*This post was originally featured on my personal blog, but I wanted to post it here for a wider audience as well.
This has been a really hard weekend to be a woman.
In the past, I've tried to word a post about my experience with and thoughts on abuse, but the only way I've been able to organize my thoughts into something I'm comfortable with sharing is my poetry project, and the situation I'm alluding to is the subject of the second book set to be released in June of next year. So I won't be giving too many details here.
What I experienced was something that went deeper than merely high school "bullying", but I struggle to openly call it abuse because it was not physical or sexual abuse, and sometimes I feel like calling it "emotional abuse" makes me seem too dramatic. In short, I was played and manipulated by multiple people, including trusted adults, and experienced harassment that I can't do justice to by calling it "bullying". I was bullied in middle school. People said petty things about me and made fun of my clothes and hair. This wasn't the same thing.
To go off on my tangent about "yes, I've forgiven those who participated in this behavior; the point of this post isn't to shame anyone involved and if you know who I'm alluding to then please keep it to yourself" would detract from the point of what I'm going to say, and I shouldn't need to specify this every time I feel brave enough to share in some way my experiences. To say "yes, I'm handling this way better than I was at 15 and not dwelling on it nearly as much" is beside the point as well, because no matter how well healed you are from something, triggers exist and they always will.
I didn't share parts of my story as contributions to the "believe women" or "believe survivors" [aka, take their claims seriously] movements, because what I experienced is far different than what these brave women have experienced. I didn't want to take up a platform that wasn't mine. That being said, when something does trigger those memories I try again and again to repress, I have to deal with them somehow.
While I mentioned that multiple people were involved in this situation, it all stemmed from and seemed to revolve around one person, and I was faced with the question of: if this person was ever being considered for a highly esteemed and important public office, what would I do? Would I share my experiences? Would I rally against this person?
No. I would do nothing.
I would quietly vote for another candidate if possible, and I would not voice support of this person, but I wouldn't share my experiences on a public platform. This isn't because I aspire to be a complicit, "party-over-person", "shut up and write your cute stories", enabler of problematic people. That is the very last thing I want to be. The reason I wouldn't go public with my story [except in a book of poetry that omits all names and allusions thereto] is because I wouldn't be able to handle what happens next.
If, while this was all happening to me, I came forward to trusted adults and asked for their help, and nobody took me seriously then for whatever myriad of reasons, why should I think it's going to be different now? If I barely lived through the scorn and backlash of my theatre camp castmates because I dared to be open about how I was being treated; if not even my own best friend at the time believed me; if I was threatened out of sharing what little proof I had that these things were happening to me before ultimately losing said proof years later when it hardly mattered to me, then why would I put myself through that again on a much larger scale?
I wouldn't be able to handle being threatened into submission again; warned about what "consequences" I would face if I dared to be open about what was happening; if I didn't delete any Facebook posts even vaguely alluding to the situation. I imagine said "consequences" would be on a much larger scale than they were back then. I wouldn't be able to handle being mocked and discredited by friends, classmates, family, church leaders, and other trusted adults. I've seen the way people in all of the above groups have talked about the women in the news recently. While there are plenty in said groups who advocate for the importance of taking claims seriously, there are too many who don't. There are too many who are either complicit or who refuse to take these women seriously.
I wouldn't speak out, because I know what you would say about me.
I could turn this into an uplifting testimony post, about how finding my church at age 16 allowed me to heal from this as much as I have, and is the only reason I lived to make this post. But I'm not going to do that. Because that isn't the point.
The point is, nobody took me seriously when I reported what was happening. For a good portion of my life at ages 15-16, I truly believed that the only way I would ever escape the way that made me feel was to die. I was gaslit relentlessly by people I trusted, and used self-harm as a distraction from that pain. No amount of forgiveness can undo what happened. No matter how much I heal, I will never get that part of my life back.
Think about that when you mock these women. Think about that when you refuse to honestly take their claims seriously. Think about that when you make excuses for why it happened to them.
Think about what I have to think about every time I see people I care about saying about these women the same things I know they would have said to me at 15.
