It’s a part of life. You have people you trust in your world and you have people who trust you. Sometimes that trust is broken. Sometimes you’re the victim. Other times…the monster.
I have been both victim and perpetrator. I have been sexually assaulted and propositioned in ways I was not comfortable with. Likewise I have skeletons in my closet. I’ve hurt people in ways I deeply regret. Even now I don’t want to open up. I won’t say who did what or to whom, that’s not my place. What I will say is I have people who hurt me. There are people I hurt.
Why do I bring this up now? What does it profit me to come clean? Clarity? Clear conscious? Attention? No. Simply it reminds me I am human. Human means flawed. Human means imperfect. Human means selfish. We’re all selfish at birth. We have to be trained otherwise. Some of us are slow learners. I talk about how I am trying to be a better person. I talk about how Stephanie doesn’t want to be held accountable for things deadname did. Unlike my sisters with DiD who can claim it wasn’t them, entirely, I can only blame deadname for so much. I’ve been told the past is the past. To let it go. I try not to dwell on the past. Most days I don’t even bring it up let alone think about it. Every once in a while, those ghosts come back to haunt me.
The things I did as a pre-teen or even teenager I feel no guilt or shame. We all do stupid shit when we’re going through the agony of puberty. In some ways it’s a right of passage. You have to discover what boundaries are. You have to learn what mutual consent means. You also have to accept, sometimes we fuck up royally.
I don’t talk about my sex life because my experience is fairly limited. There is another reason. I don’t talk about the things I did, even those I blame on my youth or deadname trying to figure shit out, because I did hurt people. I made mistakes. I don’t mean petting a girl when she wasn’t in the mood or groping a girl during a game of spin the bottle or even grabbing someone’s behind while slow dancing to a sexy R&B song at a school dance. Those things happen. Their not things we brag about and I have atoned for my sins. I confessed to those I hurt. I forgave those who hurt me. I apologized and asked for forgiveness when it bore necessity. I paid my dues to society. I accept the sacrament of reconciliation from the church. So why bring it up now? I didn’t answer that question earlier did I?
I won’t name names. I won’t give details. But I will say this. Someone in my family did something to me they shouldn’t have done. I did something I shouldn’t have done to someone in my family. It is true pain begets pain. Suffering spreads to others. Fear feeds darker emotions. The truth is I wasn’t a good person. When I say I am trying to be better, what I mean is I am trying to atone. I am trying to right the wrongs of my past. I am trying to correct the mistakes I have made. I am trying to forgive those who hurt me. I am trying to forgive myself for those I hurt. It wasn’t deadname, it was me. I was hiding behind his mask. I did things using his face, his hands, his body, to make sense of the world. To bury who I was. To forget what I was becoming.
I hurt people. I lashed out because I was afraid to cope with my reality. Another person did something to me again without asking my permission. I wasn’t sure how to respond so I let it go. I tried to steer into it. But I ended making things worse.
I will say this. I often feel like I deserve the suffering that invades my life. I often feel like I have failed to earn the right to feel joy, love, happiness because of the pain I have caused others. Sometimes the guilt eats at me. Other times I push it down and shove it out of my brain. Then there are times I look it square in the face and we have a stand off. Sometimes I win. Sometimes I lose. Sometimes we draw. Tonight I realized I haven’t forgiven myself for the things I did because at least one person has failed to forgive me. I also failed to forgive one person in particular because I refused to accept what happened was wrong. I felt shame, guilt and of course too embarrassed to talk about it. Therefore I never coped. I buried it. I ignored it.
I was a very bad person. I just hope someday the universe will forgive me and let me seek my own peace. Until then I will leave you with this. Nobody is fucking perfect, least of all me.
Stephanie Bri 