ie. anyone with squeamish stomachs or “bad things” in their past may want to skip this post. I’ll add a few blank lines here… so you can click away…

 
About why this past week took me down for the count, and I’m still down, don’t let this ghost you see confuse you.

When I was a child, life was difficult. I had a very abusive father, an absent mother (at least *she* got away, I always wished she’d thought to take us with her), and encounters with a few of my mother’s boyfriends over the years, one good, all the others bad.

In plain language I grew up being beaten (no, not “swats”), molested, and raped. By various people, sometimes one person doing all three.

It was not a happy time.

When I was grown I left. I believed that out there in the real world things would be better. I’d find a place to belong, a safe place, people I could count on.

So I joined the army. Hey, I was a kid who believed the hype.
I was also tired of starving, tired of living in crack houses, and desperately wanted an education.

When I was in the army I was raped again, by a fellow soldier.

It hurt me, not because it was rape, I was used to that, but because it happened in the new “family” I’d made. Because I believed that we took care of each other.
Of course I didn’t tell anyone. I knew from childhood that telling wouldn’t result in the rapist being punished. *If* anyone even bothered to believe me, which in my experience, was 1 out of 20, maybe, it would be explained away and I would end up being the guilty one.

I did react to it. I dropped out of ROTC (where I was getting a scholarship that next semester), I moved clear across the country, and my outlook changed for the worse, though I don’t think anyone where I was going knew me well enough to recognize that.

Years and years and years later, the PTSD (from both childhood and adulthood) has gotten so bad that there doesn’t seem to be any way of “fixing” it. It’s been too long, too many triggers, too many coping methods too unlearn.
I filed a claim with the VA. But, since I didn’t report it at the time, or go to a doctor to report it, there’s no proof. Just my word that it happened.
Monday I got a letter from the VA telling me that they refused my claim because there was no proof.

So you know what? This just reinforces what I believed then. No one believes me. No one will make restitution. Once again I’m a person that no one believes, no one will step in to help, someone no one believes is valuable enough to fix what is beyond my power to fix.

This is why I’m a ghost. And always will be.