Freedom

The word "freedom" has many meanings.  I'm sure if you asked ten people what that word meant to them you'd get 10 different answers.  I always knew what "freedom" meant, but it took until earlier this past month for me to feel what it meant.
In an earlier posting I discussed that I was molested as a child at the hands of a cousin who lived with my family. Brian stole my childhood. He stole my innocence. He stole a huge chunk of my childhood memories.  He tried like hell to destroy my life.  A few times he almost succeeded. I wasn't safe in my own home and no one, me included, had any idea.  I never told my parents what he was doing to me because I didn't remember what he was doing to me.  The mind has a clever way of keeping you safe.  When something is too traumatic for you to deal with, the mind will lock it away until something triggers the lock open.  That trigger happened in high school.  My life began to unravel when I was in high school.  
I had great friends and who knew what was going on and my parents were amazing, but that didn't stop me from turning to self-harm.  I cut my arms and leg in places I could hide from everyone.  Even though Brian was long gone out of my life, he still controlled it.  I still had his voice in my head. 
I started developing early.  I had A to B cup boobs by the time I was nine or ten years old. Brian would tell me that it was "the best part" of me and they "were his."  I once read an article about the actress from the TV show Punky Brewster getting a breast reduction and that was all I wanted.  I just wanted to look like the girls my age.  Brian told me that if I got a reduction he would "come and get me."  Those words scared me and stayed with me.  When I was in high school, those words began torturing me. 
When I was in my 20s I finally got the reduction I wanted.  The recovery went as bad as it could go.  I was hospitalized for a week with a massive infection.  The whole time all I had in my head was Brian's voice.  I had frequent nightmares of him standing over my hospital bed holding me down by my wrists (which is what he used to do when I was a kid), saying to me, "This is what you get for taking what was mine."  
No matter what I did, no matter how far I thought I moved on, I was still mentally bound.  That all changed on August 10th when I found out that Brian is in prison and he may be there for a long time.  I don't think I can adequately explain the emotions that came pouring out of me. I started to laugh. The laughter turned into crying.  The crying turned to rage.  The rage turned to relief.  The relief turned into a profound sense of calm.  For the first time since I was a child I felt free.  I felt the grip he had on me all these years release.  That night I fell asleep easily and slept soundly for nine continuous hours for the first time in years. 
Waking up to the knowledge that Brian was waking up in prison was liberating.  That familiar, underlying feeling of fear that was always lurking in the background of my life was nowhere to be found.  I decided that I needed to know more.  I wanted to know how it happened.  How did karma finally catch up to this monster?  Thank God for Google!  All I had to do was Google "Brian C-------" and his whole sorted history of drug busts, identity thefts and everything else this epic piece of shit has done came pouring out, including an 11-hour hotel room standoff with police.  The best thing I found was an article about a fellow inmate getting an additional charge of assault because, for whatever reason, he punched Brian in the face, breaking his nose.  In my humble opinion, the other inmate should get a medal, not an additional charge. 
Brian may not be in prison (pending trial, conviction and what will hopefully be a nice long prison sentence) for what he did to and stole from me, but that doesn't change the feelings of happiness, relief and overwhelming freedom that I feel.  Karma is a beautiful thing! May she continue to give him exactly what he has put out into the universe. 

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