The Wages of Sin

I’ve been blessed. I know I have… Even though I’ve been through enough to make me hate myself a lifetime over… I also know that everything I went through, could’ve been so, so much worse. I know of a male pastor, who was raped at the tender age of 8… And my grandma, my lovely loving grandma, was almost raped by her own mother’s second husband.

Me?

I’ve been blessed to have only been sexually molested. And I say blessed, because oftentimes, what we’re introduced to at an early age, even if we hated it at the time, becomes the very thing that we get stuck in...

Addicted to.

The sin that tears us apart, is exactly what we become entrenched in.

 It happened more than once, by more than one person, and I know that I was younger than 10 at the time, but I don’t have very many clear memories of my childhood. Or rather, I don’t remember what age I was when many things happened. Oh sure, I have flashbacks. I remember feeling disgust but not knowing why, I remember I didn’t want to go to karate camp anymore, but I couldn’t put it into words. Nor did I know why the two people who hung around me the most, were also the two people I both hated and needed at the same time. There was just so much that I didn't understand.

I think… It was around then that I started to feel small. 

I remember, that even after I left camp.

 I hated being touched. 

No one found out about it, or if they did, no one reported it. And I didn’t leave that camp because of the molestation either. It was instead because I was trying every trick in the book to not go, and because the prices of the camp were skyrocketing.

But after it happened, I hated any type of physical contact. Hugs were suffocating, anything touching my back except for clothes made me uncomfortable, and even holding my parent’s hand was unnerving. Though technically, physical contact with my parents had been quite rare since my little brother’s birth. 

My mom was often working, and so my dad was essentially playing the role of a single father. It was quite hard for him to divide his full attention between a baby who really needed it, and a four-year-old child who could at least brush her teeth. 

He did his best, he really did.

But he had trauma too.

As the only black kid in an all-white school, he had often been treated… not so well. I remember him sharing a story once, of how a kid got angry that he beat them in a game, and so they stalked him while he was heading home, ambushed him, and beat him in the head with a baseball bat. 

Even when caught off guard, my dad still won that fight. And his mother had to fight in court just to get some sort of justice for them.

It’s a cool story when taken out of context… 

But in context, it just meant that my dad had hair-trigger reflexes that crossed into the violent category. If we, as his kids, triggered those reflexes… Well, there are probably still a couple of holes in the wall of our old house, that were caused by me or my brother being thrown into them…

My dad also wasn’t the best at selecting punishments that weren’t traumatizing.

Along with the typical metal belt treatment, I remember there was also a time when I was locked outside of the house as punishment. Once, had been during winter, and I remember sitting outside, with Christmas music playing through my head, as I shivered in my loose pajamas.

When my mother found out about that, she stopped it.

And I’m glad she did. 

I’m also glad that God made it so that I didn’t like the smell of tobacco, or any type of smoke really, except for wood fire. I’m blessed that I wasn’t around my uncle enough for him to introduce me to drugs. And I praise God that I don’t like the taste of alcohol either. If I had, I already know that I would’ve fallen far deeper than I did.

Unfortunately, what had already hit me, left its mark… 

I think... I was around 10 when I got addicted to porn. And I was around 12 when I fully became entrenched in suicidal ideation.

 I hated myself, and everything that came attached. I remember at one time, wrestling with my mother, for the knife that I had either used or had been trying to use, on myself. However, I don’t remember if the intent had been to kill myself, or simply cause injury at the time.

I do know what the inside of a mental ward looks like though. The hang-proof door knobs and sad bedding were a nice touch.

The food was pretty bad though...

 So many of my memories are blurred, but I have a distinct memory of seeing myself as a monster.

A demon in human form. 

I was someone who hurt everyone around them, even though they didn’t want to. 

And it was around this time that the bullying began.

Not that I was the bully, but others began bullying me. 

It started with a person that we will call C for now. They were someone who I genuinely thought of as a friend, but they began turning my other friends and even family members against me. I was never allowed to succeed at anything, I remember that distinctly. If I was doing well, or if I was winning at something, then they’d get mad at me. And if I did something without them, they’d get jealous and force me to pay attention to them through any means possible. If I did anything that I enjoyed, but they didn’t, they’d make me give it up, and they would steal things from me as they saw fit.

 I also wasn’t physically stronger than them either, and they took full advantage of it. They would get physically violent, and make it seem like a game in front of others. I remember my cousin, laughing at me as it happened. 

I remember losing my ability to trust people.

I’m blessed that it never got too much worse. Later on, while they hadn’t outright told me at the time, C had been considering, transitioning pronouns. And in the process, they started using me as a test subject for their sexual preferences. I’m blessed that we graduated junior high, and went to different schools, not too long after that started. Otherwise, I would've likely had another molestation experience.

Maybe even worse.

And all the while, as I kept trying to please everyone around me, I found that I just ended up hating myself even more. I hated myself for allowing things to get as bad as they did. For allowing people to abuse me, for allowing myself to give up on the things that I enjoyed. And more than that, I hated that I thought of myself as someone who had essentially crafted people, who did nothing but hurt others. Because by not telling them to stop, I was pretty much telling them that it was fine to continue. 

And even worse... At some point, I developed a dependency on the people in my life that were not healthy for me to be around. 

And that caused me to hate myself even more than before. I thought that if only I could die, maybe then, the mess would finally stop. Maybe then, people could be safe from my tendency to corrupt others.

I know better now, but at the time, this was my truth. My reality.

And around this time, someone, somewhere, had told me that the reason Judas went to Hell, wasn’t just because he sold Jesus, to the people who condemned him to death. After all, every single sinner is a member of the crowd screaming, "Crucify Him". No... Instead, Judas went to Hell because he ended his own life, and thus hadn't been made right with God before his death.

… Judas went to Hell, because he committed suicide. 

After that… I couldn’t do the same. 

If the whole point of dying was to escape the agony of living. Then dying, only to go straight to Hell, where there is nothing good, and only the sheer concentrated wrath of God awaited, was very counterproductive. 

So, instead… 

I shut down.

I turned off as many emotions as I could, until I was pretty much just a husk of a person, going through the motions of a normal human being. It was… Easier, in a way, to not have to deal with emotions. 

I couldn’t die, otherwise everything would get worse. So I was stuck, living in a world where I was hated, and only wanted if I could be of use to others who would throw me away the moment they got bored. Hurt people, hurt people, and I hated the thought of using or hurting others. I didn’t want to put others through what I’ve been through. 

It’s only God, who gave me the grace and wisdom to not become what I hated most.

But I was still lost.

Bone tired…

And there was no hope... None…

So, I dove into distractions. To drown out the misery… the guilt… the self-hatred…

And I waited… 

At the time I didn’t know what for… But now I do.

And I’m so glad that I did.