10 BULLY FOR ME Part 4 NIGHT TERRORS

Upon walking across the thresholds of our front door after my first ride home from hell, I don’t recall rushing upstairs to peer anxiously into the full-length mirror, hanging on the back of my bedroom door.  I don’t remember wondering if those insults slamming my body are true.  I just remember shutting the front door behind me and calling out:  Hi Mom!  I’m home!  What’s for dinner?  I’m starved!  And a-c-t-i-n-g as if everything feels just fine and dandy, as per my pattern, I move forward just like always.  Or so I’d thought.

 
You see, denial did not gain control over my mind at ten years old.  I'd had sound reason to become an academy-award-winning actress way before construction on Dad’s dream house had ever begun.  So it's no problem for me to act just fine while I, sitting squished between the sweaty bodies of two smirking guys, ignore them grumbling  snidely, back and forth, about how much bench space I take up while their hips shove rudely into mine.  And if, from time to time, the red hot poker of humiliation hits a nerve, well—my trusty defense system presses the button marked ‘repression’, which pushes every cognitive awareness of my distress ever more deeply into that black hole, where self conscious awareness—seething with anguished resentment—is mercifully knocked out cold, this emptying my mind of reality too painful to bare to myself, and in this way has Mother Nature patterned my brain to safeguard the human spirit from feeling as insignificant as a sardine trapped inside a tightly packed can, terrified of being eaten alive!
 
Whenever the bowels of Hell convey me to the house of God and then back home, we’ll watch the high-spirited child, lovingly nurtured by both of my parents, disappear into denial.  And—rideafterrideafterride—we’ll see my social self-confidence do what my body cannot.  It simply shrinks up and plays dead.

  Over time here's what develops in its stead:

Subconscious insecurities loom HUGE behind my ‘I don’t care’ facade.
And as my cheerful persona walls off all sense of conscious awareness concerning my physicality, my self image gets stuck in a very bad place, meaning that I can barely discern prepubescent changes, which are about to reshape my body.

 
As denial empowers my mind to wall off despair, I seemingly cope with situations beyond my control to change for the better, overnight.  However in order to keep my eyes closed today’s truths, which prove too painful for an eleven year old to bear, my defense system must dig its heels ever more deeply into Denialand, every time I hear the van honking its horn, which hypnotically casts a magic spell over my brain as though to draw me mechanically out of the safety of my home ...
 
As to my nights—well that’s a whole other nightmare.  And when that story unfolds, you’ll see what takes place when subconscious terrors, stirring in the dark, awaken repressed furies, which tear my peaceful demeanor into shreds ...