Doodeedoo

I had an intense nightmare last night. First: when I have dreams, they tend to be vivid enough to affect me long after I've woken up, and nightmares are no exception.

Anywho, this one started off at my middle school campus and down near the entrance to a parking lot was a body and two police officers. I was standing about 20 feet away but I was still able to recognize that the body was that of one of my friends and I freaked out. I started walking towards the scene and an officer stopped me before I got too close and told me what happened. My friend had been hit by a man in a maroon colored car and the officer continued on saying "She put up a good fight and beat him half to death with her books." which suggests that the murderer got out of the car at some point while she was still alive. My mind was reeling. I imagined the whole scene and fled.
The next part was a mixture of me slowly telling people, including an online friend (Who would be completely devastated if she died IRL) and he had uploaded these pictures he made as a result of his grief onto my friend's blog, and at first my heart jumped because I thought she was still alive and was posting, but it was him. Througout the dream, I was the one telling people that she was dead and I had to watch their reactions.
Other parts of the dream include finding out the murderer has been killing people for 100 years (oh man, I've been watching too much Buffy) and me being afraid to leave the house at one point because I was afraid he'd come and kill me.
At one point, I was at her house and I found her laptop and her dad was going to erase everything on it. I was argueing with him saying that everything about his dead daughter was on there and he'd be willing to delete it all? Truthfully, I wanted to take the laptop home with me but I was too sheepish to ask such a thing.

I woke up actually feeling relieved that it was just a dream, but I still have a knot of worry about her stuck in my chest. I'm tempted to message her and tell her to stay safe when walking alone.

Ick. -shudder-

Anyway, so that was the dream. In other things, before I fell asleep this morning I was considering where the line is on placing blame and taking responsibility. Oftentimes on TV shows and stuff you hear a character say that they aren't going to blame sonso for their problems anymore and all that. Quite noble.

However, when said character had been quite affected by the actions of the person (say, their parents were abusive), then does that mean they instead place the blame on themselves? Does this contribute to victim blaming in society? Victims of abuse experience a multitude of aftereffects and reactions in the aftermath, but where is the line in placing the blame on their abusers and taking responsibility for their actions? For someone like a child molestor, they should take responsibility for their actions and get punished even if they were also molested as children. I feel sorry for their child self, but never for the adult that turned their pain against others. Perhaps that is where the line is--once you start hurting someone, you are responsible for those actions.

In my case, I was trying to figure out how responsible I was for the failures in my education. Part of the abuse from my teachers was one teacher telling me that I can't blame my sister's death on my bad grades for forever, and in a sense she is right. I blame my bad grades on the school's lack of sensitivity to my mental health and failure to teach their educators some compassion and how to interact with students who have needs. I blame them for completely disregarding the death in my family and instead focusing on my bad grades, which was merely a symtpom of my grief and later my fear of teachers. Part of the aftereffects of classroom emotional abuse is academic failure and it increases the risk of dropping out in later years. By the way, I got that information from a literary article; I did not make it up myself.

So enters the question I was considering. For years I did poorly in school but I was also dealing with all the complicated feelings from being abused in middle school. I didn't even know that I was abused to begin with until around 2007, and I was really starting to pick myself up academically (but with lots of snags here and there.) If I had done poorly in high school with no background of abuse, I would be taking full responsibility for my failures but, as someone having been vicimized in that way, how much blame do I put on my academic failures as a victim of emotional abuse in school and is that a responsible thing to do?

The better question is, does that question even matter anymore with what I am currently planning?

In the book "Trauma and Recovery", I think the first step in healing is establishing a sense of safety, and for a while I was unsure of how to go about doing this. Thankfully my grandparents have helped me determine how I can feel safe and, even better, feeling a sense of control over what is happening now that I am an adult. (This fact answers the first question as "I blame the abuse because I was a child/minor and I had no power over what was happening or that what I was experiencing was traumatic stress from those three years.")
My grandparents are pushing me to get stuff done, which is putting pressure on my head. I have no room to work at my own pace and it immediately puts me in a bad place. It is a trigger. Finally, early this morning I came up with the idea that I'd write up a portion of the story and talk about the aftereffects, then lay down the line of my boundaries: I will not talk about my education with anyone unless I bring it up first. If anyone else does, it comes off as an "ambush" (even if their intentions are good) and I shut down. I need the room to learn how to ask for help and to fix my own mistakes, and if they're constantly reminding me of what needs to be done, it ends up being a reminder to me of what I havent' done and it feels like what has been done first is discredited and I cannot proceed with everything else. In the past, this felt like reminders of shit that I felt I could not do at all, and thus I felt like a failure. I felt so ashamed of myself, so even friendly things like "Pay attention to your GPA" slices me and I want to drop off the face of the earth.

I figured out why those kinds of statements hurt me so much. I heard them SO OFTEN in middle school as if constantly reminding me that I am failing was a motivational factor. Strangely, it did the opposite. I felt like shit for failing but no one was encouraging. Even a simple "You can do it!" might have done a lot more difference, but instead at the ages of 11-14, I was treated like an adult in a time when I really needed to be treated like a kid. I was expected to explain myself and was left behind. Any attempts to help me catch up were things like "Find a tutor", but I was smart enough to learn the material (except in the case of math). I didn't need a tutor--I needed someone to believe in me. That someone finally came around in high school but I didn't realize it until after I found out I had to repeat 12th grade, but instead of shaming me for being a super senior he took my hand and said "You will graduate. I know you can do it.".

Instead, through middle school all I heard was "You will be held back in 8th grade if you continue failing" with an add on of "I am one of the teachers that decides if a student gets held back or not." (which came off as like a threat).

Thus, I am taking responsibility for my college education by taking control. I am an adult and I NEED this to happen if I will do a good job in college. Convincing my grandpa of this is probably going to be hard but if he doesn't like it, he can go fly a kite.

On a last note, the thought of going to college without my sister had scared me in the past. She told me about middle and high school, but she died before even graduating and so I'm doing this without her guidance. At first, I hated it and hated having survived past her death, but last night I imagined looking down at my inner 11 year old self and saying with a sense of confidence: "Watch this."
In that moment, I became the big sister for my inner child, which is a big factor in healing from this abuse. I have to learn how to guide myself so at night I can connect with my little one and tell them what to expect in later years.