one night stands and everything without commitment

Now I am enough

Now I am free

Now I am me

And I want to birth, nurture, love, and raise a human one day

Not because I have to

But because I want to

I am 28

And for the first time

I have a fucking choice

I want a love that feels like taking off my shoes

After a long day

A man that loves me and likes me

(And I love him and like him!)

Shared values because I’ll be damned if we argue about basic human rights

Mutual respect and understanding

He makes me laugh

Really laugh—laugh until my stomach hurts kind of laugh

We love eachother for who we are

But, still encourage eachother to learn and grow in the right ways

We kiss and cuddle and are attracted to eachother, but there isn’t pressure for sex

Because this is the “feels like taking off your shoes after a long day” kind of love

A love that will exist because we want it to

Not because we have to

A love that I know will exist

One day

When I was small

I would put my things in boxes

Packing up my entire room

“I’m leaving!” I’d declare

Only to put everything back inside

Because I was a little kid

With nowhere to go

Now I am big

And if I see another box again

I am going to rip my fucking skin off

Please let this be the last move for a while

Just this once, I’d like to stay

Just this once, I’d like to say “I’m home!”

And have it be true

I’m so tired

I have fun with my friends

And then drive around

Without my fucking body

I just want a home

Please

Please

Please

I’m so close to a good, safe, stable, real home

I can feel it

Ten more days

My bags are still packed

And you actually know me