I Thought Keeping Secrets Gave Me Super Powers

I’ve kept many secrets throughout my life. Protecting those I love by sacrificing myself to deal with the shame became just one of my super powers. Oddly, I felt stronger with each traumatic event. Each and every secret I kept.

My traumas developed my never-ending imagination and my ability to retreat into my own world. So I became, born of pain, a very creative, dreamy woman.

Unfortunately, these super powers also made me very lonely person.

Enter dark mysterious stranger.

In 2015, I had been married for 23 years. My husband had been my prom date. I had five children that we produced in a decade. I was a nurse and helped my entrepreneur husband run several businesses on the side. I had recently hurt my back at work and was on a leave.

In between the chaos of sports and carpools I discovered online games. My favorite was Words With Friends. A word lover (and true nerd) I spent most my free time in my car trying to beat my opponents.

During one of those games, a stranger sent me a chat. It was innocent… a remark that he couldn’t believe the word I played, was actually a valid word. I’m the sort that literally moves letters around in desperation, and end up making a word… a fortunate mistake.

I just had not realized I had submitted a word that was slang for male genitalia (yeah…I know I’m a nurse. I still didn’t know).

As all things innocent go, at the end of it, you will be blind sighted. Or Enlightened.

Dark stranger and I spent months chatting. One day, he mentioned how he worried he was a dark. It didn’t take long after that statement for me to decide I had to share my secrets with him. I woke up that morning with the thought in my head that I have to tell him. I was surprised when he said he also needed to share a secret with me.

Two Strangers sharing secrets. Both have super powers of childhood trauma. Is this the exact recipe for a soul tie? I think so.

When you’ve been fighting for it all your life. You’ve been struggling to make things right. That’s how a superhero learns to fly.

As it turns out, sharing intimate shameful secrets with this man changed my entire life. It was the catalyst for me to finally turn to therapy when this stranger left my world. It was the beginning and the end of me being trapped in an abusive, toxic, lonely marriage of almost 30 years.

I told him in vivid and graphic detail my childhood. I told him in a frenzy all the details that I had hidden somewhere deep inside of me. For whatever reason, this man, made me feel safe enough to tell him ALL THE DARK PARTS OF ME.

We texted for days into nights just talking about our fucked up childhoods. I won’t share details of his secret because it was a sacred secret told to me. I felt in my heart, his experience of trauma and abandonment. I had never heard a story such as his. I wanted and did cry for him on many occasions.

As for me, I GUTTED myself.

I told him that my life had started out with an untreated alcoholic father. Who also was schizophrenic. He was a beautiful, kind man with beautiful blue eyes that was committed into a mental hospital when I was 6. He soon moved back home to NY to live with his mother, as my own mother loved him intensely but couldn’t take care of him with 2 young children.

I told him my fondest memories of my father was him showering and dancing outside in the rain… until I had neighborhood friends and rode the school bus. Then, even at 6, I was so embarrassed.

I told him the reason I was a good pool player was that my father would sneak me into pool halls and teach me how to play. I loved when he would buy me a slim jim and a bottle of coke while I watched as he gambled away my mom’s new sewing machine.

Then I told him my world had turned dark. My mother who was working nights at a gas station, met a man with a new Buick. He walked into her life, had a real job fixing cash registers, and a ranch house with a full basement. We were moved in by my 7th birthday. He sexually molested me and I lived in that house until he gave me away when I married at 19.

Soon after moving in, this man started spending a lot of time in my room, bringing in train sets and race car tracks for my younger brother and I to play. He had an Atari. I loved to play Pitfall. He also had satellite tv. We had only ever seen 5 stations on our TV. The world was sort of amazing for about a month.

I remember, before he ever started touching me, that I loved to take baths. I remember all the sudden feeling very strange while taking one. I got out of the bath to pee and looked down at the air register on the floor and thought I saw eyes. Even at 7 years of age, I felt something viscerally wrong. I knew there shouldn’t be a way to see down in the basement from a bathroom vent.

Then all the sudden I was getting back massages that I never asked for in bed. And all the things that came after… stuck in closets, held down in bed, forced to load the dishwasher so I couldn’t hide out in my room as I grew older. Being woke up to see him standing over me shining a flashlight in my eyes. For some reason, I thought that was the worst.

That house was never safe. He found me everywhere.

I even told this dark man, that sometimes I invited friends over because I was so tired of dread. I was 7 and I didn’t know how to deal with it. So some nights, I didn’t. I let some other little girl experience it.

To this day, I don’t quite know how to forgive myself for that. I know small me was just trying to survive, but it still hurts.

As it turns out, my friends didn’t have my super powers. They didn’t keep secrets well. My mom put my hair in braids, bought me a new blue dress and cleaned the house. A Social worker came.

She told my mom that if she didn’t have sex with my step father often enough, that sometimes men will turn to little girls.

She suggested we move. We did (the first time) for about a month, only to return.

My poor, dark stranger friend. I didn’t stop there. I told him how my husband knew some of these things, but not all. I had not felt safe enough to tell him all of it. I told him how my husband, even after hearing my childhood kitchen stories, often got angry during disagreements and didn’t want me to leave the house.

I told him that my husband often picked up my 5 foot body and placed me on the counter in the kitchen and would take away my keys and phone. He never hit me. But I felt so trapped. It brought back horrible feelings of doing dishes and being molested by my step father. I told him I have felt like a caged animal my entire life.

I told him that my husband had suggested so many times that we let a stranger come in while we were having sex…to watch. How he brought it up every single time we were intimate and we would fight because I had told him it terrified me.

Had he not heard me talk about how I was worried about being watched in the bathroom? How did my husband not understand this?

My stranger listened, and listened, and listened. Often, he didn’t have much to say. But I know he read every word. And I feel bad to have taken this man and make him into a would be therapist. I don’t know why I did. He was such a good listener, I feel like I took advantage of his soul.

We spent an entire summer chatting away. Once I got all of my secrets out, we talked about so many other things. We sent songs back and forth. He introduced me to music I had never heard, and for that, and all his listening, I am eternally grateful for him to have walked in my life.

And now, in hind sight, I am grateful for his exit too.

He left like a ghost and I felt an intense hole in my chest. I sometimes felt like I knew what it was like for one of my patients to have an amputation. Phantom pain.

He absence left such an emptiness in my soul that I had no choice but to go see a therapist. I began a two year therapy course with a trauma specialist and an intense spiritual journey of finding myself. My therapist let me know that my “super powers” had other names in psychotherapy. She taught me new healthier super powers that made me feel much stronger and safe.

Finally I felt safe.

My dark stranger led me to who I am today. He showed me that speaking was the way to safety and I did the work. My stranger was my friend when I needed one the most.