I’ve watched it happen more times than I can count. I tell a piece of my story and the listener’s face folds in on itself. Their eyes go glassy, their hand drifts to their chest, and out it comes, soft as a Hallmark card: “Oh my god. I’m so sorry.”
And just like that, the room tilts. I’m no longer the woman standing in front of them. I’m a little girl in a locked bedroom, and they’re peering in at her through the keyhole.
So let me tell you about her. Then let me tell you why she doesn’t need your pity.
Content warning: This essay describes childhood sexual abuse, rape, drugging, forced abortion, a suicide attempt, and domestic violence. The details are not graphic, but they are honest. Please read with care, and step away if you need to. It will be here when you’re ready.
If this stirs something up for you, you’re not alone. National Sexual Assault Hotline (RAINN): 1-800-656-4673. 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: call or text 988. National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788.
The earliest monsters came before I had words for them. I was a toddler and my mind did the merciful thing and bricked those memories up behind a wall. They stayed buried for thirty years, until intensive trauma therapy started pulling out the mortar and flashes began leaking through the cracks like light under a door. The remembering was brutal.
By eight, the monster had a face. It was my stepbrother’s. He’d lock me in a bedroom and pin me down, touching me all over and rubbing himself on me and I remember that I wasn’t afraid. I was feral with rage. I bit. I kicked. I raked my nails across whatever I could reach, and I screamed until my throat went raw. Sometimes my dad would come. He’d poke his head through the door, tell me to pipe down, and disappear back down the hall, satisfied that we were just a couple of kids roughhousing, like kids did in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Then the door would close again.
By ten, the rage had curdled into fear. Weekends at my dad’s house became something I survived rather than lived. I’d arrive in full armor and leave a battered mess. While my dad tinkered in the garage, or after the house had gone dark and quiet, my stepbrother raped me. I had never known pain could be that sharp, that total. I remember thinking, with a child’s absolute certainty, that he was killing me.
At fourteen, I was pregnant. I pinned it on a boy I was dating, because the truth was a grenade and in my family, the girl holding it would be the one thrown out into the cold. The boy I was dating was actually an 18 year old young man, who shouldn’t have been sleeping with a 14 year old girl in the first place. I knew pinning it on him was wrong, but I honestly had no odea who the father was. It could’ve been him, it could’ve been my step brother. It was my unspoken duty to keep family secrets, so I absorbed all of the shame myself instead. My mother reached for every ugly name she knew and hurled them all at me. Then she marched me to an abortion clinic. I’d been raised Catholic, steeped in incense and catechism and I believed with my whole heart that I had just bought a one-way ticket to hell. My family hated me. My boyfriend hated me. God hated me. I hated me. So I tried to die.
I couldn’t even get that right. But the reality was, I never wanted to die. I just wanted the feelings to stop. I had been swallowing them for years, stuffing them down like jagged stones, until there was simply no room left and I cracked wide open. I spent a few weeks in the children’s wing of the hospital, and there, in a room that smelled of antiseptic and crayons, someone finally sat down and listened. I told my story out loud and it was heard. I walked out of that hospital a different girl, one two different medications, ready to turn over a new leaf.
But the monsters still came.
It didn’t matter what I wore, who I stood beside, or which streets I learned to avoid. They sniffed me out every time.
At sixteen, I found an escape hatch and joined the United States Army Reserve. I was a junior in high school with a plan. Basic training the summer before senior year, then AIT the moment I had my diploma in hand. For the first time in my life, I had a future with definitive lines I could finally see. I was proud. I was going somewhere the monsters couldn’t follow… or so I naively thought.
I was sixteen. I didn’t know yet that monsters wear uniforms too.
My recruiter, a man named Sgt. Duwayne Sturgeon, drove me to the MEPS center in Milwaukee for my physical and my entrance exams. I did well on the ASVAB. I could have my pick of almost any job the Army offered, and I felt ten feet tall. By evening, a headache had clamped down on my skull like a vise and Sgt. Sturgeon handed me a couple of pills he said were Tylenol. Moments later, the world blurred and began to slide. He took me to his hotel room and raped me. For hours.
