(hell, yeah) Scarleteen

Eleven years have gone by since I first came to Scarleteen as a very frightened, very lost sixteen year-old who had nowhere else to go and was ready to give up altogether.

Writing my story out like this is so important to me, for so many reasons.

My life has never been easy, although I don’t think anyone’s ever really is. I was born into a family who had so much dysfunction. They also never planned to have a third child, me.

I know now, I am finally getting to know, that none of that was anything really to do with me at all, but for most of my life I carried it around with me. I thought everything that happened to me in my life would therefore be a punishment for being the baby who ruined my family. I had never been told anything different. I had never been shown any genuine love or care by the people who brought me into this world.

Through my family, I was exposed to people who seek out children like me to abuse. And as a child, I was an abusers dream. My family didn’t care about me, I was on my own often and because I had never learned to trust adults in my life, keeping me quiet was all too easy a task.

I was sexually and physically abused by the same man and his friends for over seventeen years. For nearly the whole of my childhood, adolescence, and into my adulthood.

I don’t have many happy memories from my childhood or teen years. I immersed myself in schoolwork and sports and tried to imagine what life must have been like for my friends who complained about teachers and parents who cared what time they went to bed.

But eleven years ago I found Scarleteen.

Read the whole piece here.