18: The everlasting fall, talking to God

It feels like I am chasing the fall. Or maybe it is chasing me. Everywhere I go the days grow darker, the air grow colder, and the trees take on marvelously extravagant overcoats of colors that shimmer or straight up dazzle on the back-drop of angry, grey skies. 

Alaska had moose walking the streets in the light night time drizzle of rain. Washington state added a first snowfall in the dark to the tune of howling coyotes. Oregon, gigantic racoons on front porches in the night time shuffle to find food while humans can't find warmth enough to stop aching bones from protesting the everlasting change of seasons. 

  

I just want to sit right here in another sofa that isn't mine and talk to God.

That is all I ever really wanted.

God.

I never understood why I had to be here. Why I couldn't have just stayed with God.

When I was a child, a small child, maybe 5 or 6, I understood God in the image of man. Of course, I understood him/her/it/that as more. But my mind knew I needed words to express my thoughts and those words created images mirroring the world around me. So I understood God as a man. He was an obvious authority figure - and growing up in a massively patriarchal household in a society that held the same values albeit slightly deeper under the surface and widely denied; God was male. Growing up in a nation that was white as the back side skin of a good German citizen after a long winter; God was White. For some reason God also strangely resembled Father Christmas. I guess I must have seen images of him often enough to have painted him to be the ultimate archetype of all things gentle and generous. Not the in the material way, but in the way of kindness. So God in my child-mind was a huge, old, slightly chubby (no, very, actually), White man with a white beard and white hair. Wearing white, too, as if his general racial and hirsute whiteness wasn’t quite cutting it. Oh, and obviously standing on white clouds as well. He was God after all, the clouds – literal Heaven - was the home I had assigned to him.

Now I did not grow up in a religious household whatsoever. Not even a little. At all. We did have a Bible. But only because it had been inherited along side furniture and art as a reminder of my mothers family’s once affluent place in the world. Now the furniture and paintings existed in the house like immobile ghosts made of precious woods and long-dried oils on canvas. My mother even came from an almost uninterrupted line of pastors going all the way back to the actual, real, honest-to-God Reformation in 1536. The line got broken once by a son who opted to become a wealthy land-owner over God, but then his son went back into the fold, the lamb lost, now found. And then my grandfather’s generation broke the Godly chain again, and for good this time, when he became a doctor - and then his brother a judge. Not one neither religious nor even remotely spiritual bone in the family since my great grandfather. And now both God and the Bible had no presence in the family. The Bible itself was locked inside a secret room in a mahogany clock-stand. It was a massive volume, but it fit into the clock stand together with ancient tattered issues of Illustrated Classics. I don’t know which of all of those pastors 12 generations back the bible belonged to. It did look handwritten, so maybe even before the printing press, which might make it a pre-Reformation book. Which is crazy to even think about, let alone think how it lived its days inside the dark hollows of a clock stand. I don’t know. We didn’t talk a lot about this Bible, or any other kind of Bible for that matter, not even that one time of year my parents did go to Church; Christmas Eve. Maybe that was why I had decided Father Christmas and God surely had to look the same.

We didn’t talk about any other religions either. Nor were they taught anywhere else at that time. I would have been in Kindergarten then, and that meant unsupervised play, definitely no organized learning. Also it was the 70’s; God was in pretty short supply in general.

So how I came to have a whole inner world with a very distinct idea of the divine, I have no idea. But I did. I know a lot of children do, no matter their own parents’ ideas of divinity. God was very real to me, and very present, too.

The last problem of course being how I came to have an idea of the ultimate authority figure as one of pure kindness. Someone who loved me and needed me.

Maybe that is a question that actually answers it self, come to think about it: To survive as a human you need love. If it isn't there, maybe your mind creates it in whatever form necessary. Who knows, maybe God in the end really is nothing but the dream of being loved by children all over the world. Or God is just an overactive stimulus in a specific God-part of the brain. To me it actually doesn't matter, because none of that makes God any less real to the one God is real to.

