# 01: The Truth of That Night From a Proclaimed Liar

An exorcism in the form of a written piece about a poem about a series of events by Ezra Arndt.

If reading this on this blog is difficult, feel free to read the slightly less edited PDF of it.

I wasn’t going to write this. Even though I’ve had bits and pieces of this scribbled down and/or published in poetry format for years, I’ve never really written down what happened in September of 2018. Yes, I’ve talked a little bit about it to various people—namely my partner, old and current friends, and my dear cousin, one of the only two members of my birth relatives that I’m still in contact with—but I’ve never written it down with the intention of ridding myself of it. Of purging myself of the trauma and abuse in order to heal. To finally let go.

And when I say “let go,” I don’t mean forgive or forget. I just… I need it to stop haunting me like a terrible flesh-memory. I need to stop having nightmares of the sensations and feeling of utter helplessness. But… but it wasn’t just one night. It was a series of events and a childhood of living with abuse by people who should’ve actually cared for my safety, but wanted their picture-perfect, “good Christian family” more.

This isn’t going to be neat or a gentle, forgiving take on my past. It certainly isn’t going to be objective, and if you find me playing the devil’s advocate (which I will try to keep to a minimum as I’m actively trying to undo that habit in therapy), it’s only because I’m trying to give any potential readers a glimpse of the mindset and bad habits my family ingrained in me.

I’ve tried to cover everything that I can think of, but please be aware that there may be other potentially triggering things inside this piece that I’ve overlooked. Please, take care of yourself, and if at any time you need support, please take care of yourself. And reach out to RAINN (dot) org (forward slash) hotline or text “HOPE” to 64673 to their National Sexual Assault Hotline (available in English and Spanish) for confidential and free support at any time if you or someone you know has experienced or is experiencing sexual assault.

You are not alone.

The general content notice is for discussion of sexual assault from a family member, physical, mental, and emotional abuse from birth family, covering up abuse for the sake of protecting the status quo and their own comfort, transphobia/homophobia along with ableism and sexism, isolation and gaslighting, alcoholism, dissociating, self-harm in the form of cutting, intimate partner violence, housing and educational instability, and cursing.

One of the most prominent stories about my dad’s childhood in my memory was of one of his various stepfathers (or his mother’s boyfriends; those details are foggy for me, and as I’m no longer in contact with him, I suppose I’ll never know. Not that it makes much of a difference) drunkenly chasing my dad’s oldest sister and two of his younger brothers around the city block with a kitchen knife. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, although I’m inclined to believe that it or some variation thereof, is as according to many of the siblings, their childhood was rampant with abuse. Which doesn’t excuse the way my two siblings and I were brought up, but it certainly is a partial explanation. And the repetitive stories of how his mother, my deceased grandmother that died far before I was born, was always working multiple jobs and left her six-plus kids with her various and mostly abusive partners… Well, it was certainly used as a passive-aggressive warning for me to behave and keep my legs closed.

Or maybe that’s how I interpreted it. All I know is that my dad would always bring up his mother and one of his older sisters, a sister who had Bipolar and walked into traffic to kill herself. They weren’t people with disorders or overworked or taken advantage of. They were stripped of their humanity and used as a warning of what happens to the women in our family who don’t “behave correctly.” AKA, women who don’t abide by my father’s flavor of Christofasism.

I remember how whenever I’d tentatively ask about them, especially my deceased aunt, when I was diagnosed with Bipolar II at nineteen years old and was trying to figure out what side of the family my disorder came from (as it’s environmental and genetic, according to my doctors then), there would be a verbal dance around talking about her. That is, if it wasn’t a flat-out refusal. It took me practically begging my dad while we were driving home from his work shift and me from my therapy appointment (I couldn’t drive, and virtual therapy wasn’t really a thing for me then. Plus, I didn’t trust my family not to listen in). I knew there was the threat of having therapy taken away from me. And it was assumed that I’d never reveal anything too taboo or too deep about the abuse in my sessions, because my younger brother could possibly be put in a foster home. There was also the added threat that if I spilled the beans in therapy or to anyone that mattered, my parents would kick me out of their house.

