This may be disturbing

I feel like this post should have a warning similar to the one at the beginning of south park episodes.  You know...due to content this post should not be viewed by anyone.  If you're easily disturbed by things, or just disturbed by things, or maybe just human in general, you ight want to skip this one.



Now then.  Have ya'll (who shouldn't be reading this :-P) heard about Jessica Ridgeway?  You know, the 10-year-old girl out in Colorado who vanished while walking to school one morning and a week later her dismembered body was found in a field?  They couldn't identify the body at first, they said, because they only found parts.  Clearly she was taken by one sick SOB!  And now I just can't seem to get her off my mind.  Not a good thing to be thinking about at 2:30 AM.

No one seems to know anything at this point about what happened.  They say kidnappings are usually by someone the child knows, but this one just really has the feel to me of being random.  Of course what I "feel" doesn't mean much of anything since I clearly don't have all the facts.  I should know better than to give in to stereotypes, but it just seems like such a nice neighborhood and a nice family and a nice little girl.  I guess it could be some distant acquaintance of the family....who knows.

But that's really beside the point.  Here's what gets me.  When I was 10 I was...experienced.  (I'm assuming that this crime was sex based).  I honestly don't remember how old I was when the first rape happened, but I know I was a lot younger than 10.  The first sexual stuff I remember for sure I was about 5.  By the time I was 10, I was in many ways immune.  Things still hurt me, but I knew how to hide from the pain.  I knew how to get away in my head.  Hell I knew how to manipulate adult men during sex.  Plenty of stuff a 10 year old should NOT know!

But most likely Jessica had never experienced anything like that before, and that makes my heart go out to her so much more.  I'm not saying at all that things would've been better for her had she been sexually abused first, but I just can't imagine going from happy, peaceful, loving childhood into a brutal attack.  I grew up in the hell.  It was my life.  It didn't make it easy by any means, but I didn't know to expect any different.  I had no concept of a peaceful happy life, so I'd grown up learning to deal with the horrors.

It's like the book I just finished reading about people growing up in Afghanistan during the war.  They were amazingly not shocked and horrified when things started being blown up all around them.  I'm sure they were scared, but it was their home and what they knew...far different from an American who has never seen anything like that walking into the middle of it.

I remember years ago I went to a website for survivors of sexual abuse/assault.  One of the first people I met there told me her story of being stalked by this random guy she didn't know, who eventually broke into her house and raped her.  I was shocked and horrified by it.  I knew all about living with evil people.  I even knew about letting people take advantage of me because I didn't know I could have anything better.  But somehow it just hadn't registered to me that some random guy off the street could be that evil too.  Somehow I still thought the outside world was (relatively) safe.  I knew the types of abuse that occurred in my world, but I thought that the rest of the people out there, not born in to my hell, were safe.  And I just kept thinking how terrible it would be to be suddenly ripped out of all the peace and comfort you've known and flung in to the world of being a rape survivor.  In fact her story still terrifies me.  She wasn't drunk out at a bar wearing next to nothing.  She locked her doors at night.  She was doing all the right things to be safe and it still happened.

I never want to compare people's trauma stories and think about whose might be worse.  It really doesn't matter for one thing, and there will never be an answer anyway.  But I just keep thinking of the terror little Jessica must have felt.  I remember the terror I felt and I had years of learning what to expect, what might be coming, and how to survive.  As sick as it is, I got damn good at it too.  Of course Jessica's attacker clearly had different motives than mine but I still imagine a lot of the pain was the same.  In a strange way mine was predictable.  I didn't know exactly what was going to happen when, but I knew eventually it was going to happen.  She was just walking to school.  As far as anyone knows she was just happily walking to school when all this happened.  It was just another day, until it all of a sudden it was hell.  I at least had a pretty good idea of what would happen after I walked home from school.

It's now after 3:00 and i'm probably not making any sense since I'm tired and really struggling to find the words I'm trying to say.  I just can't get over all the anger I have on this little girl's behalf.  I hear stories of kids being abused by their parents every day it seems (way way way too often, but that's another post for another time), and those bother me, but none of those rattle me like this one seems to have.  Why am I so much more bothered by this than any others?  They're all innocent children, but this one scares me so much.  Maybe because I do eventually want to have kids, and I know I can be a good mom and take good care of my kids and not let them go through any of what I went through.  But I may not be able to stop them going through what she went through.  Ugh.

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Ok gotta do my gratitude...can't skip that.  I'm grateful that I finally got my homework done tonight even though it nearly killed me.  It took me 'til about 12:30 to finish.  Of course that seemed so late at the time...now that it's after 3 that seems early!  Not holding out a whole lot of hope for sleep at this point though...my brain is way too awake with this stuff.  (And my evening dr. pepper.  I knew that would cause issues but I wouldn't have been able to do the homework without it.  <sigh> )