...in public spaces. I was never hurt.
My home life was strong, protected, nurturing, warm...
Right at the time when growing up from a little girl to a pre-teen girl, is when the danger type of incidents started and though it decreased after I got married in my mid20's, I still had a bad incident way in my late 30's!
"You were beautiful and to some boys and men, this made you a target for them."
But you can already imagine what that quote means so I won't be going into details because when it comes to young people in my family, the new generation, they don't need to be burdened with things from previous generations.
Let it end! Heal, and let it end.
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Posting on my FB personal page is so difficult and weird because these are people I know in my real life. I try to throw in a lot of humor but that is not how I be feeling on the inside. Anyway but this is what I posted
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My therapist:
"You were beautiful and to some boys and men, this made you a target for them."
I found that hard to understand because most girls/women have dealt with public place predators
So when he words it something like this:
"True. Almost everyone has had their safety violated in public.
But, you attracted much more attention thus the chances of harmful experiences increase with the more attention you attract."
Okay I get that because I can see how it's true from a mathematical view point.
My thought process is:
Larger sample size of people = higher probability of all types of people.
Lol seriously though, everything has to make 100% complete sense to me.
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On the opposite end though, by far most of the attention was harmless, respectful guys however the interactions would still be intense and unusual because they would be looking so serious.
Like telling me in the grocery store while I'm pushing my basket "Your husband sure is lucky." Or, I'm standing in the pharmacy line one day and this man turns around and sees me and goes "I feel like one of the luckiest men in the world to be standing next to such a pretty woman"
We just in line! LOL. I do not understand how men care about looks this much.
When I worked at LensCrafters in the mall, guys would come in, respectful and harmless guys, saying how beautiful they think I am. Not trying to get my number or anything.
And inside, not out loud but inside I'm something like, "I'm so stressed out, I hate my job, my life has fallen apart, I feel ugly, like a failure because I got to get back into graduate school and earn more degrees and money--I don't care about my looks, so OMG stop walking around saying the same lies to every woman."
Very extreme reactions from men and then boys started so early in life for me so I thought it was normal to get too much male attention and thought that every woman was walking around getting the same type of you're so beautiful comments while she ran her errands 🤣
And who the heck is in a good, sociable mood while running errands or being at work? Chile...
Not knowing who is a predator or who is just a nice guy, is a lot to deal with and I'm thrilled that I don't have that problem anymore lol must be the gray hair
Sometimes on social media, I have seen other women mentioning how other women are posting things with the intention of trying to get men's attention. And I was like is this a joke? What woman, particularly a Black woman (I mean have you seen how amazing Black women look?)-so what Black woman is not getting attention? All she has to do is be breathing and that means she already has too much attention from men.
I was like what woman in her right mind wants more attention from men? You just want the right kind of attention, now that's different.
So I have been extremely shocked to learn that my experiences are not the norm
😀🦋🦋
delete. less is more
😡Cruel guys full of rage, tough home lives, and lucky me who just having to be crossing paths with them way too frequently
⁉️Sometimes they were strangers, sometimes they were not. Either way they were usually guys I didn't have any trust with
‼️My wonderful parents took me to get professional help at age 15, but these random altercations made it so difficult for me and mental health professionals to figure out the source of my rage, major depression, broken self-esteem and other symptoms
✅But we have another problem here: I withdrew from the world and became manically obsessed with high academic achievement-punishing myself when I didn't live up to my own unrealistic standards
⁉️I haven't discussed this in therapy yet but he will help me figure out what is the connection between trauma and feeling the need to punish myself if I couldn't make genius-level grades
✅But wait, we have another huge problem Houston: I also became vehemently obsessed with worldwide human rights injustices (for some reason this is called "politics"). Is it just me or should human rights just be a thing, regardless of politics?
This added even more trauma to
‼️The other extreme type of male attention I dealt with was on the opposite end of aggressive or angry, these harmless guys would be a little obsessive, in awe and romanticize me
⁉️Starting as a pre-teen (and causing emotional wounds) but thankfully most of these comments came when I was an adult; it may seem like cute compliments to have cute guys obsessing over how pretty you are to them, but it caused a deep burden, not cute at all when the guy was older
‼️Romanticized = intense comments like these, from different random guys
"Why are you so beautiful?" (while grabbing my arm and pulling me towards him);
"I'm just trying to see how someone can be so beautiful."
"I just needed to get a closer look at that beautiful smile."
"Best thing in the world." (that line in Poison by BBD. So I'm Poison now? lol). I was 14. Adult male felt that way about me. It's too much. Even though I'm grown now, it's still too much!
Now it would have been fine to be "Poison" for boys my own age, lol.
"They say the most beautiful people in the world have symmetrical faces"
"I feel like one of the luckiest men in the world to be standing next to such a pretty woman"
‼️Those type of romanticized comments from men who don't even know my name or care to know my name, (well some of them knew me very well) but anyway, what those comments do is blur the lines between fantasy and reality
😄Cause boy you out of your mind.
💔That type of attention starting as a child, plus having all those altercations with the violent types, made it nearly impossible for me to know how to communicate with regular, level-headed, normal acting guys who in my opinion would look right through me and not see me.
💔This is the exact spot I am in my healing journey
💔Healing that pre-teen and teen girl in me who had so many normal boys who liked her but because of being in traumatized fight mode, couldn't even communicate with them
💔I had a lot of rage outbursts and would start screaming, yelling, cussing
💔But I felt so sad and guilty when I first started with this therapist (2023) and my therapist said "The good boys might have been scared of rejection when they saw your reaction to other boys"
I was like OMG I went into a rage on some nice guys. I feel so guilty. My therapist was like "Oh no big deal, boys have to learn rejection"
💔I was feeling so sad about it all. I will share those stories, like write a letter to the boys I can remember-as a way for me to apologize and forgive myself and have closure from inadvertently hurting nice boys' feelings because of the trauma. I was in survival mode, so I would snap. But I would never want to purposely hurt some good guy's feelings
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🧜🏿♀️👸🏾👼🏾
