See tags for TWs. More context can be found on my post in Share Your Story, but it's not required to understand this.

Today, I went to church and prayed for myself privately. It's actually the start of my "weekend" because my days off are Sunday and Monday; figured I'd try to make this week one where I'd try to focus on healing, and this is where I started. Yet I sat in the church, alone in my pew, singing hymns, reading out of the Nicene Creed, and I felt shame underneath it all. Who was I to sit in a holy place so contaminated at my core? Who was I daring to come into a house of God so profoundly and permanently defiled and filthy? I'll never wash myself clean, no matter how hard I try. You can sit here and tell me God loves us for showing up, for loving you just the same no matter how hurt or "dirty" you are. I understand that about my own faith; you can lay it out to me all day. Yet I still feel so vile for showing my face to God like...this. It is so hard to explain that no matter what you tell me, I feel like I allowed myself to be assaulted, and that's a type of filth I cannot rid myself of. I haven't even been baptized because I've kept my assault to myself there, and I don't take Communion because I don't feel right to take it the way I am.

This is part of slowly pulling apart the results of the trauma I put away for so long. It took 15 years to come back to me. I always had a problem of self-isolating and generally distrusting people, because I was afraid of giving in if they pressured me. Just the same way as I, as a young child, caved to being pressured after being sexually harassed for some time. Now a large part of the reason why has coming rushing back to me. It hurts more than I can describe to you here knowing I just cracked into being violated. I still have memories of him standing over top of me, my head underneath the hole in the floor of the camper, with his partially erect penis over top of me. I remember him humiliating me as he urinated down my throat and making loud sounds of pleasure doing it to me. The first time I told this story to my therapist I kept blurting out in between parts of it, "why did I let him do it?" It eats me alive at night. I feel so alone all the time, worthless around other people. I'm so scared of people wanting to be my friends or caring about me. What if I let someone hurt me again? Slowly little details come back to me. The more they find their way in again, the more I feel distrustful, gross and slimy, weak and malleable to anyone who wants me, and scared to feel loved.

The more I pull things apart, the more I realized I was never trusted or taken seriously. I was wrong to trust my mom, and I don't think she has ever trusted me. I keep finding the common thread in all these memories of my COCSA is that she never once checked on me when I was with my abuser. He openly exposed himself to me and physically sexually harassed me and no adult or anyone I ever trusted noticed. She ignored me asking for help and to get me away from him, and then never noticed the sexual assault happening outside her house to her own child. I want so badly to be able to trust someone, anyone again. I want to be able to ask for help and be noticed for once. I want to have someone not pick me apart but just listen once. I want a partner who I can trust not to insult my body and who I can feel safe opening myself up sexually to, and be able to touch them and allow them to touch me because I consent to it and love them. I want to be confident in my identity as transmasculine person and feel like I can love every part of my body as my own again.

But I did say that I want to start healing this week. All of this stuff has eaten away at me since finding it out. It never leaves. But for right now I'm focusing on myself. I'm reminding myself that my body is worthy of love and respect as I view it as creation of God; that I should be treating it with kindness. I have been giving myself time to sit with everything and find peace with the fact that right now, I feel bad, and that it's ok. I also am trying to spend what time I can affirming myself that I am worthy of being loved sexually and a partner who cherishes my body. This entry is trusting myself to put these things down and let others see them. I'm trying to just recognize what I can and put it down so I can eventually start making peace with it all.