Member-only story
Trigger warning: content contains discussion of child sexual abuse and assault.
No matter how complex or tightly woven the lies, they always unravel when confronted with the truth.
I don’t have my outside filter on today. You’re getting this straight from inside the gates. I’m not going to keep you out. You know it all. And I want to thank you, dear reader, for not flinching, not turning away, not tuning out my anguish. Hundreds of thousands of times my older brother raped me over the decades. Whenever he could, whenever he wanted, aided and abetted by our mother. And I’m so sick of talking about this and writing about it. I want like hell to be free and be done with them. I choose to let them go. But here we are and letting go is not so easy.
I wonder if you’re wondering how I survived my past without cracking up, committing suicide, or losing myself to drugs and alcohol. As far as I can tell, it’s simply because I refused to believe it was happening. Instead, I believed a fairy tale version of the truth. My mother and my brother fed me the lies I needed to keep believing in our false family so that they could keep drugging and assaulting me. And I had internalized my mother’s dismissal and diminishment of my feelings, so much so that I dismissed the innate warning signals that might’ve kept me away once I moved out. You can see that at work in my account of the last assault and how I was able to talk myself out of my terror that night.
As a child that served me. If I had been able to see what was happening to me I’d never have survived it and I’d never have lived to tell about it. As long as I allowed my mother and brother to keep their masks on, I was safe. If I had told anyone, including myself, I believe my brother would have killed me, or my mother. She’s in the habit of poisoning. I haven’t even begun to tell you about the ailments throughout my childhood. I mean, it hardly seems important given the severity of the sexual…
