Strength and Stars

During my Flashback Friday posts, at my ManKind Project I-Group meetings, and in my Adult Child of Alcoholics meetings I have been confronting my childhood sexual abuse head-on. When I have written an experience down and been able to step back and look at it from a distance, what I see at first is a weak little boy being overpowered by an adult man or men who were supposed to protect me. When I look deeper though, and through the lens of what I know now, I see a very different picture. Suddenly I see my stepfather and his friends as weak cowards. The only power they had was over a little boy who couldn't fight back. Another thing they all have in common is that nearly all of my abusers drank themselves into an early grave. For all the power they had over me, they were powerless in the face of time and in the face of karma. Their power was nothing but an illusion.

My abusers are nearly all gone, but I'm still here. How? Why? The horrific childhood sexual abuse that I endured broke my body, mind, heart, and spirit into a million tiny pieces. How am I still standing? How did I somehow make the journey from victim to survivor? The answer I am beginning to grasp is strength, inner strength. While their power over me was nothing but an illusion, somehow my inner strength was very real. No matter what my abusers did to me, there was a spark that they couldn't extinguish. They did their best to snuff it out, but they failed. They settled instead for breaking me.

I have been staring at the million broken pieces of me as an adult that are left in the wake of my childhood sexual abuse and despairing that I was weak and could never be the kind of man I always wished could have been there for me. I needed a hero and there was none to be found so I was a boy broken by the false power of men. But isn't that how all the great superhero stories start? My greatest wish for this blog is that in sharing my past and my journey to heal that I might inspire another man who was a broken little boy to start his own healing journey. So with that, I do the only heroic thing I can think of. I take the broken pieces of me that still hold that spark of light and I throw them up into the sky as stars to light your way. May it help you on your journey...