Not long after Mr. Troll* let me out of the basement when I was 8 years old, while panicking form his poisoning me again, Mrs. Troll* and I were sitting in the bedroom I shared with Princess* and she was telling me this wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t so defiant; everything about you screams defiance. The way you stand, the way you look, the way you talk says defiance and that’s “bad”. Look what happened: taken to the hospital you almost died. So everything about you is “bad”. She was telling me that if you feel “bad” or think you should feel “bad”, if you hunch in, if you make yourself smaller, that’s not a defiant pose. If you make yourself smaller you won’t be seen as defiant and inside me the defiance was “bad” because I died, defiance is “bad” so make myself smaller, make myself smaller, hunch in, stoop a bit, always look down, always look down, never look up, that’s when I started always looking at the ground when I walked.

At four years old in Michigan, after he let me out of the room when we first moved there after I tried to run away, Mrs. Troll was with me while I was panicking from the poisoning and telling me that I was “bad” and I had to stop being “bad” and to listen to them about what was “bad” and stop dong it and inside me in pain and panicking again: stop being “bad”, stop being “bad”, stop being bad. I don’t want to be “bad”. Mentally locking in I don’t want to be “bad”. I was “bad” and I didn’t want to be “bad”, I was “bad” and I didn’t want to be “bad”. Mentally locking into myself I don’t want to be “bad” and Mrs. Troll telling me you don’t want to be “bad” and having the fresh memory of having been locked in that room and abused by him, this is what happens when you’re “bad”. (I didn’t believe in their definitions of “good” and “bad”. I don’t want to be their kind of “good”. So I had to lock “bad” into me.) She promised me it wouldn’t happen again if I was “good”. She lied, obviously she lied. Because when I was “good”, it didn’t change. (This first time it happened, instead of telling myself she’s lying, I told myself I had to try harder to be “good”) She told me I was never going to be “good” enough when I was eleven and lost my so-called friends. So I never was going to be “good” enough and look what happened to the friends I thought I had. Mr. Troll was always telling me no one likes you, no one is ever going to like you. I had friends in kindergarten and when I had the friends in kindergarten I had safe places to be (safe points) and if I had friends again I would have other safe points: other people’s houses I could go to that weren’t the Trolls. So it wasn’t whether or not they liked me it was whether or not I was in the Troll house. Mr. Troll made a point over and over again of telling me that outside wasn’t safe, narrowing down any other options of which I might have thought including running away again. I was telling myself not to look because no one is gong to like or help me and trapping myself into only thinking about being in school or at the Troll home. Because I had no friends from the time I was in the fifth grade until I went to college, it was school or home, school or home for the most part. Having been beaten and tortured essentially for trying to run away at four and a half, and reminded of that by Mrs. Troll and then the lies that there were more people around and because there were more people around and nobody liked me I would be less safe outside the house than inside the house. I could have tried again to run away at any age.

Quotes I have seen lately:

“It’s never ok to hit a child.”

“It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

“Child abuse kills. Over 4,000 children will be murdered by their parents this year in the US. They will be beaten, burned, stabbed, raped, and tortured to death. The most frequent assailant of children is NOT a stranger but the parent or caretaker. Between 1 and 6 million children “survive” such abuse each year only to have their spirits crushed in the most dangerous place of all—not the streets, not back alleys, not day care centers but within the nuclear family.