Monthly Archives: April 2012

I promised you, my readers, that I would launch my new blog today.  But as those of you who lovingly labor away at your own blogs know, it ain’t necessarily so simple.  Especially when your internet blinks on and off with every gust of wind… And there are many gusts tonight. 

This evening I stood gazing into the fridge and the cupboards, marveling at the vast stores of food therein, thank G-d, and thinking back to that frightened and starving little girl (that was me) who lived for a whole week on handfuls of after-dinner mints pilfered from a bowl on the kitchen counter of an acquaintance who hid her in an unused garage, until her mother found out and locked the door.

To that little girl I will dedicate my new blog.  I promise to link you to it as soon as it’s up and running.

But for now, this little snippet of a preview will have to do.

Copyright 2012 Laura P. Schulman all rights reserved

In my last post I told-all about April 22 and its loathesome significance for me.  Thanks to the support and encouragement of many of you, my dear readers, I have decided to take the plunge and start a new, separate blog as a platform for writing the story of my years as a teenage runaway, homeless child, sex object to predators, survivor of serial rape and survival prostitution, abortion, and witness to countless acts of violence.  Gee, do you think I might have PTSD?

The new blog platform will need to be under nomme De plume, as the stories are intimately bound with my family, who are still deeply entrenched in their own fairy tales about what happened, and I don’t want to get into that right now.  I just want to write the story and thereby accomplish step number one:  break the silence.

The jury is still or on the blog title.   When I  get that figured out I will cross post the first post from the new Blog on here.  I will continue to post my bipolar stuff on here, and move my teenage saga to its own safe place.

As always, I am happy to hear your suggestions, so suggest away!

Copyright 2012 Laura P. Schulman all rights reserved

April 22md approcheth, and with it the brooding sense of dread that accompanies it every year.  I have written hundreds of pages about it.  It’s the centerpiece of my memoir, since my life changed profoundly on that day.

I don’t know what to do with any of this.  On one hand, I feel that it would be good to share it: perhaps one person might be helped, might not feel so all alone.  On the other hand, I don’t want to contribute to the gross sensationalism that feeds off of any seeming misfortune, if it is shocking enough.

The extremely short version:  on April 22, 1970, which was the very first Earth Day, I was drugged, abducted, and brutally raped in a dark basement by an older man whom I knew slightly.  I was sixteen, and a virgin.

I never told anyone.  The physical damage required two surgeries to repair.  The damage to my soul is much more complicated.

I ran away from home shortly afterward, and lived the life of a vagrant.  Pretty sixteen year old girls who live on the streets get raped a lot, so that was part of the unpleasant bargain.  I soon learned to leave my body when it happened.  That was a good survival strategy then, but as one might imagine, it wasn’t a very good thing once I got off the street and began having consensual relationships.

Writing helps.  After the first 20 years of denial, after my first marriage failed, I started writing like my life depended on it.  And in large part it does.  Writing has been the keystone in my recovery process from the monster case of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) that I had acquired. 

But what to do with the hundreds, maybe thousands by now, of pages that reside on my hard drive, my notebooks, and in every digital device I own?  Every resource on publishing tells me that I need to have a completed manuscript before I approach an agent.  So I need to get my life together, literally.

This coming Earth Day, I hope to spend some time organizing, going through chapters, beginning to take control and make some order in my life of the page.  I feel that what I need is to control “it,” rather than “it”  controlling me.  What do you think?

Copyright 2012 Laura P. Schulman all rights reserved

Someone desires me.  Really and truly.  This terrifies me, especially since he knows a great deal about me, yet still he desires me.  I can’t help thinking, what kind of a nut would know these things about me, yet still desire me, and even more frighteningly, love me for exactly who  am? 

This hits at the core of my insecurities.  It causes me to challenge the obviously erronious premise that because I live with mental illness, because I am a survivor of rape, because I have been in multiple dysfunctional relationships, that I am therefore doomed either to live alone or to suffer through cycle after cycle of similarly destructive relationships.

Now, it is clear that simply being desired is not the key to the kingdom.  But.  To be desired as the person I am, complete with all of the attributes that I consider blemishes, is something new, and terribly frightening.  And.  He seems to love those blemishes too, and in fact it seems that he does not consider them blemishes, but simply (simply?!) part of ME.

Copyright 2012 Laura P. Schulman all rights reserved