hubchallenge day 25: No money, no job, no friends, no life

One of the challenges many survivors of childhood sexual abuse face is getting a "normal" life set up. On hubchallenge, day 18 I've spoken about how it can be difficult to have an intimate relationship as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. For most people having a partner/relationship is one of the mayor prerequisites for having a happy life. Other factors affecting happiness are having a job, making yourself useful, having the comforts of life in a material sense, having a goal in life and actively working towards that. All of these elements can suffer from the long term effects of childhood sexual abuse.

Having a job is one of the ways we seek to identify ourselves. We say things like: "I'm a baker" or "I'm a therapist" or "I'm an administrative assistant" when we are asked what we do for a living. We identify strongly with the role we have in our professional life. It's also something we talk about often with others, by way of introduction: "I'm a carpenter, what do you do?". If you're having trouble finding a job, or keeping one, this way of identification is largely blocked. The careers of survivors of childhood sexual abuse are often full of false starts. A sizeable portion of the survivors of sexual abuse are unemployed, in an institution or burned out from working so hard to please people.

Not having a job means to have a low level income. This also means that for a survivor even keeping themselves in food and shelter can be a chore. Having very little money is a major stressor in peoples lives. It put's a damper on evolving any type of social life, because you can't ever buy your friends a round. Eventually you stop going out altogether. You can't register for any interesting courses because of lack of money, so self development becomes a difficult thing. Almost everything you can do in the world today has some sort of money connection, if you don't have any, you are led to believe you don't count in the world, you are a loser, your self-image suffers.

Life itself becomes difficult, because instead of spreading your wings and exploring the world, you're afraid, broke and have low self esteem. You stop reaching out to people and become a lonely person, trapped inside your own set of fears. If you're not careful your world shrinks down to a minimum. Other people are scary and because you're no longer confronted with people much, they become even more scary. In the end, this road leads to deep depression, loss of connection to life and sometimes it results in giving up the struggle that life has become.

I've been unemployed on and off in my life for as long as I can remember. I had a rough start in my professional life because of both personal circumstances and the state of my country when I left school. I was studying to be a teacher and the general consensus among students from my year was that while our education was fun, we'd be most qualified for the unemployment line. There simply weren't any jobs around and the economy didn't look like that was going to change anytime soon. This wasn't a very conducive attitude to studying and by the time I finished year two I dropped out of teachers college. I tried unsuccesfully to become an artist and studied for a little less than a year at art-school. The most important thing I learned there was that there were others who felt like they didn't fit in society.

I was taught by a German gentleman, really nice guy, named Werner. When we'd go to the pub after (and sometimes during) class he'd drink wodka straight and talk about the war. He was in the Waffen-SS during the war, typical young boy, enamored by airplanes and flight. He'd performed air-raids and had bombed our cities and those in England in his youth. The choices he had to face as a youngster were staggering. How do you decide whether or not to become a mass murderer at that age? Basically you follow orders and defer your personal responsibility. How I could relate to that! I felt seen and heard when he called me his little cricket and even though he probably could have taken advantage of me sexually, he didn't. At his age and with his history he oozed integrity. Especially when he drank... It would have been so easy to develop a drinking habit back then, too damn easy. I don't know what angels were watching over me to make sure that I didn't.

Later on, in the USA, on the run from a home that wasn't a safe place and hadn't been for a long time. I was an illegal alien, always slightly on edge, underpaid and living four to an apartment most of the time, although at one point I lived in a little purple house that had 10 inhabitants, mostly illegal aliens (aussies and kiwi's) some Americans, down on their luck. We were all in the same boat together, up shit creek without a paddle as the Americans so graphicly express it. The good part about that was that I wasn't alone. The bad part was I was going nowhere and life was passing me by most of the time. My saving grace was Windstar: a project, high in the Rockies, that brings together people in an effort to raise awareness. As a volunteer I was able to enroll in personal growth classes, environmental awareness projects, including their bio-dome and a symposium once a year. It took the place of the library of my youth, where I read every self-help book available. It inspired me and gave me a sense of belonging, a sense of hope for my own future as well. It kept me from submerging myself in drugs and alcohol.

