I can count on both hands the amount of times I’ve discussed this. However, since this is a poem that I wrote and the topic an important one, I’m not going to be controlled by the demons of the experience. I suppose in order to cope with it, over the years I’ve dismissed it even happening. I laugh it off or simply brush it aside. I think, hey, a lot of people have been through it, why should I be any different?
I was molested as a child. My memories of it are, for the most part, lost to me. However, I remember it happening. I remember where it was, what I wore, the thoughts in my head. His face is no longer known to me. Some things happened in my childhood that to this day impacts my view of life, sexuality, everything. I don’t allow it to define me nor do I use it as a crutch. Bad things happen to everyone. How we overcome them is ultimately the truth in one’s character. Abuse is never okay. Whether it is emotional or physical or both. I think that I should have been more vocal about it when it occurred, I should not have suppressed it. That would be my biggest regret. I think that had I sought help then, many of the missteps I made in my teens and early 20s could have been avoided.
If you hurt. There is no reason to suffer alone. Something like bottling up those types of events and feelings only does more harm than even the event itself. I’m a big girl now but that little girl inside me, the one that was a part of those horrible moments, she was stuck there much longer than she should have been. For a long time I felt like I was too smart to allow something like that to impact me. However, being abused has nothing to do with how smart you are or how good or bad a person you may be. My Childhood may’ve in some ways been tarnished but the abuse was not the entirety of what was still a wonder time in my life.
LaToya M. Davidson-Perez 