Even if they could pretend it never happened, I couldn’t. Even if she told me I shouldn’t tell people about it, I couldn’t help but speak. Because the one person who couldn’t pretend it didn’t happen was me. It happened to me. And I was dying for someone to see it. I was aching to be seen—held, embraced, even as my wounds were still bleeding. It had cut me in places I hadn’t even realized at the time. I was unaware that it would ache silently forever—for the part of me that died.

I was too young to know any better. So when I told people, maybe they didn’t see it as something that happened to me. Maybe they just saw what I had become after. And because that’s how they saw me, that’s how I began to see myself too: utterly ruined.

I shouldn’t be thinking about it now, but it’s Monday again—my weekly therapy day. Last session ended with us unpacking that trauma, and I’ve been left to reflect. To remember how it felt. To remember how it happened.

But all week, I didn’t really drown in it. I don’t think I even tried. I’m wired to push it down. And I do it so well that I start to ask myself—was what happened really that big of a deal?

These are the memories I never sat down to recall, just kept running from. So much so that I barely remember half of it. I just remember myself, standing there—dead inside. On the outside, I barely moved. I swear I had no movement of my own. Everything was done to me. I was fifteen. My life hadn’t even properly started, and I already felt ruined.

It felt like the ultimate betrayal. Like I had betrayed myself. Like I had failed to protect me. I felt responsible. I had been manipulated and isolated so completely, I didn’t even believe there were people who could—or would—save me. So I quietly endured it. Months of abuse, manipulation, and hostility.

That one thing that happened became the cornerstone of everything else that followed. It shaped me. It shaped my relationships. It shaped the relationship I had with myself. The trauma alone was unbearable—but the second-hand trauma, the one from never being allowed to process or speak of it properly, was even heavier. My behaviors became patterns—trauma responses I didn’t even recognize until now, seventeen years later. Longer than I had been alive when it happened to me. The trauma is older than I was when it first occurred.

I was forced to bury the pain so deep that I began questioning it. Did it really hurt? That planted the seeds of a lifelong struggle. Not having anyone validate my trauma meant I started doubting everything. While others moved on, I stayed frozen. Broken. And this became the beginning of me questioning reality itself. Was what I felt real, or was it all in my head?

My thoughts split into two ends, always pulling at each other. I could never quite be sure of anything. And that uncertainty—of myself, of my own mind—felt like a curse. My sense of self failed to exist.

I was never taught to love myself. So I never really valued me. I barely even saw me. I didn’t care about how I felt. I was conditioned to overlook myself, and others followed suit. I was invisible. And for the rest of my teenage years and into my twenties, I only saw myself through the eyes of others. If they didn’t see me, I didn’t exist. Their validation was my only evidence of being alive.

Surely, there couldn’t have been a worse way to live through those years—but that’s how they were.

And maybe—just maybe—the reason I give so many chances to people who hurt me is because I had to forgive my perpetrators. And if I can live with that, how hard can the rest be?