Much in the same way I convinced myself the molestation I
endured at 12 was a “misunderstanding” because I was not brutalized violently
or raped viciously in the manner that would leave physical bruises, I also
convinced myself at 20 that the verbal and emotional abuse I was enduring was
just another “misunderstanding.” In both
scenarios I minimized the situation in order to rationalize my abuse – to move
forward because I thought that’s what one does.
Even later on in life when others molested me too I was paralyzed with
insurmountable anxiety that if I did not move on I would have to confront what
I was going through, and I was the least informed about abuse of any kind. That’s the thing so hard to grasp; life doesn’t
suddenly stop so that you can sort through your feelings. So that you can understand what you don’t have
words for. You can barely ask for help because the whole process is humiliating
to even admit. You just have to keep
going. I placed the responsibility of my
abuse on myself because I thought I was overreacting – this is how I resolved
it. I truly thought that just because I
was seemingly not being forced I must have had control, and if I had control I
could have stopped it, but the reality was wrong; I had no control.
In conversations I heard around me the general census was
that one cannot force themselves on another without the person’s consent. It seemed unfathomable to people that you
could be raped, molested or even verbally abused without your permission. When
one is physically assaulted the marks against the flesh – a purple pulp of a
disfigured blemish – is an undeniable proof to an everyday reality. It becomes easy for others to accept your
abuse so long as they can see the scars across your face. But even then the case is against you.
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” – Eleanor
Roosevelt. This sentiment, I believe, is
a perpetual train of backwards thinking.
It permeates the collective minds of our society. Women are often made complicit in their own
abuse so that the world could rationalize the increasing violence and second
class citizenship of over half of the population. The world makes us women share in the responsibility
of violence against ourselves to minimize the real problem and to deny the
failure of human condition; that we have risen generation after generation of
men who have made violence a mandatory trait of masculinity. As much as feminists can raise the consciousness
of people, of men on the subject of institutional violence against women the progress
to a liberated society is drudgingly long.
The difficulty of living with forms of post-traumatic stress disorders
suffocates any woman.
Often we are lost inside our own skin feeling the revenant
hands of our abusers crawl inside of us and rip out everything we were and
everything we could have been. Their words, though long forgotten by the
years, become our daily church bells – reminders that the language our abusers used
sewed us to our insecurities and buried us under their own filth and called it
a compliment. For me, and many like me,
I believed invisibility was the answer.
I thought silence would keep me safe, but in this, I too was wrong. We do what we can to survive; returning to
normalcy begs a stage in which we feign shallow interest in a life that is not
ours anymore. The pain may lessen over
time, but what was done will never be undone.
I learned that I will have good days and bad days in ways others will
not. I learned that one cannot simply
move on; one can only manage to nurse the wounds until they become scar tissues. I learned that I will have to live with this
for the rest of my life.
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