While we all know that I travel quite a bit for work all the time, this week I’m actually headed out of the country, to London, for a few days. So I may be a bit slower than usual to respond to comments, emails, tweets and so forth!
On the other hand, I’m hoping to meet up with my cohost over on the News and Reviews blog while I’m in his home town. Keep your fingers crossed that it works out.
Ya’ll be good to yourselves in the mean time.
Anyone who spends as much time as I do online, and who is an outspoken survivor, inevitably gets bombarded with lots of requests to share information to their readers. Like most of you, I get a lot of those, and if it’s something that I think survivors might benefit from, I’m more than happy to.
What I won’t do, is sign your petition, voice my support, contact the media or a congressperson on behalf of someone I don’t even know. Here’s a good example of why I don’t so that, a Facebook post that went viral, purporting to name a wanted child molester, who in fact is not wanted and has absolutely no legal issues to speak of.
See, here’s the thing. Baseless accusations ruin people’s lives, and they hurt legitimate abuse survivors. If we want a world where abuse victims are to be believed, we need to be extra outspoken against anyone, anywhere, who makes false accusations. We need to be more skeptical when faced with social network posts claiming to raise awareness of a specific case when there is no evidence beyond an anonymous Twitter or Facebook account.
In this case, not only does this individual have a pretty good civil case against the person who started spreading the post, he has one against every single person who thought they were “doing their part” and shared it. Every one of those people has lost credibility. How many false rumors about potential molesters, or false claims of abuse being used as a child custody tool, before we are simply not believed any more? How soon before we reach a point where every claim of abuse is met with skepticism, because there are just so many false ones.
If we expect society to believe victims, then we have to weed out those who would take advantage of that by making false accusations, not continue to spread “support” when we don’t know anything about the case we are publicizing. False accusations are damaging to the people being accused, and to the survivor community in general. Think before you repost.
Some of you may know that I’ve been maintaining the Male Abuse Awareness Week Google Plus Page for the last year or so. As the full year has come to a close, I was sent the paperwork to become an “official” volunteer for the PLuna Foundation, the larger organization behind Male Abuse Awareness Week. It was in trying to find time to review the paperwork, sign it, and get it back that I really started to notice how little extra time I have for this project. (It was taking a long time just to get around to the paperwork!)
Given this, I also realized that the page deserves better. It deserves someone who can dedicate more time to raising awareness of Male Abuse Awareness Week, growing the Google+ following, and getting more involved in Google+ Communities. My ability to simply drop a couple of links in every week or two was nice, but it could be so much more if someone with more time could devote the time to it. So, I’m walking away from it, to devote more time to my own blogs, and making sure that I’m doing all the things that I need to for myself while my work life has me traveling so much.
If you’re interested in taking it over, or doing any other online volunteering for the organization, you can check out the volunteer recruitment post.
I do hope you’ll consider donating some time to a very worthwhile cause. Male victims of abuse don’t often get the public resources and acknowledgement that would encourage other males to tell their stories. Any efforts to bring attention to survivors, of all genders, is worthwhile to me.
You may have noticed things have been a little quiet around here. I’ve been pretty busy with work, which is taking me away from my normal blogging patterns. Given how much travel I’m going to be doing as part of my job, it’s becoming more and more obvious that I’ll need to find some way to keep writing while I’m traveling.
On the other hand, work is becoming more of an adventure every day, and there’s part of me that is simply enjoying that fact. Last week, I was in Norway, for example. I wish I would have had some more time to explore Oslo while I was there, but I did need to work, and frankly, even the little bit of exploring I was able to do was a chance to see more of Norway than I expected to see in my lifetime. 
So, as much as the trip wore me out, and even had me come home with a cold, and as much as it’s been difficult to find my focus on the blog in the midst of all this, I wouldn’t trade it. I spent so much of my early adult years being afraid to try new things, struggling to stay “safe” from the things I had to deal with as a child, that now that I’ve finally started to realize that I am capable of keeping myself safe, and can navigate the world successfully as an adult, I don’t want to turn down opportunities to have an adventure. I feel like it’s almost my way of thumbing my nose at the abuse. That doing something new, interesting, and yes a little scary, is my way of reclaiming my life from abuse.
Whatever your adventure is, I hope that you are able to take it, with the knowledge that as a survivor, you’ve already accomplished so very much, and have the ability to accomplish much, much more.
I was curious about Tumblr so I started a fun little blog about sports, just as a way to learn about the platform. Now that I am looking at it, I wondered if there’s any sort of survivor community on Tumblr or if any of you guys have been using it. Let me know, and if you happen to be a sports fan, check out my Tumblr blog and join the conversation.
An annual tradition around here is to put together a Flickr Set of my favorite photos from the past year. 2012 was a busy, busy year and brought about some very unexpected changes for me professionally, ones that caused our lives to be much different than we expected too! Your personal life can’t help but be impacted when you start traveling as part of your job.
So, for the year 2012, here are my favorites pics. Click the play button to view as a slideshow, or simply browse through all 42 of them at your own speed. You can also view them on Flickr if you don’t have Flash available.