Call it delusion, call it romanticism, call it whatever you want. Really, judging a person for God in the end doesn't say a ton except about the person needing to do the judging.

So really there was just one actual problem:

Why had he abandoned me here? God, I mean. Why was I here? And also why did he not come and get me then at least, acknowledging his mistake in loosing me in the first place, so I could go back home? I did not belong here, I was here by mistake; I was under no delusion about that - it was simple fact to me. What I didn’t understand was why no one was coming to take me home.

It went like this: God had held me in his arms. He had been walking on the clouds one day, up there in Heaven. One wonderful, glorious day of sunshine and blue skies – we did live over the skies, mind you, blue skies were a given. He had been telling me a story, I think I was giggling. He was laughing. It was a funny story. And then he tripped. That’s all it took. He tripped over a cloud and lost his grip on me. And as he fell, I did, too. Only I fell through the clouds, for some reason not solid substance to me as they were to him, I fell all the way to Earth and was born into a human child.

It was a mistake. He had tripped. If he hadn’t tripped, I would have been safe and at home still. I was not supposed to be here. I just wanted to go back home.

I remember the loneliness and home sickness so strongly still. Especially while being in the house I was supposed to know as my home. But my parents’ house was never my home. I could sit in the bed that they said was mine, in the room with it’s bare walls, with they grey curtains, and the furniture that I hadn’t had a say in, and feel how my core was being ripped apart; This was all wrong.

And even younger, I remember so vividly looking at my father, to see how he spoke to my mother, and see her cower under his insults, and wonder who they were. I did not belong to them; This was all wrong.

And then I remember God. Before I remember words, I remember sun light – probably pouring in from a window – like endless tiny impossibly thin threads of gold and purple and yellow and white and deep orange and lilac and dark blue and every color waving and weaving in and out, up and down, side to side, like sea weed near the beach on a shallow pool of gentle ocean water and a beautiful day of clear skies and soft sun. I remember it being delighted in it’s own beauty, like tiny timbals the laughter rose from it. I remember laughing, too, it’s happiness being my happiness, it’s light being mine as well, we were one and the same, and what we were was love. 

I can't help thinking that my survival as a human being here was because I always knew that I was never truly a human being in the first place, or more, I was that reality that lies beyond, the reality that enveloped me in the transcendent beauty that way the single strands of sunlight pouring in from a simple window. That was my home. I belonged with that light. I belonged with God.

When I was 15 years old, or just before, my Father said he had an announcement. I had just come home from school and was eating rye bread standing up in the kitchen. He had summoned my mother to be there, too. She was standing to his left. They both faced me, as one collective unanimous voice:

- You do not fit into the family. So your mother and I have decided to send you away, he said.

I quite frankly did not know how you are supposed to react to a statement like that. So I simply turned around with my back to them and kept eating my food.

My body still remember what it felt like, though, and it might not have known how to react, but it knew very clearly that if you are in a position of proximity to any person ever, you do not tell them, they do not fit in.

Especially not if you are their actual family. No matter how true it might be. I knew I did not fit in. I had always known. That did not mean I didn’t want to. No child was ever born who didn’t desperately want to fit into his own family. But I never wanted it to be on the expense of me eradicating who I was myself. No child should ever be expected to do that. No family will ever benefit of being homogenous to the point of destroying all that does not fit in. What does that even mean – fit in according to whom? According to what idea of what a person should be to fit in? Who got to decide that? My family to this day holds it as the truth that it was I who wanted to change them. That I never thought they were ‘good enough’. That I thought I was better than them. That I was too sensitive, couldn’t take a joke, should get over myself and think of them for a change. Especially my brother. It was never true. I didn’t want to change them. I wanted them to stop forcing me to become them. I wanted them to have room for me to be who I was inside of the family, to open up the confines of what makes a person, to hold me and love me and accept me for me – not for who they wanted me to be, but just me. They couldn’t do it, and it was killing me. Literally. 

