The Bitch in The Stuff That's Not Interesting But Is The Most Interesting Stuff I'll Write

This might be an unsettling entry for some people… mainly because I’m going to refer, tangentially, to the circumstances of my coming out which landed me in jail.

Every time I drive with my mother in the neighborhood, she has to point to the sign for local rodeo that’s coming up (yes, I live in a part of California that has a HUGE rodeo every 4th of July). She points to it and says, “That’s (insert the name of my cousin)!” I surprised myself today when I said, without thinking, “Good, maybe she’ll be trampled by a horse.”

At the time, I thought I said it just so the shock value would make my mother think twice before saying anything the next time we pass one of those dozens of signs. However, the more I think about it, the more I realize that that statement accurately reflects my feelings toward her. She is part of an entire branch of my family tree whom I haven’t seen since I was 19… with the sole exception of her. I ran into her a few years later in a restaurant and the resulting altercation was one that remains a fresh memory in my mind even 10 years later.

I think it’s because I’ve accepted that I’m just going to have negative emotions about her and the whole family. The way that everything went down nearly cost me my life.... and I’m not over-exaggerating, I actually had to go to the ER because I was close to dying. So I suppose I think of that as kind of a trade-off.

They think I’m a rapist; so I think of them as murderers because they tried to end my life.

When I talk with therapists about them, they try to make me “get over” my negative emotions, but I think it’s nearly impossible to “get over” negative feelings generated by a group of people who had a clear array of choices and chose to act in a way that resulted in my near-death. How does one “get over” that? Is there forgiveness? I’m not sure that’s even a possibility, all one can do is move on… but how do you move on when the picture of the bitch is plastered all over town?

I talk big and have lofty aspirations for myself emotionally, but in reality, I’m a human being. Letting go of something that devastated my life and altered EVERY aspect of my life seems nearly impossible. I’ve tried everything you can think of: art, religion and meditation, exercise, drugs, moving away, exorcism (seriously), and many many other things, but I can’t get past it. When any one of them come up in conversation, or I see their picture, or I notice that someone I’ve friended on Facebook is a mutual friend (whom I then immediately unfriend), all that devastation comes upon me like an avalanche, and I remember that I fought very hard so that I could be here today… alive.

That’s just something I’ve got to accept, I guess.