This will be your one and only trigger warning on this site.
I am a survivor of three different kinds of abuse. I won’t go into detail because that’s not the point of this site, but I will summarize for you.
I am the child of a military parent and as such I spent the first half of my life moving every couple of years and never having friends. Since I’ve always been independent, this didn’t really bother me very much, but it did impact my older brother who did need to feel connected to other people. The first time we lived somewhere that we didn’t really have anyone to play with, I was 6 and he was 8.5; that’s when it all started. Since I was the only one my brother had to play with, he would demand I play something that I didn’t want to play and when I refused, he would beat me until I agreed. The physical abuse lasted until my brother moved out when I was 16.
When I was between 10 and 12, the “game” my brother wanted to play was sexual assault. The worst part about the sex abuse was that I was too young to realize how much it would impact my life in years to come and too eager to avoid a beating that I didn’t fight as hard as I should have. I used to feel guilty about that but I don’t anymore and the reason why will be addressed in a blog entry one of these days.
When I entered high school at the age of 14, for the first time in my life I had a lot of people who appeared to be my friends. The one boy I called my best friend made it very clear he wanted to date me and I made it very clear I wasn’t interested. So, he started telling me that I was ugly and no one would ever love me, I suspect he was also chasing all the other boys in school away from me, but I have no proof. After almost two years of that treatment, I started to believe it and he became my first boyfriend. He dumped me two weeks later and I can only assume the reason was that mentally abusing me to the point that he had completely stripped me of my will and destroyed my personality was the fun part for him.
It took me until I was about 26 to rebuild my identity after these experiences to the point where I am actually a whole human being again and no longer a shell of my 14 year old self. That’s 10 years of recovery from 10 years of abuse; 20 years all together, two thirds of my life to date (2013). But this blog is not about feeling sorry for myself because I don’t feel sorry for myself. Yes, what I went through is bad and it shouldn’t happen to anyone, but it did happen to me and it does happen to more people than most people realize. Yes, a lot of bad things came as a result of my experience, but a lot of good things did as well. I choose to focus on the good things.
I am not writing this blog for selfish reasons. I do not want sympathy, or praise, or fame, or money. I have taken great pains to ensure that this blog is not connected to my real name or my primary online persona. I tend not to talk about these things in the real world, not because I have difficulty discussing them, but because most people have difficulty hearing them, especially when they can see my face and care about me, and I don’t want to hurt anyone. I have long wanted to have a platform where I could talk about my recovery and how my experiences have helped to shape the person I have become and be heard doing so. I most importantly want to be heard by as many people as I can because I believe the things I have to say might help others who are themselves recovering to recover and help those who have not gone through these kinds of experiences to learn how to handle it when they find out that someone they love has. It is my hope that this blog will be well received and become large enough that it can be that platform where I can be heard.
Keep rising,
Ashen 