Throughout most of my Middle and High School career I was sexually abused and harassed by my adult cousin. My senior year of High School, I finally decided to speak up and tell my parents. They were livid, though obviously not at me. They called my aunt and uncle and they told my parents I was lying and misunderstood the texts he continually sent me and misinterpreted the situation. My life after that day was never the same. Now my big family is small, made up of my parents, two cousins and my grandmother. Everyone else believes I was lying and no longer speaks to me or I made the decision to cut them out of my life due to awful messages they would send me.
However, my family does not seem to understand my decision of doing this or even my life after me speaking up about my sexual abuse. For my parents it seems life after speaking up and “dealing” with the situation that it was over and done with and now we can move on with our lives as normal. But life is not normal anymore. It is not over and done with for me. When my mother slightly mentions his name my stomach twists into knots, at the site of a white truck my chest starts to hurt because my heart is beating so hard and fast, I spot a man that looks like him and I feel like I’m going to throw up. He took so much away from me and made me hate myself and believed I wasn’t worth anything.
I’m going to be completely honest with you all, I have no idea what I am doing, or if it is even possible to fully heal from this or a way to feel normal again. All I do know is that I am taking one day at a time, and journaling during those first months helped me so much to be more aware of how I was feeling and to be able to get to a place to forgive him for what he did to me.
Though the situation I was in was terrible and has left me with many scars mentally and emotionally it taught me what family really is. Family is not defined by sharing the same blood, it is defined by who is there for you when you need them most, by who is accepting and loving. Since my senior year I have created my new version of family, which consists of my best friend, her mom, and our close family friends that I saw more often than my blood relatives anyway. These people stuck by me throughout the situation and have always had my back during rough patches in my life, to which I am so grateful. It also taught me I do deserve better and I deserve to have people in my life that support me and will always believe me and have shown me I am a lot stronger than I think I am.