Abusers have a way of messing with your head and discounting every single thing they have put you through. I will be on the phone with mother and she will have me believing that maybe what I went through wasnt so bad. As I am sitting in my apartment located in a completely different state because I just couldn’t take her abuse anymore. I am literally across the fuckin country because I couldn’t take her abuse and yet as I sit on the phone and listen to her speak, I wonder if maybe I made it all up. It’s insane how they do that to you. 

But I gotta tell you, there is one thing I always keep in the back of my mind whenever I start to doubt myself. You know how in Inception he had a special object to help determine if he were in the dream world or not? Totems, I think it was called. 

I remember I wrote this really heavy note to my mother. In the note I told her how tired I was of being bullied. How she makes me want to kill myself. How I couldn’t understand why she didn’t love me. I poured my heart into this letter and in the end I did’t give it to her because I didn’t want to make her feel bad. When my family lost our house we had to move in with my grandmother, during the move I guess the letter got lost in the shuffle and she found it. My mother proceeded to bully me even more. Pick on me and push me around. When I asked her why she said “You should be used to this, right? Since you said I’m such a horrible mother in your letter.” As I’m in fucking tears I tell her that she wasn’t supposed to read it and she said “Well it had my name on it.” 

THATS my totem. I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember the room we were in and where I stood when she said it. I remember thinking that she really truly didn’t care if I died. That was the final nail in the coffin. Yet she tries to spin shit around and make me think I am losing my mind and that I imagined all this but I did NOT imagine that. I did not make that up. 

Don’t let them trick you. Have that totem. Have that one fuckin thing that even if they make you believe you made everything else up, THAT was real. Don’t let them get away with what they put you through. Don’t let them back in if it’s not what you want. That memory is mine. That pain is real. Your memory is real. Your pain is REAL. That is something my mother can never make me believe didn’t happen. That is my totem. Have yours.