Denial is a strong potion... and a morphing one. Every time you suspect its treachery, it rationalizes itself: "I am not denial, only your innate strength that is so wonderfully dealing with... you know... with... (and it belies itself by its inability to even name the incident but you don't notice and hence u believe it. I believed it.)"

For me, the experience of sexual abuse was never as appalling as for the many, so so many who have written here... reading them,I almost felt I was a spoiled brat for even considering that the abuse defined me over the years... but careful thinking tells me: every degree of violation has its consequences that infest one like a legion of malicious orcs. We just have our own demons to hatch and kill. It's like a friend of mine so often said: to each his own. He was righter than I knew. My recall started later, and I believe having known him helped. I only wish he knew. But anyway…

Is it funny if I say my abuse lasted from age 11 to 17: I have no idea of its frequency, not even a sure memory of the last time it happened? Age 17... hell, that's old enough to remember... I cannot believe I regarded my complete disassociation from the nights as normal, but I did. I am 20 now.

In a nutshell, I was never raped... age 11, a blood relative spent a night with his hand inside my pajamas. Another night, a month later, I wake up finding another relative on me, french kissing me, his penis between my thighs, and him thrusting away trying to bring himself to orgasm. These were the first chapters of a story that would last longer than I could have dared imagine. Later he would put me on top of him, forcing me to 'ride' him. It was always in the dark... and I never acknowledged the nights to him in the mornings just as he didn't to me. In fact, I was very defiantly bold... and it is this front all people know me by: the crazily defiant girl, the bold girl, the brave girl, risking things to get things, never crying over losses. Some know of the other pole(s) within me too: the submissive girl, the confused girl, the angry hurt girl, the juvenile girl, all belying the precocious, woman-of-the-world front I have/had so exhaustingly mustered up. They see the und! ertones... but I always glossed these over even as these states controlled me. Disintegration and consequent behavioral eccentricity was a natural state of affairs… quite artfully handled. But like I was saying, I never acknowledged the nights. When I began denying him access to me the way he accessed me the first few nights, he reduced himself to licking and caressing me all over, all over, or rubbing against me. I have memories of times he forced my hand to perform handjobs on him. Never a fellatio... hell, I never cooperated with him, he might have feared I would bite him off. He had to literally puppeteer me to get something out of me. Hail the passivity I learned thus. There were times I resisted... but never won. Times he was pressurizing… painful… and so hypocritically tender. But you know what? the worst times were not the ones when I was being coerced, bad as they already were. No... the worst times were when I knew that all I had to do was get up, and leave, and it would probably never happen again... that in that particular household's situation, he would get scared by my nightly defiance... I could never get up. Can you believe that? I have been re! ading stories here about people who spoke up, who took a stand but were not heard... and I admire them. I never had the guts to take a stand against him during those nights... every time was a paralytic state, a recession into a habit learnt too early, or just apathy. He made me realize that my inner voices screaming at me to take action can be overridden, and by myself too... that I can be my own cancellation… there went my self-trust...kaboom.
Once my aunt was in the same room
Another once my mom and my brother were in the same room.
Yet another once my cousins were in the same room.
They slept through it all.

Age 17: I don’t know how… the last night I got up and left. I don’t know how. For the first time ever, a word was spoken in the dark between us. He called my name. I went to another room where there were people… and slept.

Abuse leaves you dead in ways that are undefinable... undefinable. It leaves you amputated from not merely the reality without, but the reality within. I had fantasy worlds I had alternative realities and the very deliberately creative skill to cook any at my will I had too many concurrent or cycling moods that I hid behind a hyperenergetic front or an overly lethargic front as I willed. I thought it was just me being the creative writer I always wanted to be… so 'different' and creative in my perspectives. Hell, no.. I was just diseased. I was myopic and whimsical in my perceptions of reality, and the landscape of my imagination was hiding it from me.

There is hatred, self hatred and you may not know why. I didn’t. There is anger. There is an intolerance for any restriction. There is a search… and now I know it is merely the search for 'normalization'. There is no solid conception of when you are over stepping people's boundaries or when you are being overstepped. I felt stripped of empathy, and created stunted prosthetics for it. I could maintain very expanded social circles, but couldn’t get close to anyone, even as I had and still have incredibly loving friends people are loving. I shut out my family. I was paranoid and yet so gullible. And worse of all… I was reduced to playing games with the one guy I adored at age 19, not knowing that the reason I could not give in was because my system knew only one response to touch and tenderness: resist, deny, defy. There is also disruption of consciousness, of your very perceptions… there is disjointment in ways I just cannot define. There is surrealism… a feeling of disconnec! tion… being in the sidelines… a scrim in your mind's eye. You are interrupted.

At age 19, freshman year at a US college, the demons didn’t go away. I thought having traveled halfway across the world to a land unknown amongst unknown people would free me. It didn’t. I self-destructed… I was just too tired battling myself, battling an old enemy I couldn’t even define. Half of me was trying to save me, another half was hell bent on a mind and soul suicide… just because I did not understand why I was the way I was. Thinking I was just ridiculous for feeling that way… self-accusing, self-rebuking. Switching between manic escapade and depressive self-disgust. And yes, escaping for me was, had always been, a way of life I do not know how I had a teenage that is superficially very successful in so many ways… though I never considered it so knowing myself, by any external standards it was so. Things worked out better than I worked for when people wanting the same things would be working their asses of to get it and sometimes not make it. God is there. That’s t! he only way I can explain it. But yes, escaping was always a way, and I didn’t unlearn it in college. It only worsened. I hit rock bottom in every aspect of my life. But college was a treasure of people. Even as I crashed and razed myself to the ground… what I learnt from the people there motivated me to keep going.

I have not resorted to a therapist. I think that because I left myself nothing to cling to, and that meant neither my hopes nor my fears nor esteem nor rebuke nor any notion at all but the small flame that said 'do reinvent yourself'… I was suddenly picked clean out of the stream of my past's aftermath. More so, the drastic change of environment (west asian home to US ivy league) gave me insights into myself that helped me work back to my past and deal with it. But it is not a way I would recommend. It is not foolproof. And there was too much self-annihilation before the demons left. Additionally however, turning to God helped. After years of running away from God, turning to him helped. My memories of the abusive nights are from the 'outsider's' perspective… as if I was somewhere else in the room watching it happen. But just the better recall of them now is streamlining all my memory functions… all my cognitive functions. In the middle of my recovery process, there were weeks of nights when the very process of sleeping was an exercise in reliving my entire life, reliving my memories: both the tainted ones and the untainted, normal ones.

I have been recalling more and more these last couple of months…. And my psyche has been unraveling before me, explaining to me why I might have been what I was… and how I am not to blame. I find myself doing things I never did before… thinking along novel lines. I find myself FEELING… I am beginning to feel genuine.. not a merry-go-round of so many facades. And it is a beautiful feeling. To be real. Finally.

Never give up. Just never.

"no longer will i lay down/ play dead/ play your doe in the headlights/ shut down and terrified/ your deer in the headlights/ locked down and horrified/ when push comes to pull comes to shove comes to step around this self destructive dance that never would've ended till i rose/ i roared aloud here i will i am" __ Perfect Circle