The Nothing Kid

Status
Not open for further replies.
The Nothing Kid

C. E.

Administrator
Staff member
**Some possible triggers ahead, please proceed informed**

THE TWO WEEKS OF BOY SCOUT CAMP over my fourteenth summer shaped everything since. I was lazy and uninspired, and perhaps a bit more confused than most young teen boys should be (without the wisdom I now have of understanding why). The camp was a well-known site in the forested Adirondack Mountains. We all had projects and goals, including merit badges to earn. I had a block of pine with instructions on how to carve a totem, and that was one of the projects I picked. At the end of the two weeks, I had the same number of merit badges I went in with: zero. And I had a block of pine that had a few whittle marks, a piece of uninspired junk which eventually ended up in the trash.

Sometimes, our lives turn about a single moment. That moment for me was the last day of camp, sitting around in a big circle with our knapsacks packed for the long hike back to the buses that would take us home. It was a ceremony atmosphere, and every camper was recognized by the camp director for what he had earned in those two weeks. Every camper received the applause of his peers. When the director got to my name, he paused and mentioned my achievements by saying one devastating but true word: "Nothing."

Silence. Then under his breath he muttered the words that would forever haunt me.

"Of course."

That was who I was. Nothing. And those two short words added as a coda cemented that "nothing" as an expectation. I was defined by that moment.



WHEN THINGS HAPPEN TO YOU AS A YOUNG BOY and your boundaries are trespassed as mine were, I suppose it's almost natural to blame yourself. That you were so skillfully groomed, you agreed to everything from that first act of kindness to the first act of sexual violation, with all the smooth manipulation that got you from one to the other. That perhaps you felt you embraced it on some level by the buttons the abuser was pushing - your mind hating your body for responding despite your will, betraying you as if it was joining the enemy. That terrible split that takes a lifetime to heal. You end up owning it as much as your trespasser does, along with all the self-disgust that grows like black mold around everything you were and everything you have been ever since. It tarnishes childhood memories that should be a cherished foundation. It sets you up to run away from yourself and jettison that kid you were as if he never happened. And you can't parse the good from the bad - it is all tangled together in that mess called your childhood, and it all ends up in the trash of desperately discarded memory.

I went to camp after over a year of being molested by the older boy next door. That completely derailed the healthier trajectory I should have had - the hard lessons that built character, the consent that defined integrity, the freedom to make bad choices from which good ones are learned, and the sense of confidence that should have shaped the adult I was trying to become. The most trite words are stolen childhood. But mine wasn't stolen as much as it felt like I gave a piece of it away. And the rest was certainly damaged. I lost my dreams. I lost sight of the man I imagined I would become. And then I lost myself. As a mentor and "big brother" friend, I let him define my worth based upon my how well I accommodated him. I gave him so much of me that there was nothing left for myself. And then someone - a camp counselor - noticed that nothingness. And said it out loud. Nothing. Of course.

I was pretty good at neglecting it all. Not looking at it. Putting it all in a box on a shelf in some place I would never visit again. Later, as a young adult, that shelf sagged under the weight of itself, then it all collapsed on top of me when my father (not an abuser) suddenly died. My life was suddenly in pieces and I did not know why I could not seem to put those pieces back together again. After a few months, I finally saw a therapist. I figured he would give me step-by-step instructions on fixing myself - grief therapy - and that would be that. When he wanted me to discuss my childhood, I described a normal one by talking around all the mines I had buried there. But he was sharp. His dogged persistence and incisive questions prevailed, yielding from me reminisces that I avoided thinking about for years. It's an amazing moment when memories known but untouched for years are suddenly put into words. Like watering a dried up plant you think is dead - and it suddenly plumps up and comes to life. I distinctly remember that the words which spilled through my lips seemed like those of some disembodied stranger, describing a life that wasn't really mine - but at the same time was. That’s how far I had traveled from myself. But it was me - and just speaking those memories out loud gave me something I never had in my adult life before that moment - a connection to the boy I was. An acknowledgement. It was a terrifying, heart-pounding reunion with myself that, notwithstanding, made me whole again - a wholeness that had been so elusive for so many years.

