The Healing Process: Disillusion Towards The Past
Content warnings: abuse, sexual assault. Reader discretion is heavily advised
I’ve always been hyper aware of situations in the moment, of how I feel, how someone makes me feel. From sporadic memories of childhood, the bliss, guilt, and abuse feels tenfold looking back.
It feels odd calling everything what it is. When I was even younger and even more confused, my only exposure to the unfair treatment of children was within donation commercials. Between showings of Animal Atlas, the voiceover would detail the grueling lives of starving children in unspecified African countries. The camera panned over dry lands and muddy water in old, plastic cartons, and the solemn voice asked for even just a few cents. The worst fate I could think of for a child was something I already unconsciously recognized to be systemic– out of the control of the people. People, as in, plural, more than one singular person.
So to feel that loss of control, on top of the isolation, I remember thinking that I couldn’t ever imagine someone subjecting a child to what I was being subjected to. Familial love was unconditional for everyone else but specifically not me. I didn’t recognize my situation as abuse or any term like it, I just knew it was bad and something I had to be compliant to.
Before now, I had only confided in three people about the times I was raped. Maybe five if you count the time I, aged probably twelve, in my misplaced frustrations and rage towards my friends saying how bad their situations were, blurted it out as a way of leverage in the middle school trauma olympics over Instagram direct messaging. Then, the five years between four and nine years old, I knew it was wrong. How could something so secretive and uncomfortable not be wrong, despite how the perpetrator regarded it with nonchalance. Everytime it happened I would mull over how I would tell people – if I should tell people. Now that the perpetrator is across the world, far from me, yet unimaginably closer to potential impending victims, the self-victim blaming paralyzes me.
Bad enough as it is, I consider myself lucky that I only think about my assaults in the most dire, late night type of moments. I certainly think it’s better than breaking down in your family restaurant’s bathroom after reading “You did the best you could under extreme circumstances” in a moment of unprepared self-confrontation during a shift. Thoughts of If I said something then, if I say something now, maybe I’ll be listened to, maybe I could “save” others, stay in my mind like the sharply hued floaters behind my tightly shut eyes vaguely recreating the incident. Inescapable.
The entire time I was experiencing the abuse, sexual or otherwise, I felt so entirely alone. When I reconnected with my cousins and learned that they had experienced the same things, seen and had understood what I was going through, it felt like the world began to resaturate with color. I had always been labeled as the good girl in school, yet the trouble child within the family, an uncle even going so far as to call me a “little devil” during a scolding. To learn that there were people who knew me in my personal life that actually saw me as human…
I know basic respect and humanity are things that you should never have to work towards, but it felt like a reward. After everything I went through, I could connect with people in a large, at times vague, fucked up way. To reiterate, I felt so closed off family-wise, when the floodgates opened, I couldn’t help but think, This was here the whole time? Are you kidding me? I was angry, and sad, for not lack of a better word, but for how cut simple it felt.
I’ve always been the girl who cried a lot. I have a distinct memory of showering and all of a sudden remembering that death is a thing, stepping out soaking wet and having to be consoled by three people, my older sister and cousins, with the fact that Princess Unikitty from the 2014 Lego Movie existed and was kind and pink (Thanks CJ).
“Think happy thoughts” only worked for so long. Maybe it’s a universal Girl Experience, but the idea of existential dread and other large yet relatively simple concepts had been instilled in me for as long as I could write in a diary, probably, only to be brushed away because who was I to be thinking that.
After I had moved away from the majority of my abusers and my parents began to believe me and stop their complicit support of it, the pandemic happened. After that, as I began to wearily visit and interact with these people more, now with the back of my 5’5 father to better hide behind, they… treated me kindly? What kind of switch up or revelations come during a 2 year period that jarring?
The aunt that tormented me and tore apart her own relationships with her siblings, and mine with my cousins over a missing fucking sock monkey and calico cat plush, now hugged me with surprise as I gingerly stepped into the dining room unannounced, having just cried into my dad’s shoulder before he had to leave to find parking just 2 minutes earlier. The uncle that made a depressed fourth grader eat trash started telling jokes and doing favors. The adults in my life started treating me like everyone else.
As if. I. Had. Earned it.
If you’re reading my work, and I assume the work that I like to recommend and surround myself with (looking at you, unscathingly (which is surprisingly not a real word??) intellectual girlbloggers of all genres), I assume that you understand healing is a excruciatingly layered and unkind process, especially in the beginning. From the back and forth of victim blaming, to a hopefully positive self actualization, the change is scary, and the reliving scarier. Hopefully, I can help you feel a little less alone. So, crack open a window (unless you’re in Canada or America’s east coast right now) and we can get through this together.
This is my least planned but perhaps most terrifyingly easy post yet. If you’ve stuck along until the end, I can not ever convey my gratitude. Thank you.
Further Viewing, Reading, Listening
“What Were You Wearing?” Exhibit, dove center via dovecenter.org
A Really Bad Birthday, luna danielle via lunadanielle.substack.com
07: hymn of the tiger daughter, terry nguyễn via lycheemartinis.substack.com
The Burden of Bipolar, charlie squire via evilfemale.blog
Violence, Visibility, and Victimhood, charlie squire via evilfemale.blog
Latter Days, big red machine and anaїs mitchell via spotify
conveying such heart wrenching events and past stories into such beautiful writing is truly wonderful. we see you and appreciate you, and i thank you for talking about something so intimate and vulnerable. i wish only love and healing for you moving forward, and i’ll keep cheering on from afar on one of my favorite writers on here (that’s you lovely :D) !!