Content Warning: This entry contains references to sexual assault. I would like to clarify that while I am referring to sexual assault, what happened to me was not rape. However, I choose to still use the term “sexual assault” because it is the legal definition of what happened. It was important to my healing to learn and accept that what happened to me was serious and by legal definition, sexual assault. I don't want the term I use to seem misleading; however, at the same time, I want the audience for this anthology to understand that sexual assault has a wide definition and leaves a lasting impact in all of its forms. Thank you.

Sorrowful

June 11, 2020

I’ve been feeling lately like I couldn’t see the full picture of myself. It felt like part of me was in a fog, and try as I might, search as I might, I couldn’t clear it on my own. I couldn’t even name the feeling, that something was missing, until it wasn’t anymore.

I learned this week, at twenty-five years old, that I was touched inappropriately by another child when I was three years old. I was in a daycare facility, the first one my parents had left me in, and my mom got a call at work one day. She came over and picked me up immediately and found another daycare. The little boy was being sexually abused himself and DHR was now involved. They tried to assure my mom that I would be safe, everything would be fine, but she took me out of their program and found another. They thought and hoped and prayed I wouldn’t remember and wouldn’t find out.

I learned because I asked. I can’t explain how it came to the surface, how this memory was clawing its way through my subconscious, screaming for a way to be heard, a way to be released. But it did. And it was.

My mom first told me and I was just like, “okay!” and kept making my smoothie, kept making small talk, gave my mom a hug, and thanked her for telling me before I left for work for the day. It wasn’t until an hour later when I was sitting at my desk that it started to sink in. It took everything in me not to throw up. I keep ginger ale in my office for my usual nausea, but this was different. The more I thought about it, the sicker I got.

I have so many feelings I don’t know how to express. Except through sobs.

I haven’t sobbed like this since I found out I was having brain surgery. Sobs that heave straight from your heart because it’s the only sound it knows how to make on its own. All that’s left behind is a silence within.

I feel like I’m observing a moment of silence for myself.

I was a child.

I was just a child.

I worked at an organization that worked to shed light on child-on-child harmful sexual behavior. I didn’t know it applied to me.

I’m so sad for myself, for the child I was.

I feel conflicted, could it have really impacted me? Because I was so young. Did I understand what was happening? I couldn’t have comprehended it at that age. Did my soul know what was going on? Did it bear that wound? Does it still?

I’ve grown, I’m an adult now, my body’s different. But my body doesn’t need my mind to remember in order to keep score.

I have to accept that it had an effect on me. Even though I was young, even though he didn’t have malicious intent. I was affected.

I can’t be mad at him like I could be mad at the man that assaulted me when I was 17, though people argued I couldn’t be mad then either because he had intellectual disabilities, but I could still demand justice for me and help for him. I can’t be mad at him in this case because he was just a child. He was being abused and he did get help because of this.  I think I can be mad that it happened though. I can be mad that I didn’t get a say over what happened to my body and I live with the knowledge and the memory that I don’t always get a say over what other people choose to do to my body. I can be mad that it’s a fallen and broken world and that’s the reality I, as a woman, live with. I can be mad at that. I can hope he’s gotten healing and justice for his own pain. 

I can’t think I did anything to provoke it. With my other two assault incidents, I shouldered part of the blame, asking myself if I wore or did something misleading, reassuring myself that no, I didn’t, and fighting to make myself believe it. Even if I know I didn’t do anything, we’ve all internalized the thought from years of rape myth culture. But in this case, I was just a child. He was just a child. I did nothing, said nothing, wore nothing that would give anyone any reason to say it was expected or warranted or caused. With that comes freedom and crushing grief. I didn’t expect the grief to feel so much stronger when you are unquestionably and by all standards a victim. It’s almost like it’s more bearable to live with if I thought in some way or shape it was somehow deserved. But it isn’t, and all I have is sadness.

I can’t understand why God let it happen. I can’t understand why God let this little boy live with abuse. I know God cared so deeply about that little boy and that little girl, and I can’t help but think God’s crying with me. Grieving with me. But nothing happens without God causing or allowing it. I can only trust that he’ll use it for my good and for his glory. I can only trust that in what I don’t understand is a God I know and love.

I worry it will affect me in ways I don’t know yet. I’ve got three sexual assault experiences now, all different, and I worry they’ve left marks on my soul in ways I won’t know until I’m married. I guess all I can do is trust God for a patient, kind, and understanding husband. I do believe that. God, I ask for that.

I’m sad. I want there to be a solution, a lesson, a resolution. I can’t redeem sadness by learning a lesson. I can only allow myself to be sad. Let it take the time it needs to cleanse the wound this left. What is at the end of sadness?

I think it might be hope.

Hope for healing. Hope for restoration. Hope for beauty. Hope for a knitting together of self; hope for a relationship with God without separation. Hope for love.

I can see all these moments of trauma in the landscape of my life held in my hand now. The three sexual assaults, the tornado, all of the medical issues that have been, are, and are going to come. I hold them lightly in my palm, like fragile, finely decorated glass figurines. With care, I sort them, giving them space from the others, allowing myself to acknowledge the detail, and I settle them one-by-one from my palm and onto my treasured bookshelf by my Bible and journal. I let them down next to where I sit every day, where I feel the most me.

I let myself be sad.

To hear this entry read aloud, click here.
To watch this entry in American Sign Language, click here. (Coming Soon)