I don’t remember it. What I remember is the aftermath, in fragments. I remember his arm steering me down a hotel hallway, the ache between my legs the next morning, the headache back worse than ever, pounding like a fist on a door. My body knew what my mind couldn’t make sense of.
The drive home from the MEPS center took five hours. He offered me more pills for my headache. I declined. Water. No. Food. No. I sat in the back of that government sedan with my forehead against the glass, head thumping away, watching the mile markers tick by, counting down every single one until I could see my house. A week later, I reported him.
It made the local news. They kept my name out of it because I was a minor. Detectives showed up at my school to question me. I felt paranoid that everybody knew it was me. Kids would whisper in the hallways when I’d walk by. The story mentioned other minor girls who had come forward as well, from multiple other towns and cities, a small chorus of us, but I was never allowed to know who they were. Confidentiality is what they told me. And they would never know who I was either. We never got to stand together. In court, the case crumbled because I couldn’t recite exactly what he’d done to me in a room I had been drugged into. I ended up succumbing to the pressure as Sgt. Sturgeon stared me down on the witness stand and denied anything happened at all. I felt alone on an island and was too afraid to speak my truth and stand on it. But I knew what he’d done. Survivors always know. I walked away from the Army, two weeks before my ship date, because I couldn’t spend one weekend a month for years saluting the man who had drugged and raped me. No one protected me. What I carried out of that courtroom instead was a new name, the girl who cried wolf.
In my twenties, I married the worst monster of them all. For nine years, I lived inside his abuse. He raped me. He wrapped his hands around my throat until the room would start to dim. He painted my eyes black and blue. Left bruises on my body. He hurt my children. And then, one day, I finally saw my window and left.
Why I’m telling you all of this…
That was my life. Not a chapter, or a detour. The whole fucking road. Violence was the weather I grew up in, as ordinary as snow. My entire life was a fight and I earned every ounce of the anger I carry. I walked through the darkest country a person can cross and I came out the other side on my own two feet. Strong. Resilient. Resolved. Daring the monsters to come get me now, because I’m not afraid anymore.
I’m a fucking warrior. And you should know, you’re pity doesn’t land the way you think it does.
Look back through my life story and look at the adults in it. My father heard me screaming and told me to keep it down. My mother looked at a terrified, pregnant fourteen-year-old and saw only a stain on the family name. A judge listened to a drugged girl’s broken memory and let the man walk. Over and over, the people who could have saved me felt something, a flicker of discomfort, a pang, a shake of the head, and then they turned back to their own lives and left me alone in the dark. The only moment that ever changed the course of my life was the moment someone simply listened. The rest of it was me. I saved myself. I built what I have and who I am now.
I earned that shit. Nobody can take it from me.
So when you look at me with wet eyes and say “I’m so sorry,” I hear the echo of every one of them. You’re feeling something. But you’re not doing anything with it.
Pity is a view from the balcony. It looks down on me from a safe height and sees something fragile, something shattered, something to be handled with care, like a newborn baby. But the woman standing in front of you isn’t the girl in that locked bedroom. I’m fragile like a bomb, not an egg. I took everything that happened to me, every bruise and every lie and every closed door and I built a life on top of it, brick by brick. I’m not the rubble. I’m the goddamn house.
And the moment your face crumples, the weight shifts onto my shoulders. Suddenly I’m the one holding your hand, telling you it’s okay, that I’m fine, really, softening my own story so it goes down easier for you. I have to wait, patient as a nurse, for you to recover before we can go on talking. The survivor ends up consoling the witness. Do you see how upside down that is?
Your shock also does something you’d never intend. When abuse was your whole childhood, you make peace with it the only way you can, by accepting it as the way things were. I’ve spent years and blood, sweat and tears laying those ghosts to rest. When you gasp, you’re reminding me how monstrous my normal really was. You’re rattling the lid on a box I nailed shut. In one sharp breath, you can stir up silt I spent a decade letting settle.
