Hey, how are you doing? I share this meme as something funny and too accurate. “Not today, satan” is countered with “What about tonight?”
I’ve had some dates with satan. Or devilish folx, if not the Lucifer himself! Yes, he can be persistent. If abusers gave up easily, wouldn’t that be easier.
trust
My first date with my rapist was when I was 16 or 17 years old. He was 46 or 47–he said he was going to be in my town for some reason, and I asked my mom. She said yes, I could go.
Oh no! She was weird about trusting people she shouldn’t, and not trusting people she should. The rest is history.
Poor mama. She was really busy being abused by my dad. Dancing with addicts is a full time job, but she had a full time paying job also. She might have been going to school at that time too.
boundaries
I was talking to a new peer counselor the other day. I’d come with a list of three things I wanted to talk about, but she asked about me, so I gave a bit of overview. It’s neat for me to hear how my story changes. Details that seemed really important years ago are ignored or glossed over now.
Something important I told the peer counselor was: my mom taught me how to love, which is how I survived. I survived a fuckton of trauma and ace score of 9 by doing relationship–listening, caring, touching, feeding, being loyal, and giving myself 100%.
Now as an adult, I see how much abuse I received from people who took advantage of my giving. As a grown-ass woman, my task is to learn about boundaries, saying no, not today. How to break up, how to determine who does and doesn’t deserve my time and energy. It’s a lot to do.
way back
My first best friend was an abuser. Yes, before kindergarten to second grade, that girl had me wrapped around her finger. She hurt me but was there for me at times. I had no idea I deserved better. I thought I was like a bug or piece of crap until recently!
So it goes way back, accepting however people treated me. I was permanently bewildered, the lost child, believing others, out of touch with my own truth. Socially different, I was taken advantage of. I was very quiet in my suffering and did ok-to-excellent in school, so I was never singled out as a problem, evaluated, diagnosed, and helped.
My own truth told me I didn’t deserve to be violenced every day, but that’s what my home life was, so I lost touch with my truth as irrelevant. I pushed my truth to the side, in order to survive unsurvivable violence. It’s been really hard to get it back.
how to be friends
My bestie would betray, insult, exclude, deceive, and intentionally mess with me–cruel to the point of making me cry for her entertainment purposes. She was the kind of person who genuinely enjoyed harming people. I was someone for her to experiment on, a naive, generous, curious, gentle kid who thought that was friendship.
Wow, yes, it was bad. Glad I’m an adult now, but the harms of the past accumulate. Glad I’m much safer, but it’s hard to be middle aged and figuring out how to be friends–what I deserve, how to say no, how to listen to people’s behavior, not just their words.
I’m really behind. But I guess some people never learn these things, like my mama. No time like now.
song
I normally only listen to rap by women, but I heard this song Not Today Satan for the first time today and liked the video’s trumpet, upsidedown train moment, and collaboration.
