I ended up needing to take my sopping wet laundry to the Laundromat since some set of special winners decided to break into the dryers and make them unusable. Pfft. But as it seems to keep happening this week it gave me a couple hours of quiet alone time to think about everything. What was most on my mind is how very calm and at peace I am with this entire situation with Matt's existence.

There's a lot of reasons for my calm and lack of actual surprise. But the one that colours most of it is the measure of my life.

See, one summer day when I was 8 years old, my sister and I were on my bike, cruising down the hill, loving the day. A truck hit us and he ran. I walked away; my sister came to a stop using her skull. Put her and my mother in a helicopter to Edmonton, desperately trying to keep her out of a coma and me left behind in Rainbow. Then the phone call that it looked like my sister was going to die.

The only witness was me. So the man that hit us, picked me up, took me into the woods and raped me while he told me I had killed my sister. He then beat me and left me there. I crawled on my hands and knees out of that forest back into town. I never told anyone about that night and I was absolutely convinced that the accident was utterly my fault. He succeeded. But I survived, as did my sister.

Later that summer, I lay in the tall august grass while two teenage boys molested my 8-year-old body with bottles and sticks. Rainbow Lake was a bad place to be a child. I survived.

Then came the verbal and physical abuse at the hands of my mother. There's nothing to describe what being a young woman, discovering yourself, and being told repeatedly for years that you are worth nothing but your sexuality, is like. Being terrified of your mother and utterly convinced that someday she would manage to shatter your soul. Being hit for being silly. I survived.

I spent most of my teens waking up in the morning with the promise that if the fight in my soul were gone by that night, I would slit my throat and let it all go away, finally. Death was my best friend, and I longed for it so. But I was a fighter and nobody was going to take from me the tiny bit of light and hope I had hidden away. So I survived.

Then I realized that I was losing the fight. The damage was so extensive; it was eating away at the tiny pearls of hope and faith I had sheltered for so long. So I fought harder and I asked for help. And I sat in rooms filled with women and men as damaged as I, and I heard their stories of brutality and violence, their histories of cruelty and the viciousness that resides within humanity. I walked out still broken but with the tools to heal myself.

Then I was a 23-year-old woman, pinned down by the man I had been dating and realized that my no meant nothing to him and I was going to be raped once again. I went away inside my head and I was raped again. I survived.

I once thought I would never live to see my 25th birthday. But I did. And it was agony of break-up and betrayal and loss. But I was alive. From that day to today, I have been blessed with life. I have been blessed with hope. I have been blessed with love. I have been utterly blessed that the tools given to me in therapy work. I have created a life for myself that is coloured by acceptance, faith and light.

But the measure of my life is in cruelty, violence and terror. I have known it more and intimately than anything else.

That I am alive is a feat of survival and faith.

That I am capable of love, hope and vulnerability is a fucking miracle.

So this absolutely juvenile game of betrayal makes me want to take the players, buy them some Shirley Temples, pat them on their cute little heads and tell them how sorry I am that their daddies didn't love them enough. This is less than nothing compared to what I have survived and triumphed over in my life.

And really, I gained so very very much from this game that to be angry or to regret a moment means I deny that good. And I know better than to do that. Every tiny drop of good in this world needs to be embraced and celebrated because there are monsters in the dark, and they are very real.

So, to quote a song that's been on replay for me this week -- "You owe me nothing for giving the love that I give. You owe nothing for caring the way that I have. I give you thanks for receiving, it's my privilege and you owe me nothing in return."

Not even being someone real.