I lost my father a few days ago. This post isn’t about that but it frames what I’m writing. I’ve lived too long (thankfully) and have tackled too few of my issues for my life to be linear. I have lost the opportunity to address problems as they come. When you let them pile up you get exactly what you built – a big pile of interlocking, twisted shit. Try to extract one piece and you’ll pull and tug another. So you might as well jump in. Any progress is progress at this point. And there is no more time. No more time to wait.

Small bits. What makes a person dark? What makes someone do evil?

I didn’t always believe in evil. Or didn’t want to. I had a theology, one that came from my family’s unspoken belief system, that allowed for a creator but not really. The idea was that there was a formless shifting energy that just loved. There was no evil. That was created by man. There was no hell. That was created to control man. And there was even no heaven. My grandmother used to talk about streets of gold and how we would have everything we ever wanted when we went to heaven. The only catch is that we had to die first. This distressed me. I remember sobbing in the bed because I was afraid to die. I think she felt terrible about that. She tried to comfort me but it just left me even more distant from an idea of heaven and hell and punishment and salvation. It all sounded like a tactic to control a little girl.

So I had this moral system where I determined what was good or bad. And conveniently I could make myself good almost no matter what. Goodness was related to your reasons for your actions – not the actions themselves. Bad people were bad because they tried to hurt people. And good people, even if they hurt people, were still good because they had good reasons or some good excuse.

Hmm.

That doesn’t work for me anymore. Not because I’ve changed so much but because its not true.

I’ve been wresting with issues within my family because we have this legacy of sexual abuse and sexual immorality. Generational experiences that shape us. And what I’m finding is that sexual molestation, whether it’s perceived as harmful or not, changes the person. Indelibly and perhaps permanently. I’m talking neural foundational changes. Brain system changes. How you think, what you desire, how you process emotion, reason, and make decisions are all shaped by those early life experiences.

Think of it as a newly present birthmark. One that wasn’t there before but suddenly it’s right there on your forehead. It doesn’t hurt. But it’s irritating and something is always aggravating it. So you keep picking it at it. And covering it. And uncovering it. You’re trying to figure out how to make it a normal part of your body. How to not feel so weird with this new mark on you. And so you spend 80% of your time doing just that. You ignore your hygiene. You don’t eat properly. You barely sleep enough. You definitely don’t have the space to take care of someone else. You are fixated on this thing, this strange thing that has appeared on your body. Covering it or making it normal becomes the only thing you care about. But you don’t know that. You think you’re living.

But the architecture of damage becomes clear when someone else needs you. When life requires that you focus on something besides your mark, your dark spot. You might go a bit bat shit crazy when that particular demand is made. Because in truth you know that other people don’t have that spot. And you can either accept this deformity as a part of yourself and be less than other people. Or you can make it your identity. You can get with the spotted people and try to make sure your kids become spotted too. It’s not that bad, right? Or you might become a cutter. To distract from the spots. You might make small slices on your arm or thighs because it draws attention away from the spot in the middle of your forehead.

I wish we knew how powerful sexuality is. How life affirming and life damaging it can be. To have that awakened as a child, before your mind and body can process what’s happening, is devastating. But worse, to be that child is sometimes to not know what has happened to you. To not know what you have become.

Evil can start this way. Evil begets evil. And that is as real as my fingers on this keyboard.