Roll over Beethoven

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TRIGGER WARNING - you are stepping into my head TRIGGER WARNING
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My early years were lonely. Shy to the point it crippled me I was often alone and isolated in my head. The shyness was easy to hide in a large family, there was really no need for me to have a bunch of social friends. I kinda "ghosted" on the fringes of my siblings friends.

This is my first neighborhood friend.

I always had just one-friend at a time. Any more would have been too stressful/taxing.

She moved away a year or two later.

It was hard to loose her.

I found the Beatles record in my parents closet soon after that and at the first sounds of "Roll over Beethoven" I was hooked. Oh was I hooked on this fabulous band.

Next friend moved.

No worries I had the Beatles records to fill in the gap.

another friend moved.

Again there was the Beatles records to fill in the gap.

the next one died.

and the next one moved.

FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU ALL.

I retreated behind my walls and stopped trying. With everything else going on in my young life at the time I closed off completely. Emotions shut down, stuffed down, hidden, concealed, denied.

Except for my boys.

There I could sing and express every emotion in me. Head phones on, listening to my stack of Beatles records over and over and over. Encoding my emotion into song.

They were the perfect friends. They were always there, they made me feel something, and above all they could never hurt me.

they could never hurt me

after a while KKW came into my life and I had a friend again. I reluctantly let her into my life. She was a writer as well. Three years younger than me and after explaining The Children of Starr to her, she joined me in the imaginary world and we spun fabulous stores together.

She had the very very misfortunate luck of being my one-friend when Lennon was murdered.

Within a few months of his death I turned on her and made her hate me. I systematically drove her from my life.

No one would every get the chance to hurt me again on that level.

no one.

And no one has.

My faulty thinking as a child was, believing that anyone could be in my life and not hurt me. When all my life, people had been hurting me. My brain was hardwired differently. I had been taught vulnerability meant pain. Love equaled pain. Nurturing equaled pain. Yet I still held out hope that something/anything could just simple be, without it equaling pain.

I let my guard down with the Beatles. Their voices were constant and unchanging. Their messages had no hidden meanings. They wanted nothing from me. They simply were in my life as a life preserver. It seemed like a win/win for me as a child. I got to hear their comforting voices, and have a human presence in my life that wasn't harming me.

My frail soul could never perceive of this strange one-sided needship as every EVER being harmful to me.

(yes I have a long history of inventing words.... NEEDSHIP (noun) a one sided relationship based on one party "needing" the other,  unlike a friendship with is a mutual attachment, in a needship one side of the equation may not be aware of the other.)

I was unprepared to be hurt.

and oh, god did it hurt.

That moment in time is the worst moment of my life. In all of my 48+ years on this planet, that day come right to the front of my heart when you ask me. "What is the worse day of your life"

It also comes up if you ask me, "What influenced you most in your life?/had the biggest impact on you."

Everything in my life changed that night.

Hell...who I was changed that night.

Dark secrets. Altered destinies. Revenge plots.

I'm was 15 year old child who was now thinking about becoming a nurse so I could in the future seek employment in the mental hospital and take justice into my own hands. Holy hell...there was a man on this planet who made a powerful enemy of me and he didn't even know I existed.

So yes. 

mdc you son of a bitch ...you killed more people that night then you realized.

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Did I work on this trauma in therapy?

It was so raw that when it did come up, a cavernous sink hole opened up under me and I plunged into inky black water and nearly drowned.

So the answer is no.

Its lingering effects haunt me to this day.

why. why out of all the hellish hell you lived through is this the worst of the worst?

Simple because, it took me by surprise. I am no longer surprise-able... I simply have expected the rest.

I have lived my life knowing that people will come and go and hurt me. I expect to be harmed. I expect to be hurt. I expect bad stuff to be heaped on me and my life. And when it isn't...I have a history of hurting my self.

I am always pleasantly pleased when people come/go without harming me. You would think eventually I would let my guard down, but it does nothing to disarm the booby-traps in my head.

I greet new people in my life by shaking their hands and saying, "Its nice to meet you." while my head silently seconds that with, and what kind of pain are you going to bring into my life? How are you going to hurt me.

And then I wait for it.

A strange sad legacy of years of abuse and emotional neglect.