The Great Escape

post

original date

January 11,2008

The Great Escape

Reality pens me to the mat. I am urged to pen it back. To do so was an exercise in choice.
This is my story of my wrestling with choice.

In the early 1980's escape began for me. As freedom called. After marriage in 1982 I was for the first time in my life, safe. Safety offered me the opportunity to find a sense of self. I was connected to a loving circle that had my best interest at heart. Affiliation gave me a connectedness I had never known. Four years later that safety began to secure me into the mission that great restoration that would compel me to finish the promises made during many years of torture and abuse. Those years of my childhood were stored as if a master records keeper had taught me the skill. Compartmentalized into a persona for every major excruciating event. That was how the promise was kept.
Some day if they don't make me crazy, or if I don't let them make me like them...I will give me a life. This was a solemn promise a vow of "In your face" to every thing they made me endure.
I was safe enough that those file drawers would snap the spring that held them shut with such force that as it began I would "awaken" hiding in my closet not knowing how I got there. As the time went on those files were as a movie clip flooding my wakening moments with visions of those horrid events lived and filed away so many many years before. Remembered in a survivors capsule of secured truth that would be exposed just as I had vowed.

The "Great Escape" took me most of my life time to achieve, but there was a pivotal point that is what I long to speak of ...

During a long stay and under a strict supervision I opened drawers that were much to dramatic to open alone. I had become hospitalized. My sweet mind is a gift. God used that intelligence that He gave me to keep record. Records of thing so unspeakable that it took professional help, medication and 24 hour supervision to secure my physical safety. For I was on death watch for several weeks. Those things that I pulled up from those files had to be reviewed. I listed them chronologically. I had to make sense out of the evil that had befallen my youth.
It was at a desk in my hospital room that I was penning events that had been reveled at prier hospital stays and during outpatient psychiatric therapy, that I had a major breakthrough. This is my experience of that "Great Escape" that breaking through of choice.
Sitting at that desk my list looked like this...gang rape in 6th grade, multiple rapes during childhood and adolescence, torture, physical,sexual emotional, educational,spiritual and mental abuse so sever that I had had to have re- constructive surgery and years of intervention,Sexual exploitation begining at age 4, a mentally ill mother,a violently mentally ill step dad, being the last of 8 siblings and the only one who did not run away, moving 22 times in my first 18 years of life, starvation, malnutrition, Several deaths of loved ones, deaths to animals, witnessing a murder and the loss of my own infant at 16 years of age through a forced abortion. The list on that paper before me was so painful that it was just crushing me as I listed out that chronological horror story that was my life. I was so hurt that God let me live at one point I yelled and screamed at him...and He understood.

It was He who then gave me a choice a chance to choose the course of my "Great Escape".

Sitting there at that desk, looking at that list that was the culmination of several (5-6) at that point years of hard recovery work. Sitting there I just collapsed and cried. Understand this, I did not cry, I never learned how. I had had the ability to cry literally beaten out of me. I began to really sob. I could not breath and it really hurt my sinus and head severely and I collapsed to my knees. The attending nurse, who I will all ways treasure as an angel on this earth in the form of a woman, came to me quickly. I had to be laid on my back to relieve the internal sinus pressure for my face swelling I was gasping. She gently told me what it is to cry that I was having the moisture come out of my tear ducts at such a rate that it was causing severe pressure. She told me lovingly that it was a normal physical response. She then sat on the floor beside me. She was so gentle and kind . She stroked my hair and she helped me to pace my breath in. They gave me an injection to help relieve the sinus pressure, and I wept. I wept myself to sleep there on the floor I think an intern came and they lifted me into a bed. Where when I awoke I was just in shook and speechless for what seems like days. During those days I was given a presentation by God. It was the sacred options that lay before me.

The option of choice.

For it was God who taught me the options before me. I had a major choice before me. There was no condemnation or criticism from Him what ever I chose HE would respect.
This is what I had before me...
I could chose to go off into pure spirit and live in an institution the rest of my life. He would be with me. I would have fellowship with him. My body would no longer be my own and I would be deemed in this world as insane. I would no longer have to fight through the process of restoration. I would be free from the pain of knowledge. There would be no more images and no more remembrance of what had happened. It came with great costs however and that was presented to me as well. This was purely between God and I . No one else gave me the clarity of the choice before me. If I chose this however it would irrevocably effect my Beloved for the rest of his life. I would have nor earthly future and would most likely suffer indignities to vast to measure.
Or
I could choose to continue the battle full face to the wind and beat the snot out of the darkness that had so tried for my entire existence to extinguish me. That would mean that I would have to face my offenders, remember and walk though the events that had not been unwrapped. I would have to tell about Carolyn's murder and call the authorities. I would have to continue with the surgeries and indignities of the remnants of sexual abuse and the ravage that had been done to my mind,spirit and body. I would have to continue to have the stigma of being weird and a misfit in this world. I would have to continue to raise myself and grow up in this world developmentally. I would have to continue to face the Post Traumatic Disorder that kept me a bizarre person with odd traits and tender responses. It meant that I would have to integrate all of those broken pieces called me. All those severed parts that were mercifully dissociated just short of multiple personality disorder. It meant embracing those parts of me that were loathsome and angry. It also meant so much more than that. Like "trusting the process" just learning how to even trust. How to stop surviving and learn how to live. It meant getting of the triangle of victim/rescuer/offender with my family of origin and facing all those other dysfunctional relationships. It was letting go of unhealthy relationships. Getting boundaries of where I began and ended so as to be able also to know where others began and ended.
The choice I ultimately made was not an easy one. Neither, would have ultimately been a choice of ease however. I had endured things that few humans do ever live through. My life had been kept from even my own hand (suicide). I had/have a purpose. A responsibility in my survival, to pass the torch and light the way behind and before me with the knowledge, experience and strength that I have fought for and attained.
I escaped. I made it out and into the life, the life I live. This life uncommon. This life Restored.
~Donetta




Write Away Contest
If you'd like to participate here are the rules:

1. Write a post or find one in your archives on the topic, "The Great Escape" and email your post's permalink to me at: scribbit at gmail.com any time through Sunday January 20th. If you fail to meet the January 20th deadline I will still happily publish the link to your post and include it in the list of entries but it will not be judged. I reserve the right to reject submissions if they fail to meet the topic or if they contain objectionable content.

2. Publish a link to the contest page here at Scribbit in either your entry post or in a separate post.

3. Check back here on Tuesday January 22nd when I will post a complete list of the entries along with the Write-Away Winner and any honorable mentions our judge sees fit to award.

Our guest judge this month is Robin from Around the Island, a wonderful mother, writer and blogger living in Tel Aviv with her husband, son and daughter.

But besides this the winner and all runners-up or honorable mentions (I leave that up to the judge to award them) will also get to take home this attractive Write-Away Winner button which he or she may display in their sidebar if they wish.