The autumn leaves crunch under my feet as I follow the windy trail behind our house. I can smell the freshly cut grass and musky, heavy air that lets you know winter is coming. My grandfather has me by the hand and is leading me to one of his favorite spots. It’s an old rusty grill among the maple trees left and forgotten years ago. He puts me on top of it, hikes up my dress and pulls down my underwear. I am 5. He starts to touch me, I don’t fight it - this isn’t the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last. He says “let’s just play the game, do you like it? Does this feel good?” I say yes with the hope that this will all be over faster. By this point, 2-3 years into the abuse, I am an expert at dissociation - rushing to turn off my mind by silently going through a list of my favorite animals: horses, wolves, dolphins and I snap out of it. We hear a car pull up the driveway. He immediately stops, redresses me, and says the usual closing remarks “this is just between you and me right? our little secret.” I nod and follow him back to the house.

I was sexually assaulted, in all forms of the term - at first by my grandfather and later by two cousins on the other side of my family until I was 15 years old. It is the first memory I have, there is no “before”. I remember the day I realized the severity of what was happening - I was 13, sitting in our living room when a dark, nauseating feeling came over me. This was not normal. This was molestation, incest, rape. I wanted to disappear. I started trying to - in what became a 15 year battle with eating disorders. At the age of 14 I was raped again by a classmate - someone three years my senior - who held me down as I yelled “no, stop” at a friend’s house. It was the first time I drank - and it took me years to realize that that too, was rape. My parents were emotionally abusive alcoholics, my mom was known as one of the “town drunks” so when I started to act out in school no one asked any questions. I snuck out, I drank, did drugs, I was suspended. I never told anyone why - my parents were so unstable I didn’t feel they could handle it, nor did I trust them. 

I spent most of college in a drunk stupor, vacillating between bone-crushing depression and Adderall-fueled all-nighters. I believed in nothing, I still just wanted to disappear. I hoped I would. Despite seeing psychiatrists throughout this time, I never fully conceptualized what the problem was (which I now see as relatively textbook PTSD) and just believed I was broken, crazy, and headed for a quick end.

On the eve of my 29th birthday I am grateful for what has changed: I am safe, sober, stable, an ultra-runner - thriving on most accounts - and brutally aware of what has not: weekly flashbacks, a tiny but (seemingly) infinite well of sadness, nagging thoughts of self-destruction. Despite it all, I am an optimist at heart - I firmly believe we are capable of so much more than we think, as long as we keep putting one foot in front of the other. 

-aston333