Anonymous
Trigger Warning: Before reading this letter, we'd like for you to know it discusses the author’s experience with sexual assualt. If you think that reading about this will be triggering for you, we encourage you to take a pause before reading this letter, center yourself, and prepare any resources you may need to access after reading it. If you'd rather not read this letter, we encourage you to read a letter on a different topic, such as Elizabeth's or Bailey's.
If you’re reading this, you can still make your little self proud.
My story is short because years of it have disappeared from my memory.
When I was a young child, someone who I believed to be a friend at the time used me in a way that my young brain couldn’t even comprehend. For years, I wrote it off as something that must be normal, something that I just “have to deal with,” and something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
I told nobody else at the time, but as the years went on, I felt more and more uneasy and less and less confident in myself. My parents told me that as a toddler I was extremely outgoing and talked to everyone; as my memories have started returning, I remember knowing myself better at the age of 6 than I did at the age of 15. Unfortunately, even after this friend was no longer in my life, I floated through life for years not quite knowing who I was or what to do with myself.
I soon became an anxious middle schooler who grew into an anxious high schooler who did things to herself that she wouldn’t imagine even telling her worst enemies to do. Worst of all, I didn’t even remember what had happened to me as a child or why I was the way I was. I told myself that I was just asking for attention and that I was messed up for no reason, because I thought that nothing bad had ever really happened to me; in reality, my brain was just coping by forgetting.
After years and years of working on myself despite the fact that I didn’t remember the trauma, the memories finally came back and I instantly knew that what had happened was wrong. The years of misery I had been through could be traced back to those formative years. It was a disturbing realization, but after coming to a slightly better place with myself, the knowledge brought me a little peace. I wasn’t just messed up for no reason, and maybe if I could finally address the trauma head on, I’d be able to break out of my self-destructive cycle.
Today, I am still working on myself, but the house that was once broken down and abandoned is now rebuilt, decorated, and occupied with many people who love me and who I love. I occasionally still get new memories from that time, and I am constantly unlearning the negative core beliefs that I had come to internalize throughout most of my life. I still have restless nights, I still feel unsafe in public, and growing up comes with many new challenges that I have to face. But the one thing that I can say is this: even though I will never quite be the same as the person that carefree 6 year old could have grown up to become, I can finally say that I own my body. I own myself. The journey that I have embarked on to get to this point has taught me more about myself and the world than even most 40-year-olds have had to learn. I am reclaiming space in my own brain and in my own life, and I am starting to realize my immense worth.
I can’t go back in time, and there is honestly nothing much I could’ve done differently at the time, as I was only doing my best given what I had and knew. So, I have learned to not only forgive myself as a child, but also as a young adult who made many mistakes because of those years. I’m constantly learning, but I can be compassionate with myself.
So to other survivors of early childhood sexual assault, I say this: I believe in you, and my greatest wish in the world is for YOU to believe in yourself. You didn’t deserve what happened, but you deserve to own your healing, own yourself, and own your future. It may feel impossible, but I guarantee that it is not. You may always be a little haunted, and you may never quite be the person you “could have been,” but the love you hold in your heart can create a future that is the best that it could be from this moment, right here, today. Make that little kid proud.
Anonymous, Georgia Tech
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