... growth demands risk taking.
Linda H. Hollies, A Daughter Survives Incest: A Retrospective Analysis

Gingerly she walked across the long dark stage toward the podium. She’d been contemplating this moment for many years, hashing over whether an opportunity like this would free her of the demons that caused disquiet, doubt, and confusion in her life. And, of what confusion she’d lived! The anxiety that controlled her life was stifling, deadening, particularly abusive. It’s a wonder, she thought, she even found the strength to walk across this stage.

She’d been invited to speak before a symposium of women, hurting women who’d been through everything from genital mutilation to painfully watching their babies being raped repeatedly. As she stood before the waiting eyes – eyes that shone betrayal, pain, anger, and emptiness – she searched her mind for the words, at least the first words to say about her own pain.

“Somebody hurt you. They let you down. And not only did they let you down, they got away with it.”

She saw the shift of shoulders and the nods of heads. She heard a few hisses and a couple of “Fuck hims.” She began to tell her story.

“For me, it was the sitter my mother trusted. The sitter who bound my little hands and legs as she poked and prodded my insides with any object – clean or unclean – she found appealing. The sitter who looked like me in color that held my mother’s kitchen knife to my little neck as she made me perform sex acts on her only meant for two consenting adults. The sitter whose status in life was no different than mine that said to me, a 7 year-old, that if I told anyone, she would deny it, put my name in the street as a hooker, and set my home on fire with my mama in it. The sitter who for 3 years after every episode would fix me a bologna and cheese sandwich then go smoke a cigarette on my front stoop.”

She continued. “Now, I know my situation pales in comparison to some of your life stories. Most of you have been through more than I can ever even imagine. But pain is pain, especially when it takes over your psyche and defines who you become, what you think of yourself, and what you do to yourself as a result. Don’t compare our stories, that’s not the point. Think about our common feelings and frame of mind.

“See, this woman took from my 7 year-old self a sense of innocence that I will never fully understand or ever recapture. At 8, she and my mother darkened my ability to trust as I tried in my young and simple way to throw hint after unsuccessful hint at my mother about what was happening to me only to feel each offensive act sanctioned every time my mother shut the front door on me and my sitter. At 9, I lost my ability to feel deeply or see myself as more than an object as I began to live outside of myself just to breathe and cope with what I could not tell a soul. And finally, at 10, no longer holding on to self-worth, I became the hooker the sitter had pronounced I was. At 10, I began a life of self-abuse and indulgence, and there was not a single thing anyone could do to me or use me for that I could feel. And the sitter got away with it because there was no other life I knew to live.”

She told that crowd of survivors how she’d covered herself in pain killers, illegal drugs, criminal acts, and sex with anyone – male or female. She told the sorrowful onlookers that disease been a regular resident in her body, and that her relationship with her mother and all women had been anything but pleasant and trustworthy. “I don’t even regard any of you as capable of being trusted,” she contended.

“But a flower can’t bloom unless it takes the risk of poking its head above ground. I come to you to tell you my story; to get these feelings out in the air for there’s healing in telling and naming your pain and power taken away from the pain when it’s spoken. I’m in need of reconciliation – with myself and with the others I’ve intentionally hurt and disregarded because I was hurt. I want to grow and live and experience life from a different place, one that is free of emotional bondage, shame, and humiliation. I want to know the real me, the me underneath all this filth and debris. I am exposing myself to you – women who don’t know me, women with histories more disparaging than mine, about a woman who betrayed the blossoming woman in me and stole what I can never get back or reclaim easily. I am blossoming now as I speak because the sitter is no longer getting away with it.

“I’m not sure if I’ve met the goals the symposium sponsors set by speaking to you in this way today; they will probably throw me out of the building when I walk off this stage. But I do know that after many, many years of assuming myself dead, I am a blossoming flower and I’m opening myself up to receive the sunshine. I know that today is about each of you butterflies taking some of my nectar and using it for your own sustenance and restoration. Take all that you can, all that you need, so that I can be refreshed and my experience can be useful. I’m still healing. I have a long way to travel. I’ve risked losing my life, and, with all that I have left within me, I now risk reclaiming it.”

With that, she stepped away from the podium, bowed, left the building, and lived.

Sadiqqa © 2008