From the Wild Collective Heart series: Part 17

Content Warning: Psychological abuse, coercive sexual dynamics, food restriction, sleep deprivation, dissociation, and family abandonment.

He’d called me a pig and told me to snort for him. I laughed my ass off and left. I didn’t know yet who he was or the damage that had been done. I just knew my Rogue was into something, and it was time to get her out of it.

After some investigating, I learned this guy was our support person from a website promoting trained mental health support with kind and compassionate listeners available to chat.

So… why was he in our email? He was acting as our support person and our Dom?

Sketch.

I started watching and reading, desperate to get a grasp on the reality of our current events. I looked at anything and everything around us. Books, rooms, emails, pictures, whatever was in front of me, trying to piece it all together. I had parts of myself I never knew of and traumas I had never been exposed to coming out through the seams of our skull rapidly.

I watched our body collapsing along with our mind. I had skin rashes, my hair was falling out, I’d lost 55 pounds. We weren’t eating. We weren’t sleeping.

He’d supported all this by telling us we were a pig and needed to put down the fork. Giving us an article about how eight hours of sleep wasn’t necessary. Broken-up sleep patterns were superior time management.

I looked like a ghost, a zombie in the mirror. I felt terror. My family was in tatters, and it all hit at once. The past abuse coming up in us. My family turning away and choosing to side with my father.

I begged for help. I told my mother, “I am not okay and I need help.”

My mother spoke to me as if I was dead, as if I wasn’t speaking to her.

She said, “It’s like she died and I don’t have a daughter anymore.”

And I knew I was on my own.

-Raven