As I look forward to 2013, I realize that for all the traveling I do, I rarely bring anything more than my iPhone for taking photos, and rarely even pull that out. I need to change that. I should be trying to take advantage of being in different places and try to create more photo memories of those trips. Granted, it can be hard to do when you spend all day in front of a group of folks, but I should be thinking more about taking photos while out walking around as opposed to waiting until it’s vacation time and I have my DSLR with me. At least that will be the goal, so perhaps the collection of 2013 will have more iPhone/Instagram photos as I capture what I happen to see!
Thanks for following along here on this little site, whether you’ve been here for years, or just discovered it in 2012. I hope 2013 is going to be a great year for you!
If you’re interested in a little interview I did recently with the founder of the No Longer Silent Movement, you can check it out over on their blog.
As I mentioned before, I think it’s a great thing that Nicolette is trying to reach survivors at a young age. So many of us went through such pain and misery in our adult years because we didn’t get help, or tried to keep our issues secret. How I wish survivors would not do that to themselves! Hopefully, giving them a role model (Not that I consider myself a role model, but I am someone who survived, and has overcome an abusive past) will let them know that they are not alone, and are on a path that others have taken before them.
In looking at past Thanksgiving holiday posts in an effort to say something new, I came across this one in 2008, and it is still exactly the message I would like to send survivors as we kick off the holiday season in the US. So, I’m re-posting it tonight instead of writing something new, and probably not as heartfelt:
It’s the Thanksgiving holiday here in the US. My day was pretty full, volunteering and serving food early in the day, and then having dinner with my family later. It was a long day, all that time being social and around people has me pretty tired, but I wanted to post a quick thought about being thankful.
Sometimes for survivors, finding something to be thankful for at this time of year is a struggle. Many times we’re simply trying to survive family time without too much stress, or struggling with depression more than usual. I know, I’ve spent many years viewing Thanksgiving messages of gratefulness with my own particular brand of cynicism.
That’s not so much the case now, but it was for a very long time. It takes time, and there’s nothing that can change that. On the other hand, if you can’t find anything else to be thankful for today, be thankful that you are alive, and that you have time, and the hope, that in the years to come, you will continue healing, continue growing, and build a life that includes plenty to be thankful for.
I am thankful that each of you reading this has the chance to live, and become the person you want to be, healthy, and happy. Continue to work, and have hope.
I found myself reading this article about Queen Underwood, a female boxer represeting the US at the Olympics earlier today. The headline grabbed my attention, because she is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, but the story actually contained something I don’t see often, although I doubt she is alone in this. She admits to regretting telling her story.
No, she doesn’t regret telling her story because she’s in danger of repercussions from her father, or her family. She regrets it because people made assumptions about her:
A few months ago, Underwood did an interview with the New York Times in which she revealed her father Azzad sexually abused her for years. She described how Azzad would creep into her room as a child and touch her, often taking her older sister Hazzauna off to another room. Later, she said, Hazzauna would return, weeping.
It was a powerful story, made more powerful by a small tour of TV interviews the sisters made. And then, a boxing official says, she came to regret all of it, because instead of being a fighter, she became something else. Something weaker.
…
“It’s not who I am today,” she says. “People are trying to make connections that aren’t there. I’m strong because of my mindset.”
Now boxing is a very tough sport, one in which you do not want to show any weakness. Most of us will never know what it’s like to step into a ring with someone who’s job is to hit us as often, and as hard, as possible. Given that, I can see why she is offended by anyone who assumed she is a weak victim. She is anything but weak. But it’s illustrative of how we deal with abuse survivors that she has now come to regret saying anything about her abuse, because the general public made assumptions about her, based on nothing more than a news story about her being abused as a child.
I’ve seen the same thing, over and over again, in the Jerry Sandusky coverage. There are a lot of stories that describe for us what the witnesses lives must be like now, what sort of issues they are dealing with, etc. without one of these “experts” actually talking to any of those survivors. There are a lot of well-meaning advocates who feel the need to tell us how difficult live must be for these men, ho they’ll never lead a normal life, or that their lives have been ruined beyond repair. I’ve already talked about how dangerous it is to talk about survivors in those terms, letting all survivors think there is no hope of healing and overcoming their past, but there’s another, more personal, reason these statements bother me so much. That’s because, as someone who has been vocal about my own story, I’ve seen lots of people come to this site, and make plenty of assumptions about me, based solely on this one fact of my life. I am a survivor of child abuse.
Other than that fact, you don’t know me. It’s dangerous to assume that you do, and it’s offensive to many survivors to assume that you know them. If the statistics are true, and 1 of every 4 girls, 1 of every 6 boys, is abused, that means there are millions of survivors currently, just in the US. To assume that we all have the same ideas, share the same political affiliations, and have the same opinions about how to protect children and how to support survivors, is insane. We are all individuals, and we are all dealing with our past in different ways, with different results. I try to be welcoming to all different survivors here, and I would hope any survivor blogger, community, website, etc. would be. But, just because I am a survivor, and I willingly share that fact, doesn’t mean you can make assumptions about me. In fact, I’ve been doing this a long time and have seen plenty of assumptions made about who I am, what sort of beliefs I hold, and what my personality is like. Some of them were correct, some of them weren’t even close. Most of them, however, were misguided assumptions based on nothing more than being a survivor.
Queen Underwood and I are both survivors of sexual abuse. You may also be one. Aside from that, we’re each our own combination of many, many, things, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
News and Reviews