I had tried suicide already at 14 years old. Because I could not handle living in a family where the constant messaging was that something was seriously wrong with me. To the point of me needing to be institutionalized, preferably in a straight-jacket, because clearly I was bordering clinically insane. I know now that is a very common way for a family with inner workings like mine to make sure that a person looses her voice. If you believe the messaging that says you are insane, you become quiet. And even if you do not, or you manage to find your voice even a little, the messaging has already been working on the family as a whole. Even the extended family. You have been securely branded as unreliable, because you are said to be unstable. Even if you aren't, especially if you aren't. No one believes the words of a crazy person. It is the smartest silencing technique in the world.

I see families as mirrors of governments throughout the ages. Micro cosmos/ macro cosmos. What can exist between a few people can exist as a nation. Anyone who has lived in a fascist state can tell you about the intricate ways a government will silence it's opponents. Anyone who believes in real democracy will make sure it is in work inside of their own family first. That is the true roots of democracy; the family. Families that encourage everybody to have a voice have discussions over the dinner table.

But they never include vicious ridicule, belittling, or that someone gets up to start putting his glasses down. Then take his watch of. Slowly, deliberately. Then open his belt and let it slide off of his pants, until he holds it's leather in his hands, looking at you. Daring you; Just try. Try and speak up, and see what happens. Of course I always did. The results were not pretty.

I remember a social worker came to see us. I don’t know how it happened. I think my mother had asked one of her colleagues to come – my mother was herself a social worker, she worked with new mothers to help them get a good start as parents. The irony of that always leaves me heart broken with sadness for all of us. To this day I am deeply thankful to my mother for getting this social worker to come. It must have been impossibly hard for her to do. It would have meant going directly against my Father, maybe even without his knowledge at first, contacting anyone from the outside, naming any issue that might leave a crack in the steely veneer that surrounded us from the outside world.

It must also have meant for her to wake up, if even for a moment and realize her child was hurting to the point of it being lethal, and that she really had to do something this time, lest she lost me completely. It may have been the only time she managed to not only wake up, but also to act, and I know exactly how petrified that must have made her feel. I also know how determined she must have felt, I recognize it in myself. The drive to speak truth to power, no matter how towering that power might be, no matter the risk to yourself, if enough is at stake. I think she knew my life was at stake. I am grateful she set the wheels in motion that would finally get me out. Even if he managed to turn the narrative around.

I had been on a hunger strike for 14 days, I think, at that point. I was already thin at the time, I remember seeing photos from my confirmation. I look like someone who had been starving for a long, long time before that. Not just from food. From all of life.

I went on hunger strike to wake her up. To make her see that she needed to do something. Of course not him, he was the reason she needed to act. I knew there was nothing I could do myself. I didn’t trust the adults in my school. They had watched me get violently bullied for years, doing nothing. I didn’t trust my friends’ parents, they had been on the sidelines all along, never picking up on the distress of a child. Both of my parents were well known pillars of the community. No one suspected what happened behind closed doors, no one wanted to know. 

I had even tried calling a radio show for children in trouble once. All I recall was the debilitating fear of actually asking for help, because I knew exactly how that would look should anyone find out. And with anyone I mean my Father. I would have been in trouble of the really not humorous-in-hindsight kind. And then the dismissal of the host. I think she said I should tell my teachers or other adults in my life. She didn’t seem to get I didn’t have other adults in my life. Not any who gave a damn enough to actually help. I remember feeling so utterly alone after that. If that radio host - who was heralded to be the savior of all lost children, didn’t get it – I was fucked. 

Desperate measures were needed. And being a child pretty much the only option you have when no one listen to the words you actually utter – is food. Food is communication. Always has been. We gather as humans around tables of food and rekindle relationships. We talk and laugh and the stars twinkle. Except in the dysfunctional family. Here food is control. It is the final stronghold of any child whose voice isn’t heard. Using food they take control back. It’s so simple: Because you cannot force food into a child mouth, if the child refuses to eat. You can force anything else. But not this. If your child denies food it is time to look at the underlying issue: What is your child trying telling you that you don’t want to hear? What truths are you denying? How much are you trying to force your child into things this child is actually not comfortable with? How much are you imposing your will onto another human being? How much are you refusing to acknowledge that just because this is a child, doesn’t mean it isn’t a person with thoughts and fears and wants that are just as valid as yours? 

