How am I still here?
By: Meg Oliver
Tags: Survivor, Evangelicals, Childhood Trauma, Religious Abuse, PTSD

CW: Child Sexual abuse, physical abuse, spiritual abuse, emotional & verbal abuse.

It’s tonight I’m finally wondering fully: How am I still here? How am I not dead? Re-reading old journals is like inspecting ancient vomit…it takes a lot of gumption and stamina because it’s almost too physically jarring a task.

How do other people’s childhoods go? The one’s with nurturing parents and real schools? What’s it like to have an age appropriate maturity level?

I don’t often realize that this is something I cannot fathom.

When my uncle molested me and I was beaten and tormented in response by my parents and my Christian school, I transfigured into something else. I wasn’t a child any longer (though still only five), but I wasn’t an adult either.

My parents didn’t make big decisions for me because they said they thought I knew best. They sent me to cultish Christian camps and services freely without questioning what went on in any of those closed door rooms.

I was trained for war at the age of eight singing songs about being in “God’s army” and shooting non-Christians who were the enemy. My parents and all the adults I knew taught me that one day locusts with horse heads and human faces would torture people in the streets leading up to the days when Jesus was supposed to come back.

I fell asleep with imagery of me and my family riding white horses through a battle field, cutting off sinner’s heads and killing anyone who didn’t have the mark of Jesus on their foreheads. It was terrifying but I had no choice but to accept it as my future.

I spent many nights awake, rocking in the fetal position trying not to masturbate as my body burned and burned. I spent years terrified I would get cancer for the way I touched myself and I spent so many nights awake “fighting temptation” that I got used to sleep deprivation.

There were so many thousands and thousands of conversations I had with the imaginary God who regularly shamed and guilted me, threatening to send me to hell if I didn’t stay on the straight and narrow.

My biggest fear wasn’t spiders or the dark. My biggest fears were being raped again and burning in hell for all of eternity because I touched myself at night.

And no matter how hard I prayed I always wished that I would be raped again so I could finally turn in and die.

I was told if I didn’t speak in the tongues of angels (gibberish) that I was not a real Christian. And one of the first messages ever pounded into my head was what happened to people who weren’t Christians. They live the same hard life that everyone lives on earth but after, God rejects them and sends them to hell where demons burn their bodies in the dark with fire that tortures and maims but never kills.

My friends and I would comply and speak in tongues and fall into trances on the floor when the adults would push our foreheads. We would raise our hands in surrender to God as we sang battle songs and listened to sermons about how to tell all of our non-Christian friends that they’re going to burn in hell if they too don’t ask for forgiveness for being born sinners.

I had nightmares from my youngest memories of the stars falling out of the sky and God coming to kill my friends whom I loved. And it was my fault for not speaking up sooner.

I was told it was my job to keep the boys from wanting to touch and look at my body. I wore the appropriate clothes, but the male principal and teachers still looked at my butt when there would be a surprise dress code inspection between classes.

I was raped as a child and then beaten (and encouraged to be by my church) because I was acting out.

My church exonerated my parents for using the “rod and reproof” to correct my wickedness.

I’ve never not been wise well beyond my years. Adults have been telling me this since I was single digits. I guess wisdom comes from learning how to survive against all odds.

I didn’t have a childhood I had a pre-adulthood.

I was sleep deprived, brainwashed, tormented and all I wanted was to die. All I wanted was for Jesus to “take me home”, as my mom would say quite often.

My father looked me dead in the face and ignored me, no matter how much I begged him to love me, to see me, to know me. To save me.

My brother escaped my parents brutality because he was a boy, he was seen as “innocent” and because my mother thought he deserved better.

“I would never tell your brother what I just told you!!” Is something my mother still says to me, even though he’s 34 and I’m so broken I can’t fully function.

Please stop telling me things.

On top of the sexual, physical and spiritual abuse my mother would tell me that I needed to lose 20 pounds if I ever wanted to get a boyfriend. She would tell me that I should enjoy when men hit on me publicly because one day I’d be old and undesirable and wish some man would ogle me.

My mother called me names in front of my friends and told me that I was a spoiled bitch who only cared about money.

I spent my time daydreaming about running away. I would pack my backpack with whatever I could grab fast enough but always unpack it when the guilt would catch up. Dishonoring my parents was a punishable offense. The flames of hell were never not licking my ankles.

I lived to not dishonor my parents…my dad who wouldn’t speak to me and my mom who scared me shitless.

Illness plagued me for years. My parents would eventually rush me to the ER where men would stick speculums up my vagina as I screamed and cried, just to tell me it was probably gas and send me back home the next day.

I missed the last 6 weeks of my first year of high school because I couldn’t get out of bed and my mom was told by God that it was a punishment for my parents shitty marriage.

I went 40 days at a time without eating food, just subsiding off of celery and carrots when I felt faint. Withholding so I could be closer to God at 14 years old.

It was exhausting. My childhood into my teenage hood into my early adulthood…it’s all been fucking exhausting. A marathon I’ve never been allowed to stop.

And now I’m picking up the broken parts around my feet. They spell out words and sentences like “education” “healthy relationships” “inner peace” but they’re so shattered I can’t even grasp the shards.

Forget about gluing anything back together.

The physical symptoms of my mental illnesses are shooting off flares and guns and fireworks and I feel stoned when I’m sober and drunk when I’m dry. I’m dizzy and sleepless and consumed with nightmares of being chased all fucking night long and still, nothing can touch my throat. I feel a constant threat of strangulation.

I can feel his hand around my five year old throat as his croaks “don’t worry Meggers”.

I can feel the wooden spoon on the back of my thighs where it’s tender, smack smack smack.

I can hear all their voices, “You’re a quitter” “You’re a bitch” “You’re so close to God” “You’re a woman of God”.

I can hear God’s voice “Surrender. Surrender. Surrender more”.

I feel the pastors who were fucking sex workers,

My father who was fucking sex workers,

Praying over me to be clean.

Touching my abdomen, praying for my uterus, telling me I just needed to believe and then I’d stop being in so much goddamned pain.

How am I still here?

How am I still here…