I have always been afraid to truly express what is in my heart with words, for I cannot lock these away from prying eyes. Over the years, I have learned that keeping diaries and journals with my innermost desires and thoughts only provided others with ammo to torture and destroy me.
For example, I wrote about kissing Brent Hathcoat and my mother found that journal entry and she was very jealous of the fact I had kissed others without her knowledge and consent. She was furious that I would dare participate in these activities with others my own age. I was sick of being whored out by my mother to all her grown friends and I wanted to have some of the flirtatious encounters that I thought normal teenagers had. I wrote about my uncle brutalizing me in ways I cannot say here and then in the next page, I wrote “and today, I went to Brent Hathcoat’s house and we talked by the garage and he was fiddling with his bicycle chain and I kissed him, but he jumped back and wiped his mouth off…” It is odd that one sentence set my mother off; but reading about my uncle didn’t evoke an emotion from my mother. Isn’t that twisted?
Another example, I was married to a man named Aaron before I met my current husband. He controlled me. I tried so hard to follow this book about being a good Christian wife and be demure and never questioning his motives and always complying with his requests on the first try or I would be punished. He had the right to have girlfriends because I was a stupid prudish deaf bitch, yet in the next breath he would scream that I am the world’s biggest fucking whore and I shouldn’t resist what he wanted to do to me. I tried so hard to make him happy. I went to college and kept my grades up and then he decides to enroll too for the student loan money and he makes me do his homework too, on top of my own schoolwork and my three jobs. I managed to keep all of my and his classes above a B minus. Between work, homework for both of us, and being a mother to Trinity, there was no time for me; not even sleep. I used my journal to vent so I could focus on the tasks at hand. I wrote about what I would do if Aaron magically disappeared. I wrote about what I would do to get back at him for openly having girlfriends while married to me and making me the ridiculous laughingstock of the town. What he did not get is that all these things I wrote were me venting things, not planning things. No matter. I had to pay for what I wrote. And I still bear the scars from the times I paid for what I wrote.
In those instances, having a journal screwed me over. It nearly drove me to my death.
This is why I must write my book. It is interwoven with both fact and fiction. The truth is so outlandish that readers will assume that is the fiction segments, and the false parts will both seem brutal and tame readers will assume these to be fact. Only I and the people these characters are based on will know which is which. It will free me and damn them.
