words from an evolving human

It is with concern and regret that I emerge from blindness to understanding. I am blinking in the bright light of truth about a world I have lied to myself about since my first verbal thought. I am a victim, and yes, I am aware of the negative connotations of that word, of such severe and consistent torture, that my mind fragmented. I am, however, on the healing end. Still, it hurts very much to be me.
Each morning I awaken to agonies in my body that are a remnant of the past. It is called acute PTSD and DID. I have to suffer it or die. There is nothing to be done. If I take painkillers, I am only postponing the inevitable. This pain must be felt and processed by me, because, although wrongly imposed on a very young body and mind, it was my body and mind and I must feel it and add each step in understanding the world and my place in it that the pain points to slowly.
The upside, not that there is much of one, is that in return, I get to discover myself. For most people, this process is not agonizing, yet in my case it is involountarily and automatically ongoing, which, in a way, is kind of an advantage. I have discovered the world in the process, and am frightened by it. I am in shock daily as I open up to new revelations about what the human psyche is capable of. I have hidden from the truth for a long time, like many Americans.
I am giving up my ostrich life of dreaming for a new life of understanding and joining. It hurts, but it is much better than my attempt at safe isolation through imagined superiority. It feels good to find myself a fellow human, one of the masses, important perhaps in that I am newly come to emotional health that continues to elude many ostrich-like people, and then perhaps not so important. Having been an ostrich for forty years, I understand its appeal. This awareness thing is HARD.
Yet I find myself watching everything and reading everything that I had planned to one day read, and I weep often. Born into Brothels, The Boys from Baraka, Democracy Now, and anything about North Korea and Darfur. I have no money, since I still spend alot of my time on the ground violently reliving rape and torture myself, and cannot work. Nothing can be done for it, there is no help for it but prevention, and it is too late. I have another year or so of this hell to endure, and then I may be free to pursue a life, hopefully, for the first time in a long life.
There is little/no support for people who have the disorders that I have in such severe form. I have little body control, only for short periods. I scream in agony for hours. People hear that the abuse was from early childhood, and simply cannot bring themselves to understand. They are limited. Our entire society is, hence the overweening prison population and the inadequate mental health care.
As I open up more and more, I realize that I have been under a spell of delusion and lies that the media aided. Inadequate keyhole peering at truths and an imperialistic attitude on the part of America as to what its people are entitled to has contributed to their actually losing many of their rights. Rights, such as housing, free elections, and habeus corpus, must be fought for. They are not simply bestowed. We humans are not so evolved as that yet.
As I come to the last year of my five year long stint of suffering, I have come to believe that the biggest task we face is this next phase in our own evolution as Americans is for us to give up removing the mote from our brother's eye (other countries) and to focus on our own problems. An overblown fascination with appearing wealthy has put us in debt and in our desperation to forget out problems(debt), we continue shopping for outrageous oddities such as five thousand dollar handbags. I'd rather carry a boa constrictor. This is not sexy, this label and latest fashion obsession. It's an oblique form of mental illness.
We must make the commitment to change, and that means feeling like shit for awhile. Not spending, not drinking, not running. Renting those foreign language films and trying on other ways of thinking and being. Basically, America needs to grow up, and in so doing complete the destiny that deep down many know they are poised for. A serious internal makeover, one that would take at least a decade of subtle but gradually dramatic attitude shifts about blame, punishment, entitlement, and priorities. These shifts won't come easily, but if we manage it, we can change the world as we hoped to. I believe perhaps America, like myself, naively wanted to 'save the world' without realizing that we ourselves were/are drowning. Yet this childlike love and desire to do so is what I love best about America (and obviously, myself). Cynicism leaves little room for hope, and while we are getting a deserved comeuppance right now for our arrogance in thinking that we can force our (delusionally) perfect way of life on others, it is the hope that this war we inflicted could have caused good that I admire. For many of us, myself included, our intentions weren't reflected upon carefully enough. We casually accepted that we were right and good without doing the internal work to ensure that our actions were right and good. Serious deliberation between such action and the heart should have precluded our hasty decisions, and it did not.
We are trained to seperate our hearts from our heads at every turn in this society. It is little wonder that we impulsively acted when we are accustomed to 'being right' and must now suffer the guilt of the catastrophic consequences. I still believe we can do it, though. I believe that with the right artists heralding the next evolution, and I see alot of them out there working their tails off bringing us back documentaries and trying new schemes for change and singing and basically being wonderful. They make it easier to look inside ourselves and open up to being wrong often enough to start to doubt ourselves. This wonderful thing called doubt can drop our defences if we cling to the discomfort of it, ask ourselves hard questions, and we can expand, thereby evolving to the next level of what it is to be a human.