In my family the truth that was denied was so simple, it is heartbreaking thinking of the measures employed to keep it hidden, when something like that could have been turned around if only the main person would have dared look at what he was doing and why....

Abuse. Physical, verbal, emotional, mental, economical, sexual abuse. No one wanted to see it. So it was denied to the point of it being claimed as completely normal. And the one saying ‘this is not right’ was appointed as the only problem there was. Still is. 

The cognitive dissonance was threatening to tear my sanity apart. It was like living inside of that house in a travelling fair where the mirrors bend and reality gets twisted so many ways it makes you sea sick. I had fought my whole life to find a way for us to acknowledge this problem – so we could find a way to maybe be an actual family together. I knew now it was not happening. If I wanted to live, I had to get out. And I wanted to live. 

I had tried suicide at that point, slitting my wrists. I was so desperate to get away, and nowhere to go that I as 14 years old put a knife to my wrists. It left a scar so thin it was barely noticeable. I had gained my first insight into suicide and me; I could not physically directly hurt myself, and a knife in flesh hurt. Which should tell anybody who thinks that suicide is about self harm that they have no idea:

Suicide is not about harm of any kind. It is a self under such extreme pressure, an escape door opens up and you take it. Because you cannot NOT take it. It is so much not an actual conscious choice at that point, it is pure instinct. Except the door closed for me before I could get myself all the way through it. The only thing left now was desperate communication where all else had failed: Food. I refused it all together. It worked.

The social worker asked to see my scar, I remember that so clearly. She had requested to talk to me alone. That had given her a plus on my internal plus/minus sheet of whether or not she was an adult that could be trusted. It signaled to me that she realized that I would not be free to talk under the watchful eye of my parents. My parents who were the ones, I needed the escape from. The ones doing the harm. So she sat with me, alone, in my room in the back of the house where the children’s rooms were placed.

But then she wanted to actually see the scar. That gave her a huge fat minus, because it unabashedly suggested that she thought I was lying.

Just another adult thinking I was surely lying. Like victim blaming a rape survivor, only here a child surviving abuse.

It also reminded me of something else: A grown-up demanding access to my body. It made me go instantly ice cold, everything in me convulsing, the armor of my emotional protective shield instantly up; get ready, harm is coming.

I told her a flat no. And I remember so clearly how I lost all burgeoning hope she was there to help, I doubt I said much else to her.

Turned out I didn’t have to. Even though I was told I was being removed because I didn’t fit in, the truth was that the authorities removed me.

They paid for a boarding school the first year. Or some of it, I’m not sure of the exact payments. I've never seen any paper work on it. When I tried to gain access to it in the municipality, they told me all records had been burnt. It destroyed me.

Not because I needed the records for anything. But because they were my history.

After the boarding school, they paid for my board on a high school until I was 18 years old.

Or so I was told. They even paid for my books for school. That I know, I remember my mother telling me how I needed to take full advantage of that and get every red dictionary in this well-known series of dictionaries, because the authorities were paying for them. Tuition was free, this being Denmark.

I remember being told the only thing I had to do was to visit a psychologist to help me cope with the situation of my life this far. That meant staring at walls for a few years, because psychologists are adults, and I did not trust adults even a little bit for obvious reasons.

I don’t remember ever seeing the social worker again.

I do seem to remember it being covert, because she was my mother’s colleague, and so they thought they were really doing my mother a favor because they would help with payment for boarding school for me. Maybe the social worker actually never did believe me. Maybe she was actually just doing my mother a favor.

