I’m thinking that here, each week, I will write about some aspect of being an adult survivor. Being myself, in my grown-up woman life, and having the gifts and challenges that I do, in part, because of what I survived as a child.
I hate being a survivor of sexual abuse. Of incest abuse by my father, particularly. And yet, I love who I am. I love who I am becoming since I faced that truth. My life is more true. I am more myself, with more people these days. I no longer feel this sense of secret badness, dirtiness and shame every day. I used to have this constant internal stress to disprove the badness, and I didn’t know it was there for the longest time, because it had been a part of me since I was so very young.
It’s been strange to gradually become aware of how abuse permeated the core of my sense of self. It’s like I was wearing leaden overalls over perfectly comfortable pants, and I realized bit by bit, that I could just take the lead ones off. So at some point, in the past few years of healing and living, I did.
And ever since, I walk lighter.
I wish that for every survivor. That every one of you will shift off that burdensome load of shame, like an un-wanted piece of clothing. It’s not something you have to wear. It isn’t even yours. See how it hangs off of you? It was made for someone much bigger than you. It was made for your perpetrator, and even if you can’t give it back to them, you no longer have to wear it yourself.
In safety and love,
Deb
