When I was in my Junior Year of high school I was struggling to fit in and deal with all the traumas, dramas, and llamas in my life. I felt like a ticking bomb I just did not realize I would explode and it would be the first of many breakthroughs in my life.
One day I was waiting to catch the city bus to go home after school. I was just standing there not saying anything to anyone. Suddenly, a car pulls up 3 guys get out. 2 of them isolate me and the third one looked me in the face and then beat the crap out of me and get back in the car and leave. I am totally stunned. I have no clue what happened. I knew one of the guys from a class but I never spoke to him. So, I had no clue why they would beat me up.
I rode the bus home in confusion. I was crying my eyes out. The other students around me did not say anything to me. But I could feel them whispering around me. I get home and I am hysterically crying to my mom. I told her I wanted to end my life. I felt like if total strangers would do this to me what would my friends and family do to me.
That night my mom was on the phone with different hospitals trying to find a bed for me. I had gone up to my room. I Found a glass pop bottle. I broke the bottle on the side of the bed. I started cutting my wrist. I just wanted the pain to leave my body.
My mom walked in as I was cutting my arm, called one of the places back, and could get me admitted. I was in the hospital for about 2 weeks.
This breakdown helped me have my first breakthrough. It was the first time that I told someone about all my junk. 2 sexual traumas, verbal abuse, and self-esteem issues. I was feeling positive having told a “professional”
I decided to tell my mom and dad. I called my dad and told him about his friend and my cousin. The reaction he gave was not positive. “I don’t know who this guy is so there is nothing I can do” “Well you know your mom’s family they are a bunch of hillbillies so that is sure to happen” I was dumbfounded. My dad was verbally aggressive to the waitress that did not bring him silverware. But he did not get verbally aggressive when he finds out that his daughter has been sexually traumatized 2 times.
I then told my mom. NOTHING. Total crickets. No validation or acknowledgment. I felt so exposed. So, NAKED. I had bared myself emotionally to the 2 people I had hoped to feel safe with and got nothing. It would be almost 20 more years before I felt safe enough to bare it all to someone else.
While I was in the hospital I was brave enough to press charges to the guy that jumped me. Because I knew him from school, we could identify him. When we went to court he told the judge he had gotten into a fight with a girl’s boyfriend a few days before. He thought I was the guy’s girlfriend so he was retaliating. He claimed mistaken identity. At the time of the assault, I had the side of my head shaved, blue spiky hair and an eyeliner cross on the corner of my eye. There was no one that looked like me. The guy ended up having to serve time in juvenile detention because this was his “third” strike. So, I felt some justice was served.
This event was life changing. I could tell about my traumas for the first time. It was not successful but at least I was able to learn to say something about it. Nothing else was said about it from either of my parents. So, I learned to sweep things under the rug.
Sweeping things under the rug seems like a good solution. But if you continue to do it over time you are not hiding the issues. You are just relocating them to the BIG pile under the rug. That also took about 20 years to learn to sweep it under the rug is not a good long-term coping skill.
Take Care
Much Love
