TW: Sexual Assault.

This morning I spent about 3 hours working on a chapter of my book that I have been avoiding because I talk about being molested as a child over a period of a year, by one of my Dad’s friends. I have shared with others about being a victim of childhood sexual assault, but I never ever share the details because they still make me feel like someone is stabbing me in the guts with a knife.

I have a lot of reverence for my Dad, but I also have a deep and unhealable chasm inside of me that can never be filled as a result of his decision to pick doing drugs with his buddies over protecting his 7 year old daughter. Trying to parse through those feelings of love, respect, but betrayal and abandonment has been really hard. When he died in 2020, I never got my apology, or even an acknowledgement after reaching out wanting to talk to him about it dozens of times over my adult life.

It was like he put my rape in a box and put it on the shelf marked “Past Life, featuring Drug Addiction” and that was the end of it. Nobody cared about the million ways it destroyed my life, my future, my body. All is washed clean in the great “Christian Rebirth”; for the men involved, anyway.

So he never apologized, never was even willing to have the conversation, and nobody ever got me help. They are still more than content to look the other way and ignore me. The artifact of my “Father’s broken life from before”.

I just carried it until, like everything else, I absorbed it deep inside of my spirit and let it convince me I was worthless and deserved to die. At 8 years old. I’m done carrying the bones of other people’s skeletons in hope I receive love on exchange.

Some of us never had the chance to experience what life was like before we had our trust and hope destroyed, and are still grasping at any little hand hold we can find to keep us holding on.

Hold your kids. Protect them. Care more about what they’re going through than your own problems. Don’t let them turn out like me.