Like that moment at camp where I was defined by the counselor as a nothing, my sessions created another moment - a moment I began to finally know who I was. Like the biblical Jonah running from God, I spent years running from myself, swallowed up in a world of denial I created. Yet with my therapist's guidance, I finally stopped, turned around, and walked toward those memories. Walked through them. I look back at it all now and realize that the biggest tragedy was not what my abuser did to me, but what he taught me to do to myself - how I learned to disconnect with myself so damned well. How I cheated myself out of knowing the best part of me by accusing that child of being the worst part of me. How I cheated everyone around me from knowing me, including myself. All those years.



I'VE BEEN THINKING FOR A LONG TIME ABOUT SHARING in the Survivor Story forum. I wrote the chronology of what happened in my introduction (Dirty Little Hero). In that intro, I avoided the precise physicality of it all. I know why - I don't trust myself with discussing the sexual nature of what happened - it's a scary universe of memory that I somehow fear getting lost in again. He pushed buttons in me so deep that I will probably never feel autonomous from my own guilt. But I know at some level I need to share. The physical nature of what happened is the crime. Talking around it fails. The true journey means walking through it. Sharing the details respects the child because that is what he remembers. My tendency - even now as an adult - is like any adult's was back then. To talk around it. As we get older and our vocabularies grow bigger, it is so easy to do. But when I do, I'm just another turned head. When I talk around it, I turn my head from that boy I was. A fellow survivor very recently helped me with this - about the importance of acknowledging sensory memory. Feel free to skip the next couple of paragraphs. Yes - I share them with you. But I wrote them for me.

**Possible Triggers (sexual detail)**

WHAT HAPPENED ... was he groomed me - a gentle and careful process that had me eventually submit to full penetrative "intercourse." Naked. Face down on the open flannel of my sleeping bag. To completion in me. Countless times. It was never oral, and most often happened during overnights while backyard camping or during sleepovers in the basement. He was not forceful in the sense that when I cried out in pain, he would stop the advance, wait, and move forward when I said okay. It is an important detail because that memory for so long served as proof that I cooperated in a coordinated effort. That I exercised all the deterrence of a traffic light - stopping him only until I gave the green light for him to continue. And while I would often start by quietly pleading no as he undressed me, my body would join him and betray me with yes when he penetrated. The mix of pleasure and shame was toxic. My first orgasms were surrenders. They happened despite myself. Shrouded in shame. Brought by his will, not my own. Night after night was nothing but surrenders and shame and secrecy. I don't think anyone ever really gets over that.

The venues of the sexual abuse I endured - especially those in the tent - allowed him unfettered access to indulge himself with me over several hours, often engaging multiple such episodes in a single overnight. The intensity and frequency of it not only overwhelmed me, but even alarmed my therapist, who said that in 20 years of sex abuse referrals, he found my case to be particularly severe.

***End Triggers**

I remember once walking through Manhattan and seeing a pigeon convulsing - dying - next to a green puddle of antifreeze. It hit me so deeply in the heart - a gut-punch of intense empathy. That pigeon did not see the hidden poison. It trusted in the sweetness and its lies. Whatever joy the pigeon found in that delicious syrup became a diabolical betrayal, killing that poor creature from within. In a way, that pigeon was me. I wonder how many of us still feel some lurking turpitude in every consensual intimacy since.

I learned to adapt to the coerced intimacies, but I think it was the turning of heads by the grown-ups around us that carried what would be the most significant trauma. Just a few months into his betrayal with me (precisely what it was), I learned things that were known by the adults but never shared with me. He was caught doing with the little girls in the neighborhood what he was doing to me. I knew what he was doing with the girls, but not sure how much the adults knew of what he was doing with me. After the news hit, he was let go with a slap on the wrist. When this information was finally shared with me, I was asked by my own father - in fact directed - to remain his friend and help him stay away from the girls. Me. At thirteen. Did the adults know he was also doing it to me? I really didn't know. But their fix to the problem clearly fell on my slender little shoulders. What was more, he was trusted to have overnights with me. Without supervision. Just as before. Even writing this out now I have to stop and - not to be flip about it - ask: Really? Didn't anyone ask themselves, "What could possibly go wrong here?" Because everything did go wrong.

Suddenly I was his only sexual outlet, and my abuse went into a sort of desperate hyperdrive. It was an exhausting, nonstop ordeal of capitulating to his whining insistence and a libido that would not stop. But at least it did not affect the girls. I was doing my job, I guess. Not exactly how I had hoped to do it - but it was how it turned out. I felt designated as some sacrificial surrogate (again - I was thirteen), looking at a way to end it. And if the adults knew what I was doing, then I was the neighborhood's dirty little secret that everyone pretended did not exist.

