I woke up screaming, but not fully awake. After they had dragged me out of that basement where I had resided for 14 years, I had become prone to all kinds of mental bouts.I had become especially prone to PTSD and insomnia, but night terrors and anxiety came into the game as well, amalgamating into some hilarious concoction of fear and apathy. My arms flailing and my mouth screaming, my Ma shook my already shaking body back to consciousness, and stayed awake the rest of the night with me. I curled my head into her chest, sobbing. She ran her fingers through my hair, soothing and clean, soft and pitiful. I think she was crying as well. I know it killed her inside to see me like this.
I was 25 with the world-understanding of a tortured 11 year old, never finishing school, or knowing how things worked. I didn't know anything about the world, or about culture, or about living around other people, or about functioning. I had never thought I would reach this point, being alive and away from captivity. I was free now, but not truly. I don’t know if I ever truly escaped.
It took me long times to do simple tasks, and I was incredibly slow to warm up to people and new ideas. For a long time, I refused to speak, thinking that if no one could hear me I might be able to drown out the sound of my own thoughts inside of my head. This was not my Ma’s peaceful silence that I wished for. This was a lingering silence and confusion that would not go away and would help nothing, feel nothing, think nothing. This silence was captivating and ruining, and completely incapacitating. Later I would be enrolled into therapy and learn sign language for when my throat refused to allow noise to pass through.
I found myself quirky to outsiders, but in a disgusting way. I sat in the shower for hours, scrubbing my skin from my body in a desperate attempt to feel clean. I forgot everything, my address, the names of those around me, my age, my favorite color, the landmarks around my house. I mistook gestures and become socially inept and paranoid, thinking every smile was a threat and every handshake was a danger. Although there were crowds of people shoving microphones in my face, begging me to elude their curiosity with wild tales of a victim, I never felt less heard.
I did have friends, but most of them felt distant. There were one or two that legitimately were willing to work with what was left of me, and who wanted to be around me. The others only wanted to be around me for the brownie points, for their school reports, for their own benefits. It was a new kind of silencing, in which I was given the opportunity to finally be heard for everything I had to say, except everything and everyone around me was nothing but insincere. It was a new breed of hell, a different kind of betrayal. So I found myself in mostly solitude.
I found myself swelling with not only misanthropy, but a newly found and incessant sense of superiority and narcissism. I saw everyone around me as breakable, just as I was breakable, and I was able to size them up. I saw everyone around me as weak, their problems inferior, as if I could only concentrate on the past that had ruined me rather than the present that was hurting others. I thought of only the darker sides of people, what made them tick and how they failed, and how their bad actions caught up with them. Years and years away from others left me with little to no empathy, which took me a long while to build back. Everyone around me was so innocent, so naive, as I once was, except they didn't see themselves as such and it somehow bothered me.
I could empathize with no one, and no one could empathize with me. The difference, however, between me and the others, was that I recognized my inability to relate to them, while they all believed they understood. Or, at least, I believed that they believed that they understood. It was all very confusing and bitter and rude, and I blamed everything and everyone for anything that had happened to me. Perhaps I was a bit pretentious, a little self-centered, a little preachy. In any matter, I had earned the right to be so.
I guess my point is that things like this don't exactly change you, rather, they draw to the surface everything you had been previously willing to repress. I was always a little bit conceited and pretentious, and I had always pushed people away for fear of being misunderstood, but the abduction caused me to no longer repress those feelings, and I found myself becoming even less concerned with them surfacing. I stopped caring whether or not I hurt other people. I stopped caring whether or not I hurt myself. I stopped caring.
I'm not even sure if I still can, but that's another story. I wouldn’t dare to get sidetracked from the one at hand. I might never come back to it. Oh, how I’d like to never come back.
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