c-PTSD Journals

A reflection on grief, the outliers who survive, and what it means to finally know your own name.

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“Hell isn’t underground. It’s the world you live in when you’re too afraid to be yourself.” — Marilyn Manson, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

I Just Finished Nobody’s Girl

I finished Virginia Giuffre’s book Nobody’s Girl and I didn’t move for a while after. I just sat with it. That’s the only honest response to a book like that — you sit with it and let it work on you, because rushing past it would be a kind of violence toward what she lived.

For those who may not know her name: Virginia Giuffre was a survivor and activist who spent years fighting publicly against Jeffrey Epstein and his network of powerful men who trafficked and abused her and others, beginning when she was a teenager. She became one of the most visible voices in a case the world tried repeatedly to look away from. She won. She made them look. And then, in early 2025, she ended her life by her own hand. She was 41 years old. The world lost her before it had finished learning from her.

What I felt reading her story wasn’t simple or clean. It was a rainbow in some places and a muddled dark mess in others — horror, disgust, anger, vulnerability, emptiness, sadness, grief, awe, and something I can only call inspiration all tangled up together. You can’t separate them. You’re not supposed to.

I have never been sexually abused. Almost was, once. But I don’t need to have walked the full path to feel the edge of it. I know what it is to have your body treated as something that belongs to someone else’s story. I know what it is to have the people in positions of power decide what happens to you, in you, around you, without your consent being part of the equation.

What sat heaviest for me, reading her story, was the end. The way her body seemed simply depleted. Spent. Unable to heal the way a body should be able to heal. And she was still so young. The body is supposed to be the one thing that’s yours. The one place you live that nobody can permanently take from you. But hers had been taken from her so early, and so completely, and so many times — that by the time she needed it to fight for her, it had already given everything it had.

I sat with the grief of that for a long time. I’m still sitting with it.

The Brown Church Was in My Dreams Again

That night I dreamed about the church. The street it sits on. The parking lot with the neat, suited people who do no wrong. It keeps showing up in my sleeping mind years after I left, and I have come to understand that the dream isn’t random. It’s my psyche doing what it has to do. Still processing. Still trying to make sense of decades of something that got inside me before I even had words for what it was doing.

In the dream I was driving past — moving, putting distance between us. And then without any clear moment of choosing to stop, I was inside it. In the middle of the people. That’s the thing about these places. You don’t always notice the moment you cross back in. The transition is too smooth. That’s by design.

The ones who weren’t “just right” in appearance were shunned. Quietly, politely, the way people in those communities do it — with smiles and avoidance and the subtle removal of warmth. The ones who fit were moving through the motions. Doing what they were told. Sad robots performing belonging.

And then I saw my dead father.

He was one of the robots. And I know — because he told me in private conversations when he was alive — that he had questions. He had longings. Things he wanted that the system couldn’t give him and wouldn’t allow him to seek. But on the other side of the church was his alcoholism. The thing that had nearly destroyed him before he found religion, and that he believed would swallow him whole the moment he stepped outside its walls. So he stayed. He chose the prison because the alternative terrified him more.

Watching him in the dream, I felt grief and love and a complicated tenderness all at once. He wasn’t a monster. He was a man who was too afraid. And the system he gave himself to made sure he stayed that way. Fear is the most effective tool a high-control community has, and they use it beautifully.

That place feels like a prison with open arms. That’s the most accurate way I know to describe it. It’s not barbed wire that holds you. It’s the hugs. The belonging. The terrible comfort of being known inside a system that also owns you. And your psyche knows how seductive that is — even years later, even when you’ve done the work, even when you know better. The dream doesn’t show you a locked door. It shows you a place you could slip back into. That is the real thing to be vigilant about.

Free Physically. Still Fighting.

I left that church at 34. Physically. The internal leaving takes longer — years longer, maybe a lifetime of maintenance — and I think anyone who has walked out of a high-control religious community knows exactly what I mean by that. You carry the architecture of it inside you. The voice that says you are not enough. The instinct to shrink. The reflex to apologize for existing in a way that doesn’t look neat and suited and correct.