At 14, I hopped a regional transit bus from our suburban strip mall into downtown (not a safe thing, especially for a kid who looked 12). And there I talked with a social worker, asking how to get out of my situation. She "diagnosed" that I was in a homosexual relationship (under thinly veiled disgust) and that he wasn't imposing upon me, but rather I was enticing him. Okay - so how do I stop? But she never told me how other than to stop being a gay 14-year-old. I rode buses to those 30-minute $20 sessions until my summer job income couldn't keep up anymore. Nobody knew I did that, but my mom suspected - though she never pressed me on it. And when I stopped seeing that social worker, I realized that I felt more hopeless and disgusted with myself than when I started.

In tenth grade, I spoke confidentially with a guidance counselor. He taught Sex-Ed that semester and invited us to talk with him if we needed guidance. He certainly wasn't prepared for the sack of sh*t I laid at his feet. I could tell he really cared. At least he listened to me. And at least he didn't judge me. However, he was way over his head with me. He had nothing to offer but sympathy. I was always a "poor boy" - which I suppose was better than being a disgusting gay boy that I was with the social worker. His solution was essentially little more than kind-hearted encouragement to find the grace of accepting it. I already knew how to resign my body. But from the guidance counselor, I think I learned how to resign my spirit as well. Holding out hope was a lot of work and it wasn't going anywhere. Losing hope - or at least letting it go - was a new way. I didn't know how to stop the machine. But I learned how not to to be there when it happened. How not to really care. How to separate from myself. How to not be present - like a special new talent. I discovered that escape. But in the end, it was just another dissociation.

Part of being able to separate this from the rest of me meant that I was damned good at hiding it. By the end of that summer, I was a smiling carefree boy on the outside. My dad was a photo enthusiast, leaving a Kodachrome trail of smiles. I hid it so well.

**More Possible Triggers (sexual detail)**

A typical summer night that year would play out like this with very little variation. I would sit in the kitchen watching him schmooze with my mom who was happy a bigger boy took such interest in me. He would suggest to her that he and I "camp out" in the tent that was pretty much perpetually pitched and partially hidden in a forest-like thatch of trees in our back yard. Sometimes he suggested we "camp" even if it was raining (those nights isolated me even more). My mom always bought into his schmooze (he groomed her first) and gave him permission to take me. I sat there like a quiet, good boy. Because that was how they each defined me in that moment, in their own way. I would end up where he planned for me to be. When it was dark and the lights of the house went out, he would see that my JC Penney underwear that my mom bought me was removed, positioned me as he desired upon the flannel of the open sleeping bag that my dad bought me, all in the zipped-up privacy of an aluminum-frame green canvas Sears tent that my grandpa bought me, pitched on the lawn that my dad and I mowed every week together, all within line-of-sight of my parents' bedroom as they slept. I lived my boyhood in the protective cradle of responsible adults and everything they showered me with, from that tent down to my clothes. And everything that was a gift to me bore witness to my guilt and shame - props used by the abuser. In the middle of that universe my parents and grandparents provided, he took full license with me with the ease of plucking a peach off a tree. Night after night after night. And sometimes when he was feeling particularly bold, even during the day in the nearby woodlands. Nobody saw it because, I really think, nobody wanted to. I'm pretty certain of that unwitting blind spot. He was an out-of-control train, careening so loudly and recklessly down the tracks. I could see it as a kid; how the hell could no-one else?

**End Triggers**

And yet, even as it happened under their noses, he and I simply seemed invisible. I started to think that they consciously decided not to see it. Maybe because I was thirteen. But the thoughts that terrified me the most were the ones that stuck with me the most. Thoughts and memories - real or not - tend to harden like concrete truths over time. Like indelible tattoos. I thought that because I wished so hard that no-one would find out (I was terrified of my humiliation being known) - that my wish came true. And hence the fact they never saw it was in part my fault because I wished so hard for it. In my 13-year-old brain, I owned the magic of wishing - and thus I owned crime and its perpetuity.

