I have always been better with written words than with spoken ones. As a young gymnast, I never confided in my coaches when I felt scared or uncomfortable with a new, risky skill, and instead always performed it exactly as I had been instructed for fear of disappointing them. At age seven, when my mother chose not to attend my first gymnastics competition, I did not say a peep, even though I was a little upset because all the other girls had brought their mothers along.
I may not have said much — or anything at all, really — but I wrote and wrote and wrote. I have a stack of journals filled with nearly incomprehensible scribbles to prove it.
And so naturally, when my mother’s physical therapist and friend molested me at age 14, I did not utter a word — or the right ones, at least. I tried to tell my dad; I truly did. But can a 14-year-old really make an adult — her father, of all people — comprehend the incomprehensible?
So I never said much, but this time was different. What had happened to me was so unfathomable, so utterly terrifying and confusing, that I never even wrote about it until last year — not even in my private journals. I was too ashamed to tell my friends.
The thing is, when you have trouble expressing that you have been sexually abused, it is hard for the people around you to understand that something truly terrible has happened to you. And personally, I have never found anything more alienating than this.
But I am writing about it now, and it all went something like this:
At age five, after watching the 1996 Olympics on television (doing a headstand, of all things. That’s right — I watched the 1996 Olympics from a headstand, supporting myself against my parents’ bed. It is one of my most vivid memories), I begged my parents to let me enroll in a gymnastics class. Two years later, when I was seven years old, I joined a competitive gymnastics team, and that was it — I was immediately hooked. I lived, breathed, ate, and slept gymnastics. I subscribed to International Gymnast magazine. I plastered posters of famous gymnasts on my walls. And whenever I wasn’t at practice, I forced my little sister to play “the gymnastics game” with me (I was the United States. She was China. I was also the judge and the coach. Basically, I always won. My poor sister).
As I got older and stronger, my skills became riskier, my training more intense. At one point, my coaches hired a physical therapist, “C,” from their native country, Cuba, to help with the team’s various ailments. A few months later, he mysteriously stopped showing up; evidently, he had been fired, but no one really knew what had happened. At age twelve, I injured my back, and surprise, surprise, I had trouble expressing to my parents and coaches just how badly it hurt.
My mother, a long-time tennis player, had kept in contact with C. Every week (sometimes even twice a week), she drove to his house (something that I didn’t think much of at the time, but that I now find odd), claiming that he helped relieve her pain. After months of training in nearly unbearable pain, my mother insisted that I go see C, too.
C and I never got along. He mocked me constantly, but I rarely retaliated. One time, I fell asleep on his massage table. When I woke up, he imitated my face, running his index finger from his mouth to his chin, indicating that I had drooled. My mother sat beside me and laughed along.
And then one afternoon, while my mother was in the bathroom, the molestation happened.
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I lay on the massage table, frozen. Paralyzed with fear, I showed no resistance, which I now know to be a very common reaction to sexual abuse. This haunted me for years (“surely I had asked for it!” I thought. When my mother returned from the bathroom, C immediately started treating my back again, acting as if nothing had happened.
My dad always drove me home from physical therapy. That day was no different. Almost immediately, I hissed between tears, “I’m never going back there again!”
My dad said that was fine. I never really liked him anyway, he said.
But I wanted him to press me for details.
He didn’t.
So I said, “He touched me.”
He still didn’t press for details, although he did promise me I would never have to return to C’s (a promise that, thankfully, he kept). My dad, who had endured my mother’s verbal and emotional abuse for years, had a history of dismissing me whenever I claimed to be struggling or in pain. Not surprisingly, this time he suggested that I had perhaps misinterpreted what had happened, that it really wasn’t as bad as I’d thought it was.
That was enough to convince me that I should never admit to what had really happened. It was not, however, enough for me not to beg my dad to tell my mother to stop going to C’s for nearly a year.
I was scared that he would hurt her.
She told my dad, time and time again, that I was a liar. Like my father, my mother had a history of disregarding my feelings when she did not like what I had to say. In this case, admitting that I could be right meant that she would have to stop seeing C, and she was having none of it. It was her way or the highway.
I never truly told anyone what happened until over four years later – and even then, I had not meant to say anything at all. After the molestation, my anxiety grew exponentially, and I ended up developing anorexia nervosa. I became self-destructive, both through my eating disorder and other forms of self-harm, such as cutting or banging my head against the wall. I became angry and abruptly quit gymnastics, something that, to this day, I really regret. After years of enduring a secret personal hell, my father sent me to a therapist, and later, to a psychiatrist. During my initial evaluation, the doctor asked me, point blank, whether I had ever been abused in any way. I shook my head no, but before I knew it, my lip shook uncontrollably and a flood of tears streamed down my face. Why? I’m not quite sure. I’d denied the same thing to friends and teachers with no problem plenty of times in the past four years.
Once everything unraveled, my healing began.
I found the courage to tell my dad exactly what had happened (I used the words “sexual abuse” and everything). His reaction was heartbreaking, but for once, I felt less alone in dealing with the pain. My therapist attempted to explain everything to my abusive and emotionally unavailable mother, but she never showed me that she cared one way or the other (about a year after my molestation, she stopped seeing C because she claimed that he owed her money). To this day, she hasn’t shown any sympathy or concern. It still really hurts. I have not talked to her in over a year.
But for a shy kid who hates being the center of attention, I could not be more glad or proud that I was able to speak up.
The healing process was long and tedious and painful. I never pressed charges, and I know nothing about C’s whereabouts. But three years after I first spoke to my psychiatrist, I am now able to talk about what happened openly and shamelessly, both verbally and through writing, in hopes that I can someday help others in a similar situation. Last year, I even volunteered at my school’s rape crisis center.
So now I know that if someone does not believe what I have to say, I just have to speak louder and clearer. I deserve to be heard. And if anyone ever comes to me, whether it is about sexual abuse or anything else, I will do my best to be a shoulder to cry on. Because everyone else deserves to be heard too.
Photo Sources
Sad girl laying in bed
Girl on Massage Table
Sad girl sitting outside