Some thirty years ago I messed up my big toe in taekwondo class—the final excuse for quitting, which I’d been trying to do forever. The studio smelled like feet. The mix of students was strange. I didn’t really understand what I was asked to do, and was socially weird in ways that made everyone uncomfortable.

The instructor for those classes, he did try to follow up a couple of times. There were answering machine messages that I deleted. On the basis of earlier conversations, I think he was convinced I was being sexually abused. Which I wasn’t, at that time. Not as a kid. But, well. I guess there has always been something “off” about me, right.

This is really tricky and problematic to put to words, and I apologize for how it comes off. For a large portion of my life it felt really surprising to me that I hadn’t been sexually abused as a child—to the point I kept wondering if I had repressed or forgotten something important. Like, I always felt like so much about me would make more sense if that had happened to me.

In hindsight I sort of get it now. Like, it wasn’t that exactly. But I did suffer years, decades, of abuse and neglect—much of it dealing with fundamental aspects of who and what I am, and my concept of reality. This total denial of my self, this fear of allowing me to exist. This understanding that I was dirty and broken and wrong, and shameful for even considering my humanity as an individual. That everything about me had to be hidden and controlled. That I would never be good no matter what I did; that all I could do was pretend, to do my best to please. I was brainwashed, told to doubt everything except what I was told, by people who hated who and what i was. Filled with an essential fear and disgust of myself. I was basically ready to die from the time I was 11.

Some of that was to do with neurology and general mental health. A lot, though, gender and sexuality.

So this is, like—I absolutely do not want to compare my experience to other people’s violent trauma. I’m just trying to work out why it was that I always used to feel the way that I did. And, well, I certainly dive have my own trauma—much of which had to do with sex and gender, and gaslighting about the reality that I lived. It was just a different kind of violence. A different kind of self-erasure. I didn’t have the language to actually identify what my problems were. I didn’t have the resources or the models. So that comparison was the best I had available to me: some kind of abuse; something about sex (??).

Having made that comparison, though, all I could do was brush it off, because I knew that hadn’t happened to me. Or, I was pretty sure. I spent so many years going through that same weird routine: something was obviously very wrong, but the one thing I could identify that seemed to fit, didn’t really. So I had to be making it up. It had to be nothing. But if it was nothing, why were things to obviously wrong, then? Round and round.

How much this uncertainty plays into… later problems that I experienced, I don’t know. I’m not really in a place to speak to that, or begin to wrap my head around any connection. I’m just seeing a thing to note here, and going, huh. Well. There that is. But many things set me up for trouble. Broadly, not knowing who I was—except that I was broken and I needed someone to show me how to not be bad—basically guaranteed that I would wind up in ugly situations, with people eager to take me up on that dynamic; continuing to tell me who I was, and what was wrong with me.

So much of the abuse I’ve suffered over my life, I didn’t really understand what was happening. All I knew was I was failing, in ways that felt unfair but that apparently were all my fault. And I was too miserable to really question the circumstances beyond the message that I was responsible. Without the words, without the pictures, without the connections, I had no way to step away and see the dynamics for what they were.

Silence is how abuse is possible. Limiting of information. Stopping discussion. It’s about controlling knowable reality by force of will.

I make so many mistakes. I’m wrong about many things. For all my ideals, I can be as callous and petty and careless and inconsiderate as anyone. But, like. I try to deal in truth. I do my best. Because it matters. Even when it’s inconvenient, it lights the path away from harm.

It’s just amazing how knowing the right things, having the terms to communicate or look into ideas, completely changes one’s relationship to the world. It’s so empowering to be able to describe what you see and know it to be real. To be able to assert your own experience as valid

That is I think most of why I work all this shit out in public. What good does it do just in my head, or hidden away in some obscure corner of my own? That’s what abuse expects and hopes for.

I’m not afraid. I’m not ashamed of me. And maybe I can pass a little bit of truth on.

We all need help.