And most of all, pity misses the point. When I tell my story, I’m not asking to be mourned. I’m testifying. I’m handing you evidence of how systems fail children and women, again and again, in bedrooms and hospitals and courtrooms and recruiting offices. Sympathy takes that evidence and turns it into a sad story, something to feel and then set down. It lets you walk away. And everyone in my story already walked away.
So don’t feel sorry for me. I survived.
If you want to meet me where I am, say “I believe you.” You have no idea how long I waited to hear those three words. The girl who cried wolf would have given anything for them.
Say “Thank you for telling me,” because telling it costs a piece of me, every single time.
Or ask me, “What do you want people to take from this?” Then listen to the answer. And then, for the love of god, do something with it.
To my fellow survivors, you’re allowed to take the wheel and steer. When you feel that wave of pity rolling toward you, you can raise a hand and say, “Thank you, but I’m not sharing this for sympathy. I’m sharing it because...” Then tell them why. It turns the whole conversation around and it tells people how you want to be seen — as the person you are now, not the person it happened to.
And to my allies and supporters, if you’ve ever reached for that sympathy card, I’m not angry at you. I appreciate your empathy, care and concern. I fully understand that what I lived is about as far from normal as anything out there. It’s horrific. Unimaginable for some to bear witness to and your heart breaks because it should. But anger is what kept that little girl biting and kicking in a locked room. Anger is what got me out of a nine-year battle with an abusive partner. Anger is what drove me to love myself. Anger is what carried me to my healing journey. The right kind of anger, the empathetic and justified anger, is what builds something better than the world that failed me.
I don’t need your mourning. Mourning is for the dead, and I am very much alive. Happy, even.
I need your anger.
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Thank you for being here. Seriously. You make this worth doing.
~Eevie
I admire your courage, what it took you to write all of this down, and move forward, and each time you got smacked, you got back up again. (big hug)
I did the same thing you did, I just kept going because you have to.
Childhood sexual abuse happens so much more than we know. The situation with your older step brother, I had that going on too, but with my own brother, almost 6 years older than me. At age 6, I couldn't consent and I was easily manipulated by him, I feared him and I feared what he told me would happen if I told.
He said, "if mom or dad ever find out, they will send you away, not me, because they love me more than they love you," I fully believed him because in the household, it really seemed that way, even if it wasn't.
Sadly, when I think of me, the little girl, I also remember how excited I'd get when I'd see him coming home from school. At 4 and 5, I waited all day for him to come home, just to talk to someone! He'd arrive and I'd jump all over and kiss him.
But, once he started sodomizing and molesting me, my hatred came and grew like yours did. At 10 I got him to leave me alone at last. He ended up committing suicide at age 26, so you know my family became an even more dysfunctional mess after that.
I know what you mean about pity. I never tell my story to anyone because I loathe pity.
Like you, I want them to be angry enough to actually do something about it, to help little girls at the time it is happening to them! Or little boys!! I want to shout out to the world of Men - Little kids are not designed for sexual activity!! Their bodies are not ready. No one ever talks about how badly it hurts to be molested as a child, and boy does it hurt, like burning knives to your private parts.
This should not be anyone's childhood. And it wasn't just me, I am not unique - nor are you. I've had at least 2-3 friends over the years who've had similar experiences in childhood, maybe not a brother but an uncle, a father even.
I think this is the type of stuff that happens when parents just let kids raise themselves. Or, the parents are intensely self-involved and only love their children like they love a handbag or a car. Do not have children if you are a selfish person.
Oh lady…I agree…the life story of abuse survivors is not that of a victim. My mother and I trade old stories of abuse daily. Not to lament or cry. We rehash them to prove the truth . We are the toughest mother fuckers in the world. Because EVERY time we have told people our stories they put the scar on us. We refuse that shit. I get you. I believe you.