Maybe believing something can be horribly off in a family living right under your nose is simply too much to cope with for most. So it is unseen instantaneously. I do think that is how so many children are not helped every day even if social workers visit and actually do believe them – but still do nothing. I was lucky that this one may or may not have trusted the word of a child, but that she never the less acted. She got me out. And my mother got me out by getting in touch with the social worker in the first place. Or my father did it himself in a moment of realization that the methods of this household might actually be costing him a child. Who knows? The fact remains I got out. And I am thankful. Even if I always wanted the family to have been brave and looked at their methods instead, so I could have stayed. And thrived. And lived. The best solution is never to just remove the symptom.

The story to the family was that I was so talented musically that my parents had decided to pay for boarding school so I could pursue my singing.

My mother must have repeated that story so many times to others. Because in the end she repeated it back to me, as if it were true. She had come to believe her own cover story. Maybe that was easier. For her at least. But the family’s ease lives on the back of my shunning. I was the one who spoke up. So I was removed. I was the problem. So I was erased. Only I was never the problem.

Now home is nowhere.

I never did find home in the house of my parents. Or in any other house. I know they wanted it to be there. It can’t be easy to watch a child so obviously stand apart from what you fight hard to preserve. A child so tenaciously point out the things you do not want to see.

And home did not go from nowhere to everywhere. That is words repeated of the oblivious who cannot stand the truth of the uncomfortable.

Home is nowhere.

But then, it was never here. It was always God. Maybe that is the saving grace of growing up in a place where you were never afforded the luxury of simply growing up. That some of us never loose sight of that first knowing. I can't help but think that every time you see a newborn baby smile into blue air this is why they smile; They haven't forgotten yet, they are talking to God. 

I love my parents. They think I hate them. I don't. That is how a child works; No matter what you say to a child, it will always love you. That does not mean it also stays close to you. If you are actually harming it, knowingly or not, that child needs to love you from very far away. 

I am not talking about any of this to harm my family. I am simply done keeping the secret to protect them. I need to talk. Not for me, but for all the children still in homes, being destroyed, while being told they are the only thing that is toxic.

I am done carrying the narrative of that crazy child who was so disturbed she tried suicide already at 14.

Not that I think anyone in the family actually knows that part, I think that was quickly and thoroughly silenced.

But the family at large does believe I am probably not entirely right in the head. Because that was the repeated tale. Because that was the easily digestable and effective way of not having to deal with how this same family had generations worth of abuse that just might be the actual problem instead of one small girl not buying the company line.

Silencing. It’s so simple, and so commonly used in every culture with a base in oppression from families to businesses to nations throughout time: If the one who speaks is gone, no one has to address the actual problem. Which is just never the one who points it out. Shooting the messenger? Never an actual way of handling anything.

And silencing by suggesting mental illness? Another popular method, especially of dealing with the voices of women. Just say she is hysteric. It always works. Everybody knows women are just overly emotional, on their period, or in need of some penile attention. Basically, women aren’t really people at all, They’re an organ. The vagina to be specific. And organs can’t hold valid thoughts. They need to be simply handled until they are needed. And the only thing they are ever needed for, is male pleasure and the carrying of their off spring. Every woman who ever dared have a voice has been told she is just emotional at best, and has been suggested to be mentally unstable at worst. Or wait – killed. Which basically is the same, it is all about the silencing of women. Make no mistake. There is violence in all the methods, the goal is always eradication. And sometimes killing a voice by painting it the dirty colors of crazy tampers so much with a persons basic being that they end up carrying the physical ending of their voice out themselves. That is suicide. Or death by proxy, the proxy being yourself.

To me it was always interesting how it actually was my Father who wanted me to become a journalist. The job of journalists in regimes all over the world is this: Speak truth to power. Point out what makes no sense. Point out where that power is being abused. Point out when it goes corrupt. And especially when it goes violent. Interesting also how authoritarian regimes all over the world deals with that kind of journalism; They silence it. Any way they can. They discredit it, manipulate it, or straight up threaten it into submission. Interesting how the exact same methods are used inside the authoritarian household of the single family. 

I can't help but think that his wish for me to become a journalist was never simply because it was a very prestigious education in our country, the prestige rubbing off on the family. I think that maybe he wanted me to speak truth to the power that was him. I will probably never loose hope that one day he will actually truly hear it, too. 