Anyone who grew up in or lived in Northern Indiana knows that like much of rural United States, there’s pretty much no form of public transportation. Cars are king. I, of course, wasn’t shown how to drive for the longest time (so my parents could control what I did, where I went, and if I could leave them), and when I was, I was taught so badly that my mom and I nearly ended up flipped over in a ditch because of her abysmal direction-giving. Not that my dad was any better, but he’d just grab the wheel when there was absolutely no chance of me causing an accident because he thought he was one of the world’s best drivers. I eventually stopped asking to learn (and they refused to drive me to an official driver’s training course at the local high school because why would I need to pay hundreds for that when I have my father?) after catching myself deeply wanting to drive the car headfirst into traffic due to dissociation and suicidal ideation that I was dealing with at the time.

That had to have been soon after he, my father, assaulted me sexually.

I’d been in pajamas and trying to sleep in my bed in the room that I shared with my younger brother. He’d stumbled over, smelling strongly of booze, something he’d spent over a decade making his vice of choice. Whether he’d been out at a bar or trying to pretend that he wasn’t drinking at his desk in our cramped apartment, I’m not sure. All I know is that it was him, coming over to me, calling me my mother’s name, and crawling on top of me while grabbing at my chest and feeling between my legs.

At the time, I remember thinking throughout the entire thing that I couldn’t scream or make myself known that this was me, not my mom, because then my then-twelve-year-old brother would wake up and see this, and oh god, what if my dad tried something with him? What if I didn’t wake up anyone and my dad got angry? He was a violent drunk, after all. What if he actually raped me?

After what felt like actual hours of him feeling me up and mumbling sexually awful things in my ear—words that seemed too clear to be incoherent—I managed to say, with my voice as quiet as possible so as not to anger him or wake my sibling, I told him that I wasn’t my mom and that he was in the wrong room, the wrong bed.

“Oh. Sorry,” he said, his breath hot and stinking of his drink as he oozed off of me, and stumbled to fucking assault my mother as she snored loud enough to wake the dead (something which I’m certain happened a lot as my parents were one of those Christians where they “don’t do consent” because marriage equals free use no matter how anyone involved feels about that).

My dad didn’t penetrate me or leave any bruises, and it wasn’t like he wasn’t someone who might do that in the aftermath of a spat (I’d been smacked and viciously bare-bottom spanked plenty of times growing up). Even though I was in a haze for the next week or so, trying not to sink into denial of what had happened, I’d thought enough to check for any evidence of him molesting me. Nothing except for the stink of his body odor and drink on my clothes and in my hair.

I was nineteen, so after the fact, once I realized what had happened, I worried that if I reported it, nothing would happen because I wasn’t a minor (under eighteen).

I remember feeling terrible about wanting to tell someone. Because then I would have to admit the terrible truth that instead of screaming and trying to fight off a man with military training and background and who effectively taught karate to people who ended up going on to compete in mixed martial arts competitions, I sent him off to rape my mother. That is, if him touching me hadn’t already worn him out.

It must’ve been around a year and a move later (we were always moving because either my dad felt called by God to experience humility or some bullshit like that. Or because he couldn’t get a stable job and was basically living off his best friend’s goodwill, then my mom’s wages after she got a job for the first time in twenty years when I was fifteen) when I sat my mom down when the house was empty in my new bedroom (my own one all to myself for the first time since I was fourteen). I told her what happened, that it was real, and that I was trying to move out as fast as I could, and that when I did, I would be cutting off my dad and older sibling (who has tried to hurt and kill me throughout the years and who’d use the excuse that he did it because he was jealous that I was born into a woman’s body and he wasn’t. His words, not mine, which is a whole different thing to tackle).

At the time, and for a bit after escaping my family’s home, I believed that my mom was a victim as well and was just delusional that what she was going through was love because her brain was trying to protect her. It didn’t even occur to me until that conversation, one where she vehemently denied that my dad did that and accused me of lying, that she could be both a deluded victim, and enabler, and abuser herself. After all, she then claimed that she was awake and up the whole night and guided my dad away from my and my brother’s room… When in all actuality she’d been snoring louder than a rickety old washing machine.

