Eight

I live my life at an eight. My pain, on any given day, it’s an eight. It started when I was younger. People chip away at you over time, and bring you down and make you feel like you are less than what you are in actuality.

My mom would slap me across the face when she would get mad. If we were arguing and I was too sassy…here would come her hand across my face. She would always apologize afterwards…she even brought it up when speaking at church once. How ashamed she was that she had done it and promised to never do it again….it had happened many times prior to her saying this in church….by the time she made this promise I was out of her house and didn’t see her often anyway. She said how degrading it is to hit someone in their face. How it is something that can be purposefully demeaning because they have a visible reminder when they look in the mirror of what you have done to them and the shame associated with the event. She said you are making your children feel like they are less. You make it harder for them to keep looking up.

The next person…well he broke me down a little at a time until he beat the shit out of me. You only did it the once, but that was all it took. You would be mean and cruel and come back and say you were sorry and that it had been a bad day or you had been stressed. You didn’t mean it. Could I please forgive you? You would say I was too good for you and you didn’t deserve someone like me. I should have listened to you. Instead I kept letting you come back. I kept opening the door and letting you in when you said you had no where else to go. That’s how it ended. You said you had nowhere else to go. We had been fighting and hadn’t seen each other in awhile. I should have known I was in for it that night. I prayed the whole time you were raping me that you wouldn’t lock the door on your way out the next morning so someone would find my body and be able to get to my babies before they had gone too long without food. You didn’t kill me. Instead you laid down next to me after beating and raping me and had me put my head on your chest while you slept. I looked in the mirror just long enough to cover up the damage you had inflicted…then I didn’t speak of it to anyone for a long time.

The next one..well he felt pretty shitty about where he was in life and the more I tried to build him up and bring him up the more he would tear me down. It didn’t start out that way. You started out pursuing me with a single minded purpose. Once you had me though….things changed. You changed. You didn’t want me to try and help, you just wanted to tear me down to your level. You just wanted to berate me until I felt as shitty as you did. You wanted to make sure that I knew I wasn’t worth it, and to make sure that I knew you knew it as well. It was like you would pick fights just to make sure you could get a jab or two in so I didn’t feel too good.

There were more less significant things along the way, but the point is the people I loved and chose for my life tried to break me. They nearly succeeded. People ask why I don’t just get out there. They say I would have no problem finding someone who would love me. I don’t love me. After all of this, after all the people who should have loved me and treated me with anything but love…I don’t know that I have it left in me to “find someone”. Every day my life is at an eight. I’m done living at an eight…I want something better. I want something that’s more than just making it through each day to get to the next.