on ten years

On Monday morning, I texted my best friend as soon as I woke up. Something about November 26 always leaves the taste of vinegar and honey lodged in the back of my throat. "I can't believe it's been ten years and how different everything is now."

She texted me back and said, "I'm so so proud of you. We are doing good. You're doing good."

Ten years ago was just a normal Wednesday. I went to school like any other day. Everyone was restless after coming back from Thanksgiving break. I couldn't tell you what I was wearing or what I had for breakfast that day, but I can tell you this: it started like any other day and ended with me breaking down the walls of my brokenness for the first time.

Mrs. Lovrine's Family Living and Parenting class. (Yeah, the class where you take home the fake baby doll for a night. Anything to get out of the pacer test, which was required if you took health instead. Good old BHS.) We were discussing relationships and the red flags of abuse that everyone swears up and down they see and won't let happen to them. (Oh to be sixteen and ignorant again.) My brain went a few different places during her lecture. Instead of taking notes, I thought about my first love and friendships that had dissolved right before my eyes earlier that year. The raw emotions that come out when experiencing heartbreak for the first time. The sadness that always comes with letting go and settling for a small wave when you occasionally bump into each other outside the radio station or in the cafeteria at school.

Those overwhelming emotions spilled over into another world entirely. I was caught in a flashback, trapped between my classmates who were more doodling and zoning out than listening, with forty minutes until the lunch bell rang. The chair I was sitting on didn't feel real. Everything faded around me and was replaced with a movie in my head that I had seen too many times. Trapped in a little pup tent, experiencing things beyond my maturity level that at fourteen I wasn't prepared to handle. "Nice shoes, wanna fuck?" and always ended with my abuser saying my name, over and over again until it had lost all meaning to me. The panic attacks in chemistry class the year before because seeing him in the hallways at school was too much. The loss of my best friends since middle school and my first love all in the same breath because they all just kept telling me to forget about what happened and get better like it was a magic switch I could toggle on and off. It was too much.

It was all too. Much. I promised my friends I would meet them in the cafeteria when the bell finally rang for lunch, but I had something to do first. I all but ran to the guidance office, fearing that if I didn't at least request a meeting I would lose my nerve and not do anything at all. I signed in with shaky hands and prayed that I could find the courage to summon the words for everything that happened.

Opening up the trauma floodgates has brought so many amazing things into my life. From that moment in my high school counselor's office, I started embracing the freedom that comes from speaking your truth. I reported my abuser for that night in 2006 right there in the guidance office. I started going to therapy and working toward naming my demons instead of trying to run away from them. My therapist diagnosed me with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the relief that came from finally having a name for what I had been experiencing was immeasurable. It meant that I wasn't going crazy like everyone around me had convinced me I was.

In summer 2009, I was given the opportunity to attend the annual Writing and Thinking Workshop at Lake Forest College in Illinois. It was there, writing with purpose for six hours every day, where I was finally able to say what had happened to me out loud: I am a survivor of sexual abuse. I have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and every single day, I am working to overcome the civil war that my brain wages against me. I am doing everything I can to work toward empowerment and recovery to take back this bright, happy, overflowing life that I know I am capable of living over my abuser.

One of the advisors asked me why my trauma was all I ever wrote about in the pieces I shared with everyone. I didn't really have an answer for him in the moment, but now I realize that it all comes down to this: once you experience something that strangles your voice, you'll do everything in your power to take it back. In 2011, I gave a speech to a small group of girls at my high school who were going through similar experiences. I told them my story and hoped to give them the encouragement to speak up about their hardships instead of suffering through them alone. Once you're able to harness your voice again, sometimes the only thing you want to do is help others who are going through the same thing.

After speaking my truth out loud, I dove into photography. I took a few of my friend's senior pictures and started my 365 self-portrait project that ultimately helped me find my true love in this craft. Through my visual archives, I've been able to catalog growth and progress where I wasn't able to see it happening in real-time. Looking through all of those images now touches a tender spot in my heart that aches for the pain my younger self didn't have the courage to express out loud.

So much of the recovery process is taking everything day-by-day, one step at a time (or an hour at a time, as my therapist so gently reminded me at the beginning of all of this). Carving out a life for yourself when you're still in the mud of trauma is hard work that comes with more ups and downs than a roller coaster. You'll feel bombarded by the statistics, knowing you are the one in every four girls that experience this kind of trauma before they even turn eighteen. Playing a guessing game with your own self-doubt when you're still not entirely sure who you are as a person opens up pathways to new traumas entirely, but also offers the opportunity for rebirth to give you a new beginning.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel. You can just barely see it when you're first starting out, but it's there and it's worth working toward. Don't lose sight of that light. It will buoy you through your darkest moments, all those sleepless nights where you lie awake at night questioning every decision you have ever made. With time, you'll gain distance from your broken self and that light that you've been working toward will become brighter and brighter until the tunnel shatters completely. You'll shield your eyes from the sun, not believing for a second that you're really in the light. It's time to thrive now and leave the past behind, exactly where it belongs.