Virginia’s body worn down by what was done to it. My father’s spirit worn down by what he couldn’t escape. And me — still here. Still in the ring. Doing the kind of work that doesn’t look like much from the outside. The slow, grinding, interior work of learning who you actually are when the system that defined you is gone.

That’s not small. Even on the days it feels like nothing.

The Outliers Who Keep Me Standing

This morning I read something that landed in my guts. A passage referencing Anton LaVey, founder of The Church of Satan and Marilyn Manson, the iconic and polarizing rock musician, specifically this idea: that organized religion manufactures guilt by condemning the flesh in order to control the soul. That hell isn’t a place underground. It’s the world you inhabit when you’re too afraid to be yourself.

I know that hell. I lived inside it for thirty years. The brown church, the parking lot, the neat suited people — that was hell. Not fire and brimstone. The slow suffocation of never being allowed to be fully, messily, imperfectly, authentically human. The daily cost of performing a version of yourself that the system could approve of.

I want to be honest about Marilyn Manson, because I think honesty is the whole point. He is a deeply flawed human being who has caused documented harm to real people. I don’t hold him up as a hero or a model. But I also know that broken people sometimes stumble into broken-open truths. And I recognize the darkness he embodied — not because I want to cause harm, but because I have a shadow self too. We all do. Religion told me to fear mine, to suppress it, to hand it over to God to manage because I couldn’t be trusted with it. That suppression didn’t make the shadow disappear. It made it drive from somewhere I couldn’t see.

Maybe Manson was shaped by his own wounds into something that went sideways in ways mine didn’t. Maybe the difference between us is partly circumstance, partly support, partly the paths we stumbled down. I don’t know. What I do know is that I can hold the truth of a thing and release the person who said it. I can take what fed me and leave what didn’t.

Virginia told the truth when the whole world wanted her silent and had the resources to keep her that way. LaVey named the mechanism of control and refused to participate in it. These are the outliers. The ones who wouldn’t be blended into the crowd. The ones who survived — some of them, some of the time — by refusing to become something the system could use.

There are strings of fear still in me. There probably always will be. But I know the difference now between fear that protects me and fear that was installed in me by people who needed me small.

My Name Is Human

There is a song. My Name Is Human by Highly Suspect. It tells you to get up off your knees — to stand face to face with yourself, to find out what you are. And then it says the thing that opens something up in me every single time I hear it: I know who I am, “Hello, my name is Human.”

I have listened to that song more times than I can count. After decades inside a system that was built on keeping people kneeling — that was built on the premise that you are fundamentally broken and insufficient without its intervention — the instruction to stand up and find out what you are feels like oxygen.

What I am is stardust. Literally. The atoms in my body were forged inside dying stars billions of years ago. I am made of the same material as mountains and oceans and the farthest galaxies we have names for. That is not poetry, or at least it isn’t only poetry. It’s physics. It’s the actual truth of what we are. The universe knowing itself through us. Through me.

When I sit with that — really sit with it, in my body, not just in my head — I feel a pride so deep it almost frightens me. A hundred miles tall and a thousand miles deep. Like a great mountain of stone and a moving force of heavy, layered water at the same time. Immovable and unstoppable. Both.

I feel incredibly human. And I am proud — deeply, fiercely proud — to be this creature.

That feeling came this morning after sitting with Virginia’s grief and my father’s sad robot face and the brown church pulling at me in dreams and the fear strings still fluttering in my chest. I didn’t bypass any of it. I went through it and came out the other side still standing. That’s what the outliers do. They feel everything. They don’t disappear.

If You’re Reading This

If you grew up inside a system that told you who to be and what to feel and which parts of yourself were acceptable — I see you. The grief of those years is real. The anger is real. The exhaustion of still fighting long after you walked out the door is real.

So is the pride. The slow, hard-won, nobody-gave-it-to-me pride that grows in the place where shame used to live.

You don’t have to be fully healed to be an outlier. You just have to keep getting up off your knees.

🌿 If you’re doing your own inner work, I make gentle tools for the journey — reflection worksheets, mood trackers, therapy notes pages, and more. Find them at InnerHealPrintables on Etsy.