I tried to bring it up again, to see if she’d confess to the truth and admit that she hadn’t been awake and was lying because she thought that lying and trying to convince me that I was lying was the correct thing to do to keep her family together. She’d always shut me down and brush it under the proverbial rug by the time the next morning came.

I couldn’t escape. Even though I was twenty, I couldn’t drive. I had no friends for most of my life. I had been forcibly homeschooled as so not to be “exposed to secular, non-Christian teachings”… And because my dad likely wanted to keep us kids separated from society and anyone who could help us in order to continue the abuse. When I’d finally managed to convince my mom to allow me to attend public school after half a decade of begging, I made a few friends, but they didn’t last. I’d been a prick in my early teens, before I was out of the closet to myself and before I came out to my mom (who told my dad after I begged her not to, which probably prompted him trying to claim ownership and punish me for it, as the assault happened less than a week after I came out to my mom). Living in a town of under two thousand people, I had no support network of anyone in person.

And I’m going to be honest. If it weren’t for my now-partner of six years and the handful of wonderful friends I made during that period of desperation to have a community that wasn’t trying to hurt me, I would’ve cut my veins open with a safety pin and bled out somewhere in the woods nearby my family’s house. If it weren’t for an old friend—a person I’m no longer friends with because they’re a different flavor of abusive to their own family and told lies about me for ages and was only “friends” with me in order to get closer to my partner—I would’ve been found in a small-town obituary.

I’ve spent nearly six years since moving to the city to live on that old friend’s couch, another ex-friend who was only helped me to get closer to my partner as well and used me as a live-in pet sitter and maid, with my partner across the ocean for several months while we continued to job hunt for me in the United States, back at the first friend’s couch, at an Airbnb while we waited for work to give me my first two paychecks so I could afford to get an apartment, and then finally at my own place. During that time, I’ve continuously had nightmares and played what happened over and over in my head. There’s been a shitton of wondering why that would be my dad’s course of action.

Then came the brick to my face, which was the realization that he and my mother had basically spent the entirety of my childhood grooming me to be a second wife of sorts. Someone to own. To own until a man he approved of came up to him and bartered for me (which someone older than my father tried to do when I was fifteen and we were homeless and living in our truck and motels while my dad looked for his dream plot of land to start a homestead on… and to keep us kids isolated until we got old enough to be able to run away).

I wasn’t a person. I was a piece of meat to pass around until someone got tired of chewing on me and tossed me away.

Me coming out as bi (because at the time, I knew my mom wouldn’t understand anything like “demisexual” or “nonbinary”) was a massive pothole that he hadn’t foreseen. I’m sure in his mind, he believed that maybe he was punishing me or correcting me in a God-intended way. I hadn’t come out sooner because I feared them forcing me to undergo conversion therapy, but I knew that if I brought up anything trans or trans-adjacent, they’d force young adult me to go through that. Or my dad would flat-out look the other way and let my older brother murder me… which is what almost happened about a month before I escaped that place with a small suitcase, my backpack, and laptop bag.

My point of sharing this is not only to hopefully exorcise this whole experience from my brain so maybe, just maybe, I can get some actual good sleep some night soon. It’s to hopefully shed some light on the fact that sexual assault definitely happens very often within the family and/or from someone you might know.

I didn’t speak up to anyone safe until so far after the event. I was trapped and scared and knew I could never be myself in that environment. But I was able to get out.

Yes, I’m struggling still (with Bipolar II, AuDHD, undiagnosed OCD, PCOS/PMOS/possible endometriosis, and POTS among a potential autoimmune issue), but it’s with different things. Things that I can actually get help for without basically being told that I’m sick and disabled because of my sin. I’m able to actually focus on trying my damnedest to heal now that I don’t have my birth family looming over me anymore. It may take several more years, if not decades more, to convince my brain that I no longer need to be in survival mode. But fuck. I don’t need to be terrified and looking over my shoulder in my own home anymore. I guess that I’m trying to hold tightly onto as the eighth year anniversary of the assault comes around (it happened in a September, but with my ADHD memory loss issues, I forgot until recently and was just sitting there, wondering why I feel like shit emotionally).