I grew to understand in a twisted way that my acquiescence satisfied everyone. My abuser was no doubt happy. The adults were off the hook on having to deal with it. The girls were safe. And I was invisible. It worked for everyone. I was the lynchpin to it all. Right in the middle of it. That essential cog in an unseen machine, churning away in silence. Everything worked because of me. That was how I saw it.

It had a cost, however - far beyond yielding my body. It also meant that every positive interaction or praise from an adult was just a pretend; in my mind, they all knew how dirty I was. Dirty little boy. Everything I received in the way of praise or complement was just pretend - or at best, undeserved. I pretended right back, keeping my disgrace like a state secret which I would sooner die to protect than ever reveal. Always smiling. Always polite. Always the cute little boy on the outside, carrying his filthy secret on the inside. I was damaged goods. I couldn't own a compliment, nor easily build my life on encouragement. And I was certainly in no hurry for anyone to call it out the secret I assumed they all knew. We all lived in a world of pretend with plastic smiles and white picket fences. Despite wanting it all to stop, my desire to keep it quiet was far greater.



BACK TO THAT MOMENT IN SCOUTS and my remarkable record of nonachievement... It propelled me to be something better. It was a slow process, but I applied myself and eventually got into programs and schools I never dreamed I could, all with people telling me to my face I never could. Despite almost flunking out of college with a leave of absence on academic probation, I picked myself up and ultimately earned a professional degree from an Ivy League school. When people told me I couldn't, it became a challenge to do everything to prove them wrong. I learned early on that adults and teachers never saw me or knew me - and that was my strength. Even that camp counselor who defined me as nothing did me a favor because I developed along the way a determination to prove him wrong. I'm not an angry person, but I think that defiance was anger. It was simply internalized and rechanneled. Despite my successes, however, many of those achievements had little time bombs planted in them. I'd get so far, then boom - I'd blow it up as if to acknowledge that I didn't deserve what I had worked for. Perhaps that evolved from how I felt so undeserving as a kid. I was still a mess. The bombs I planted got bigger and bigger. And when it all blew up, I was incredibly lucky to find a good therapist who knew how to plant guideposts - those pointed and difficult questions that marked the path he knew I needed to walk. It required me to listen to the truths coming out of my mouth, stop running, turn around, and begin that steady and sometime tortuous walk towards ... me.

A FINAL THOUGHT... I was a smart kid. And while my scouting career was officially designated by my counselor as a nothing, I was better than almost anyone else in wet-compass navigation. I knew how to get where I needed to be in the middle of nowhere and would often lead other scouts on the way. So confident was I, that I knew from navigation what it felt like to commit to a decision, invest the effort of that first step, have faith in a destination I could not yet see, and carry no doubts to be on my way. I have discovered that every journey - even if I'm lost - starts with a simple decision to take a turn and a step. There is no fanfare or fireworks. It's a simple choice. And it happens in a simple moment. The moment itself is so simple, in fact, that it never feels great - or even significant. It just feels like any other thought. There are no rays of sunshine. No trumpet fanfare. Why, it may pop into your head right now as you are reading this. I've learned that the moment need not be great for the destination to be.

I've shared my story. It was a big step. I did so because I think all of our journeys are all worth sharing. Certainly, if yours is worth sharing, then so is mine. And if my journey says anything, maybe it is that we don’t have to accept the path our abusers set us upon. We don't have to continue the trail of pain they set us upon. Truth: yes - we have become a part of who they made us to be. We became who we had to be, and that will always be a part of us as survivors. I suppose if it was easy to get over, there would be no need for this place. So we are who we are. But we don't have to finish their work. And we don't have to take it out on the good boys we were. As for me, I dumped on that kid more than he ever deserved, and I did so after the people who should have watched out for him failed. After my neighbor abused me, I continued that abuse by neglecting me, too - just like the adults did. And yet when I finally came back to face the boy I was, he never judged me. Never held a grudge. He took all that. All the crap everyone - including me - dumped on him. And there he stood, the strongest part of me all along.

I share because so many others have shared before me. And that has helped me enormously on my own healing journey. I hope I don't come across as presumptive when I suggest to any fellow survivor: look into your heart - that wet compass inside you. It points the way. It truly does. If my story is anything like yours, make a simple decision. Take that first small step and put everything in your soul behind it. Pretend as if you have no more secrets. And don't worry about fixing yourself. For me, there was nothing to fix. Only to see.

🪶
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top