The impact of this abhorrent crime against me has been mine to deal with since it happened thirty seven years ago, and the longstanding damage it has caused amounts to this fifty year old HIV positive man living in a public housing flat on a disability support pension hoping to successfully gain an Advanced Diploma in an attempt to become employable before reaching retirement age!
I don’t imagine or expect things would have turned out this way for me had I not been a victim of this crime.
My life changed because I pretended this traumatic experience didn’t happen. I have had to bear tragic consequences since those events. I was barely thirteen years old. That abuse of power over me happened thirty seven years ago. I don’t even know who I would have been if this abuse had not happened to me, I was just a kid.
I don’t know what psychological fortitude I may have developed as a man because I was so deeply intimidated by what happened to me. I couldn’t make conscious decisions in my life.
I couldn’t concentrate; I couldn’t finish my high school or my college certification. I never even got a driver’s license, an educational qualification, a first home loan, a car, an apprenticeship.
I was emotionally stunted, shocked and impaired by this crime against me on so many levels, and now I’m 50 and I’m still trying to get some formal qualifications and I still do not have a driver’s license or my own home, and I still find it incredibly difficult to interact with people on a personal or intimate level or deal with aggression or intimidation without feeling impotent and emasculated.
I still experience psychological and emotional effects after thirty seven years. I still experience embarrassment, shame and panic attacks, bad dreams, loss of sleep and waking. I feel deep anxieties walking through the streets, noticing people near me, feeling crippled, unable to breathe; now, having to allow the realisation that the best part of my life was immeasurably damaged by this incident before I had the opportunity to even become a man, discover my own personality, the person I was naturally growing up to be... I feel all of this even more so; I feel more crippled more despair and more lonely shame.
Before I really even knew who I was, my ability to communicate honestly with my family or deal with relationships or have any sort of inner stability or intimacy with a person was irrevocably damaged.
I set out to write a poem about this, and I ended up with an epitaph for the man I never had the opportunity to become. This crime against me so early in my life, set me on a path into life as an isolated, grieving confused kid who felt so much shame and guilt about what had happened, and fear; and still, I have not been able to really comprehend the loss of my things that other people value in their lives so deeply:
Their virginity, their innocence, the security of their family relationships, their belief in themselves, their confidence, I wonder what those things are really like. I couldn’t develop those things in my life once I’d become a victim of this crime. My comprehension and my ability to discern people’s attempts at communicating with me were extremely distorted. I was an emotional mess with this awful complication making life really difficult.
Even by the time I was old enough to take action as an adult there had been a suppression order.
My life? What life?
I know what happened to me caused immeasurable damage, and I do understand why they call it immeasurable damage. I had my values and my self-respect and my dignity stripped from me completely at the age of thirteen. I’ve lived in fear and shame and grief since then. Retrospectively speaking it’s no surprise that I ended up unconscious with addiction problems and HIV positive within about a decade of the incident; rendered unable to have children of my own, nipped in the bud completely. I have felt so angry, so betrayed, there has been such unresolved distress trying to live with this crime against me going unpunished, diminishing my whole life.
The crime was against a boy and that boy is long gone, he’s dead. No one can give me back the life taken from that boy. The crime against me left deeply complex emotional consequences, I have been tormented by them through my life and I know there is more despair to come.
I haven’t even told my father about this yet. I’ve barely spoken about it with my mother or my siblings. I feel such shame, and it wasn’t my fault, I was a child.
Ten years after the incident I was married in secret, I loved my wife, but I was incapable of allowing any intimacy into my world, it caused too much distress and fear and anger and shame. The marriage failed, by then I was HIV positive and I entered another disastrous relationship where I was locked in a negative pattern unable to communicate...
I have found it exceptionally difficult in my life to make friends, and to trust people, anyone, even my family.
The closest thing to a partner I have at this time in my life is a heterosexual friend who reluctantly helps me put on a strong front because he knows how useless and vulnerable I become when I have a flash back to the incident and I realise as an adult what’s happened to me. I’m just this middle-aged loser on disability support living in poverty trying to survive – I’m doing a course at the moment, hoping to get through it successfully. I’d love to work but you need qualifications and I am no longer a young man.
When I realise how seriously the incident has affected me, and how it’s going to continue to affect me. It has been an ongoing trauma and I do not see a simple solution for me or my family as I start to deal with the realities of how it has wretchedly distorted my development at a crucial time in my life and wasted such potential.
I never became the man I should have become. I lied to myself. I didn’t know what else to do. I pretended it didn’t matter; I was thirteen I didn’t want to cause any trouble. I was there because I wanted to do a job I was getting paid for.
That’s why I see Joseph Eugene David Paul Bling as a boy who died a long time ago, and as difficult as it is for me to say out loud, this thing here, this person, me, the thing I call I, this thing is nothing but the muffled scratching from inside an old coffin. That’s how this crime affected that young boy. It caused him to emotionally dislocate from reality which isolated him from himself and the rest of the known world for the greater part of his tragic little life.
I am not a fool, I have had no choice but to survive but life has not been so good since then, I know I’m not really dead, my spirit was broken.
(This article first appeared in ABC Pool)
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