I’ve been reading a lot about various types of abuse lately. I am in the mood to write some sort of blog post to put on my blog here addressing some of these issues… but I don’t know where to begin or what the real topic of my post would be. 😛 I want to write about some of my very specific experiences being abused as a child by my mother. I want to write more theoretically and philosophically about power and abuse cycles and what we need to do to protect all people from all sorts of types of abuse. I want to write about victim blaming in cases like my own. I want to write about the complexity of my dad being a victim of my mother’s abuse, even after he’d been separated and essentially “common law” divorced from her for over a decade! I want to talk about specific types of abusive actions. I want to talk specifically about cluster B personality disorders like NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) and BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) in many abusive people, and I want to better understand so many of these issues. I want to talk about reading these non-fiction books that have flaws – flaws of sexism or assumptions of not-even-studied hypotheses being treated as likely true. I want to talk about statistics and how flawed and misleading they can be, and how difficult it is to make sense of these things. I want to talk about how the US court system is ill-equipped to handle abuse, but I’d be so out of my depth that I wouldn’t know where to begin. I want to talk about how my experience as a survivor of abuse has affected my life, my desires, my choices, who I am as a person today, but I feel like my experiences were much too minor compared to the horror stories I read about, and I’m not even sure the abuse I faced did damage me much in the long run. I want to do something tangible in the world to help children who are being abused the way I was, and of course all of the people abused in much worse ways too, and I don’t even know where to begin.
FYI, on tumblr, I got a reply to my thoughts here, and then I answered my tumblr fandom friend’s comments:
k8video said: I think its best to start from the beginning and build up from there. Find a way to link each topic within the topic and create chapters/posts that flow from the last. Maybe create a flow chart – if that makes sense? Interested to see what you write.
luvtheheaven replied: Thanks!! 😉 I really appreciate the encouragement and knowing that I’ll have at least 1 reader… 😛 I think that is a good idea… I’ll see what I can do. I have an ace meetup event to go to all day today lol but maybe within the next few days I can find time to come up with a plan. Just outline a bunch of different blog posts I want to do eventually, then decide on an order and a way to sensibly tie them all together.
From Fandom to Family 
i am a survivor of violent nuns, sibling incest and parental neglect. my advice is tell as much as you can. start at the beginning or what seems to be the beginning to you, on thru the middle to the end. if you can. if you can’t just do what you are able to do. and know that you have lots of readers that love and support you. good luck
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Thanks so much for the support. 😉 I really appreciate it. I feel like any aspect of my story will be nothing compared to what you have been through, and I’m really sorry you had to endure that. But still, I will try to write something – preferably a lot of somethings – on these types of topics in the near future, because I do really want to.
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You know, in my experience… there really is no “beginning” to even start at a lot of times, especially when it’s something that started happening when you were a child. And sometimes even when you do remember whatever the beginning was chronologically, that might not be the same as a conceptual beginning—if that makes sense. Piecing together a timeline can be especially difficult, and trying to do it has stopped my progress so many times that I just sort of… write whatever comes up, and then work on putting it in order later. Organizing things based on related ideas is much more helpful for me, so if trying to start at a beginning isn’t working for you, you might try that instead.
My therapist gave me a really wonderful piece of advice for when your thoughts feel scattered: Don’t try to write it in lines like you would an essay. Embrace the randomness, and draw little circles all over a paper, and write your thoughts in them. Connect them if you feel they’re connected, and make a sort of web. You could try doing that, and that could give you a lot of ideas for places to start.
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Thank you for this comment, Elizabeth. I really appreciate it. You’re right, I hadn’t fully conceptualized that in my head yet but there is no “beginning” in my memory, I was a child and for as long as I can remember and longer there has been some aspect that was abusive to who my mother was as a person, and it’s not like chronologically is necessarily what I want to do. I replied to k8video by saying “maybe within the next few days I can find time to come up with a plan. Just outline a bunch of different blog posts I want to do eventually, then decide on an order and a way to sensibly tie them all together.” because YES I was already thinking of doing something quite similar to what you are suggesting here. I think the web and embracing the randomness is a great way to think of all this in a “creative non-fiction” type of way, haha… 😛
I have written a lot of pseudo-chronological stuff about my experiences before but keeping it truly chronological has never quite worked. So thank you for this advice. It’s really helpful. 😉
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