June 11th, 2007

Couldn't sleep very well last night.

I was re-living, in sudden vivid colours, the time when I was a child and a camp counsellor came into the cabin where I had been the sole occupant and, while another counsellor stood guard outside the door, tortured me by twisting my skin and bruisingly punching me, raising welts, bruises, and other marks on my stomach and legs that left me doubled over for the rest of that day, painful for several days after, and marked up for weeks.

Actually, it wasn't memories of the pain and humiliation that kept me awake ... I'm through with that part of it finally. What came back to me in loud voices of reflection was that I somehow had myself convinced that it was all my fault for being "defective". I decided that it was right for me to be tortured by that adult (I was 10) because there must have been something utterly fundamentally wrong with me. Must have been. It wasn't his fault, it was all my fault.

Believe it or not, the universe makes more sense to a child that way, than trying to come to terms with the possibility that the voice of authority and the supposed voice of reason/responsibility is really an inadequate sadistic bastard. It's easier and less insane to blame yourself.

When I screwed up enough courage to show my parents my body the next week and tell them about it, they didn't react at all. I don't know if they believed me. And no complaint was ever made to the camp or to the police. It pretty much confirmed my conviction.

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