Not meant to be a sob story, but living on a low budget knows it's hardships. Unless you're very careful, lucky and socially adept it means you are constantly worrying about money, there's never enough for doing the fun things in life and you lose most of the friends you may have had. Poor people hang out mostly with poor people, because they understand at least about not having money. Unfortunately, among the poor there is a higher incidence of drug and alcohol addiction (simply because most often if you have a serious addiction you lose your job and spend all your money on this addiction). This means that as a survivor, you are again exposed to increased risk of addiction, simply because of peer pressure from your social environment.

Doing the fun stuff, working on your own personal growth, following a college course or simply going on a vacation to get away from it all, becomes an inpossibility. Even dinner and a movie, just to forget all about your sorrows for a while are out of reach. The very things that can be uplifting and help you overcome your trauma are out of reach for most survivors, simply because they don't have any money. Therapy and counselling are too expensive, national welfare programs don't often include and guidance for people unable to find their way in society.

What this all adds up to is a life devoid of the things that make it worth living. Lonelyness, friendlessness, very little fun stuff to busy yourself with, no room at all for who you are as a human being. It's no surprise when you add it all up, that survivors of childhood sexual abuse are twelve times more likely to commit suicide. Life is often not a very fun place for them.

When I first returned from my time in the US, I was living in a one bedroom apartment that I really couldn't afford. I had a job on and off, never quite making the grade. The longest I worked anywhere was in a factory, putting wrappers on rice-cakes. I worked there for a little over a year, which allowed me to borrow some money to put my house in order. I bought a refridgerator, a stove and carpeting. I was alone there, with just my cat. I tried to study psychology through a written university and was quite succesful at it, but after four classes I failed one and gave up on the study altogether. I had two friends in this town, one was in love with a heroin addict who ended up stealing from my meager amount of money. The other was 19 and when she heard that I might be a lesbian she took two steps away from me. I worked through temp agency's trying to keep afloat. I didn't know how to make new friends and I slowly sank into an ever deepening depression.

It got so bad it would take me the better part of a day just to get up and get dressed to go to the grocery store. I was stealing groceries because I couldn't afford to buy any. My apartment was too expensive for me in combination with the loan-payments. Each month found me deeper in debt, less able to cope and more depressed. In the end I found myself sitting on the floor of my apartment thinking about suicide. I knew how to get the heroin to do it with, it'd be a nice clean death. I'd simply OD on heroin and be done with it. I was thinking how I had lived in this derelict little apartment for three years now and my mom had come to visit me only once. I wondered if she'd be at my funeral. I started to wonder if anyone would care. How long it would take for anyone to find me. Would I be one of those sad stories in the paper? "Women 29, found dead in apartment. Neighbors were wondering about the smell"

The more I thought about it the more curious I became as to what would happen afterwards. Would my mother be heartbroken? Would she even show up for the funeral? (She sure didn't show up for my life, why would my death bother her) These are still deeply depressed thoughts but something inside me was rearing. Something inside was saying: "NO WAY". This was not how it would end. Somehow I found the strength to turn away from death and say "I want to live". I know it may sound silly to some, but the main reason I stayed around was because I was curious. I figured if I stayed alive now, the rest of my life would be extra. I would enjoy it simply because it was like overtime: I had survived the worst and the rest couldn't faze me. It's a good thing I didn't know back then what I still had to face in life, or I might not have made the same decision, but as it was I came out of that depth with a new resolve. I wasn't going to let life get me down.

The power of nothing to lose
I broke off the friendship with the girl who was dating the addict. I threw them out of my life completely when I found out he'd been stealing from me as well as from surrounding houses. I decided that I was too afraid of men to ever be in a relationship with one, so I dubbed myself a lesbian and even reacted to some contact adds. This, more than anything was the start of my healing journey: I was reaching out again and grabbing life by the throat. It wasn't long before I moved to another town, into a small room (12' x 16') tiny compared to where I'd lived before, but one that I could afford. I had a girlfriend whom I later married (and divorced, but that's another story). I had made some new friends and I had reconnected with one friend from my childhood. I started making payments on my debt. About a year later I was doing volunteer work at a reïntegration project and they asked me if I'd like a job there. I was moving up in the world!