Acknowledgement - Restrain

I had to hold in all in.

When I was young, I picked up a video in a store that was a comedy about gender.  "Dad, doesn’t this sound funny?“
"No, it looks disgusting.”  "Oh. Yeah.  You’re right.“

I admired the artistic punk kids in the upper grades.  Though they were never in any trouble, nor had they hurt anyone,
he said they were delinquents and tried to make me afraid of them.

A friend showed my dad a story they had written.  When my dad saw that the main character was bisexual, he screamed at them and 
then refused to speak to them again until they had written several letters of apology and acknoledgement that they’d done something 
inappropriate.  I decided it was safer just never to show him anything.

I made paper people for stories with my best friend.  They had lives and families and adventures and lived in a way I could not.
They were art that I had made and were a great source of joy and fun. I carried a bag of them with me almost everywhere I went.  
He threw them away when I was at my mother’s for the weekend.

"The reason no one likes you is you intimidate them,” my step-mother said.

Every piece of clothing I cited as a favorite went missing in the laundry.

“What do you like about her?” The therapist they sent me to asked them of me.
“Nothing,” they said.

I learned to hide everything I loved, share nothing about my preferences, because it would be used to hurt me or be taken away.  
I contain everything to this day.
It hurts me to contain it, it stabs me, holds me back, keeps me afraid of others, and prevents me from being authentic,
but I still evaluate that pain as lesser than the pain that could be inflicted if someone targeted the things I love again.

This is part of series of self-portraits I’m creating in order to make the emotional and psychological abuse I suffered at the hands of my father and step-mother into a visible and tangible form.  Even if they won’t acknowledge what they did to me, I aim to have them outnumbered by people who do.  

It’s okay to reblog these, but no porn or fetish blogs.  

This image is here on Tumblr.

The series is collected here.