Because that is the thing, isn't it? Abuse of any kind os always about control. But that means that if you truly understand that it is actually not up to you to control anyone - that what you are doing is not love at all, no matter how much you are telling yourself that is the reasoning behind your actions - but that it is deeply harmful. Then I do believe enough space can be created for change to happen.

But it has to come from the one who inflicted the harm. This is not one of those 'but fault can be found on all sides' type situations. No. Absolutely, definitively not. Abuse is a crime. You do not ask victims to assume blame for any kind of crime, that is victim blaming of the ugliest kind in the worst and most destructive way and it is violently re-traumatizing and can only be uttered from people who do not want change at all. Change happen with the uncomfortable realization that you truly fucked up in a big way. You take that in. You sit with it. You know how much you inflicted hurt. Maybe you sit with feelings like wanting to run away, or being sick to your stomach realizing what you have done, or slipping back into complete denial - or even back into the same behavior that was harmful. Which is exactly what the need for the victim to assume responsibility is. It's just more abuse being inflicted. Then I hope, you realize this, too. 

And then the healing can begin. Maybe. Because it is still not up to you. This is the time where the victim is in control. Not you. Another uncomfortable lesson to be learned on a deep level, that again: All of this was about control. You thought you didn't have it, you needed to take it with force and any which way you could. Like someone was stealing it from you. And in the process you became an abuser. You never saw yourself as one. You saw yourself as someone who was being wildly unfairly accused for all kinds of things you did absolutely not do, because you're a good person.

Well. As someone wise once said: No one sees themselves as the villain of the story.

Now. I don't believe in villains. I believe in people. And sometimes people go astray. Like they get really, seriously lost. But that means they can also find their way back.

I truly believe - family, all of you - that we could one day talk. But it will require waking the serious fuck up on your behalf. It does not work to brush quickly over any of this like it really never happened, and surely not in any really serious way. No, no, and no. Healing does not come from covering an infested wound. It comes from actually cleaning that wound up, even when it hurts. I have been in pain my entire life at this point. It's your turn.

I know there is one person who I was incredibly fortunate to meet very late in life, actually only a few years ago, who was never sucked into the quagmire the rest of my family now lives in, mud to their waists. Because she was the daughter of a different strand of the family tree. Not a close relative, she did not grow up with an abuser as her own father - like my own mother did, like my own father did - and so she is free today to realize abuse when she sees it.

And to know I am actually not a liar, even to see how that label is the trade mark of the abuser - the convenient way of avoiding to deal with the real issue at hand, which will always and still be the abuse itself. Even the specific abuse it is, to still hold onto the belief, that I am a liar. I am so thankful I met her. We talked about this for a while. Now that solid ground of actual truth established, we are free to talk about all else that life is made of. 

If other family members from the strand of the tree that branched out into systemic abuse one day find me and realize the magnitude of it - I am here. But as long as it lies secret and assumed that I am darkness herself, then that is a solid no. I know now. I know how that works. It will always end in more abuse. And I am not evil for walking away from that. I am sanity. I am life. I am light.

Outside the windows of this house, the leaves carry the colors of fall. Golden yellows, translucent reds, deep evergreens. This house belongs to a woman who knows what home is. In the front yard she has planted a vegetable garden in tubs of steel, tomatoes still on the branches, peppers glowing bright red in the setting sun. Every piece of furniture inside has been selected with care, teak tree in deep brown from the fifties, like the house itself. It’s a small house, a size made to make a human body feel comfortable. Original hard wood floors. Lots of light filtered through transparent curtains. A wall of art work over the beautiful curry colored couch. She has a kayak hanging on the wall of the wash room. Shelves stuffed with tents and sleeping bags. Life happens here. A good life. I see the fall through the window from the couch. There’s a blanket over my knees, a coffee in my hand and a little rescue dog snuggled up against me on the couch. I’m safe here. In this moment, here, I get to just be in the Fall.