My Background

I've just updated the About page somewhat for this site. I've known for a long time there's a dearth of resources for men and others impacted by sexual violence who fail to be a cis het female victim harmed by a cis het male assailant, but only recently felt comfortable starting such a resource myself.

I was molested by my older brother from age eleven to about age thirteen and a half. He raped me once, the summer I was twelve, and thereafter I was suicidal for decades.

I began trying to get help and resolve my problems as early as age fourteen. I think I took an interest in vegetarianism at fourteen and told someone about the abuse for the first time. 

I never succeeded in becoming a vegetarian and the first person I told about the abuse was a twenty-one year old college student my sister introduced me to and initially she was happy to encourage and foster a romantic relationship between the two of us, then things went sideways and until about ten months ago, I blamed my brother for that and assumed he was the person against the relationship.

I've spent this calendar year rethinking those assumptions and I think it was more complicated than that, but probably ultimately circles around to still being his fault, but by a more convoluted path. I now suspect he probably also sexually assaulted our older sister and that likely put her in a pickle and she was probably trying to protect herself without really understanding how much psychological trauma that would cause me to believe that someone who molested and raped me had more say in who I dated than I did.

At sixteen, I began seeking help more in earnest and I spent much of my high school years plotting to somehow graduate early or go to college early or get job training and a job instead of finishing high school so I could move out as soon as possible. None of that panned out.

Age seventeen was a very tough year. That fall, I was bound and determined to do something and I don't recall exactly what started this, but my sister came and picked me up and took me to her house and hour away in a different city and informed our parents she would not be returning me to them directly and would only bring me back to meet on neutral territory with a counselor.

That ended with me trying to physically leave for California (I was in Georgia) because the counselor completely missed the fact that we were there to help ME and got mired in some stupid argument between my parents.

I excused myself for the bathroom and couldn't find a means to off myself and walked out the building. My sister found me and I and my parents ended up elsewhere with a different therapist who informed my parents I was being signed into the facility in question that night and EITHER they could sign the paperwork and retain some say in the future or HE could sign the paperwork and they would lose control of the situation legally.

My parents signed the paperwork and I checked out ten days later and began therapy with a remarkable man named Doug Turley, a former Catholic priest who changed denominations to marry a French ballerina. At least, that's the polite cover story. 

He once alluded to also having other reasons for leaving Catholicism, saying he had been giving communion to excommunicated people and suggesting he had more disagreements with the church than he planned to get into with a seventeen year old patient of his.

I worked with him until I was eighteen, maybe a year, maybe less. I remember it as a year, but my memory about such details is sometimes on the creative side.

I got married at nineteen to another nineteen year old and he joined the military and we left town shortly before I turned twenty-one. It got me away from my abusive brother and dysfunctional family with mountains of baggage from events like The Great Depression and World War II and Vietnam and probably even The Irish Potato Famine as my maiden name is Irish in origin.

In addition to being part Irish, I'm supposedly part Cherokee and I suspect my mother was mixed race and Passing as Caucasian. Racism is a big taboo thing and seems to get mixed up with other taboos, like sexual taboos, and there's no clear, bright dividing line between racism in the US where intermarriage was illegal for a long time and sexual ethics and misconduct of various sorts.

I returned to therapy in my twenties with a military chaplain who was going to be paid the same whether he had me as a client or not. He had no profit motive for dragging things out and I have long suspected this is a factor in the military having a track record of success with some things that civilians feel are too hard to resolve.

For most of my twenties, I was a full-time homemaker and I had my first child at twenty-two. Reading was a hobby I could afford and could fit into my life. I read extensively on women's issues and studies and academic literature about things like sexual dysfunction and affairs and recovery from sexual assault.

In my thirties, I received a life-altering medical diagnosis, again thanks largely to being a military dependent and having access to excellent medical resources.  Following that, I felt that in spite of all my reading and therapy and life choices intended to put down my baggage, I felt that my baggage and ideas associated with it was what was really killing me.

I decided to put down my baggage for good or die trying and this led to a relationship with a man named Tom Fejeran who wanted to marry me, was an abuse survivor himself and also worked part time as a sex therapist in conjunction with a couples counselor or marriage counselor. He apparently felt I needed to put my baggage down to make things work with him and likely set out to use his professional expertise as a sex therapist to make sure I did.

It was enormously helpful to me, even though he was fundamentally wrong about what my issue was. I dumped him basically because of my medical situation. 

He ran for the Legislature of Guam in 2010 to give you some vague idea of how respected he was in Guam. He's listed as Tomas Megofna Fejeran under Democratic Party Primary..

I then was involved with an extraordinary Iranian man long distance who spoke multiple languages and had lived in France at one time and was likely involved in kicking the Americans out of Iran when I was still a child but he was not. He failed to secure his position as the person paying my bills and the relationship withered and died as I got on with finalizing my divorce and getting a job to support myself, which was enormous food for thought.

He claimed to be descended from Persian royalty and the prophet Mohammed and I believed him because he was such an extraordinary person and his manners were in line with the expectations of my mother. Her mother had a maiden name consistent with German nobility, though I'm not clear when the title was sold, so I'm not really German nobility and neither was my mother, though she clearly was inculcated with ideas and culture of the European ruling classes.

He raised the bar further on what Tom Fejeran had done for me in terms of my sense of self and self respect and identity. He was a human rights advocate and he was very staunchly interested in respecting me as a whole human being. (There's an entire blog inspired by that relationship.)

I think I was the only person he ever met who could listen to his backstory as a political activist and not be emotional crushed by it. I think he spent time with me because it was good for his mental health and I spent time with him because it was good for my mental health, but the physical distance, cultural differences, my ongoing health issues and other factors made it a bridge too far and we drifted apart and never met in person.

I've known some extraordinary people, starting with my parents. My mother was raped at age sixteen, left home at seventeen and never went back and was open about that at a time when women typically kept it a secret. Long before she knew I had been assaulted, she was telling me "The shame is on the abuser, not the woman who got raped. People are wrong to shame women for that."

This is a thumbnail history and doesn't credit other extraordinary people who accompanied me on my journey for a time.  It's just an attempt to give readers some idea of where my writing comes from.