It is not now, nor has it ever been my fault...

Today, I need to acknowledge that I am a survivor of sexual abuse that has existed practically my entire child hood until I had grown to be the age of an adult. It happened to me, and it was wrong, each every incident that I can remember and can't. There was never a time that I raised my hand and shouted pick me.


My Uncle, a boy in my kindergarten class, a cousin, a cousin of a girlfriend, and two men who I believed myself to be dating who were adults, several times past my age in years.

I am preparing to be 35 years old and my revelations of late are just blowing my mind. I have known that I can be aloof at times, can be distant, different, often deal with a mild form of depression, am extremely intense and anxious for some time (years), and continue to be an obsessively over protective parent, and at times sexually repressive. I had chalked it up to be issues with expressing my self, resentment for my parents who elected not to be hands on protectors of my body, my youth, my appearance, or to having to be old, young.

You name it and I have felt it. I think piece by piece, individually, I believed the events that happened to me were odd, no fun, not right, believed that they were happening to others girls, girls who looked like me, from North Nashville, dark skinned, and curvy, who did not have hair down to the floor, but who lived in housing with roaches and rats. I don't think I believed that things like this happened to girls that were not from my neighborhood, didn't happen to tall girls who wore name brand clothes, smelled of perfume, and went to the hair dresser on a regular base, didn't happen to girls who went private school, and didn't have to ride the bus or walk to school. The things that happened to me didn't happen to girls whose parents came to PTA meetings and school programs. This is what I believed.

Growing up I didn't ever consider that the things that happened to me were abuse. I knew not to discuss them openly, like we didn't discuss the drug and alcohol use that was prevalent in our family. I just knew felt different, always out of place. I just believed that these were things that happened to me because something I was doing, saying, the way I looked, or the surroundings in which I lived. Didn't ever consider it to be an issue with the offenders who were violating me.

It is not now, nor has it ever been my fault...