Why I’m here

Reminding myself why I started talking in the first place

Many times in my life I have asked why I’m here.

I asked it when I slogged through shitty jobs that crumbled my self-worth.

I asked it when I was agented and growing more and more unhappy each day but couldn’t quit the industry I love, no matter how much of an act of self-harm it feels.

When my marriage was fissuring and relationships were corroding and I felt so deeply alone while still doing everything I could to uplift others at the expense of myself.

When I stared at a mirror, unsure why I was trapped in the body that stared back, wondering why I continued to exist this way when I simply did not want to.

And, most recently, why I’m on Substack and what I’m trying to do here.

I was recently reminded by some wonderful substackers (who I will keep nameless for now) about why I came here. I’d lost my purpose in what I wanted to say, what I wanted to make with my tiny patch of the internet.

And it is, so boringly, to talk.

But to talk specifically about surviving sexual violence decades after it ended.

When my memories of a decade of childhood abuses surfaced, I found nothing to cling onto to make me feel sane. I scoured the internet, emailed rape crisis charities, tried to make sense of what was happening to me in any way that I could. I am one of those people that has to understand things in order to accept them. I research things to a pointless degree just to settle the itch in my brain. So to be in a position that made no sense, that upended my life and had no clean answers, only made me feel more insane.

Imagine if you will, one day learning that not only is your life not what you thought, that you weren’t who you thought, and in the midst of that, being flooded with new flashes of memory of the worst things a person can endure. Things so awful and cruel that no matter how much you refused to believe they were real, the fact that they were so beyond anything you could have ever imagined or fabricated is the undeniable proof of their truth. Things so beyond the ordinary you haven’t been able to find a single account from another human that said, “Yes, this happened to me, too, and you’ll be okay.”

I was alone in my annihilation.

I found stories of people who later in life had the same sudden emergence of buried memories. I found stories of people who briefly awoke from their drugged states to find their bodies being violated. Who had a violent paedophile get them in their claws young and not let go.

But none from people who admitted to being threatened with untold violence into silence by a paedophile. None from people who repressed and later remembered every agonising second of a drugging and rape. None who were awake the whole time the GHB they’d been spiked with weighed down their limbs and made them unable to move. None who had been targeted in a premeditated attack by an infatuated boy who used drugs to force a relationship. And none with all of this and more suddenly appearing in their 30s, and would continue to vomit forth for the next two years.

I wanted answers to moor myself. Because I knew I couldn’t be the only person like this. It was and still is too unfathomable and cruel for me to be alone in this. I can’t believe that.

In the absence of answers from others, I decided to write a book about it in metaphor, so others would have what I’d needed.

Then I decided to talk about it here, on Substack, just in case one day someone like me stumbles onto it and gets answers I couldn’t.

I lost sight of that.

At my core, I am deeply damaged. I fear people’s approval and disapproval, because both are dangerous. I fear hostility. I fear saying too much and putting people off my book, thus killing my career before it’s started. I fear being boring and repetitive and so overthink what to share and what not to share because insignificance in the face of all I’ve overcome now would be oblivion. To be met with silence after decades of silence terrifies me. And I fear either of them finding out I know what they did and am talking about it.

But I am also filled with righteous fury. I am filled with spite and rage and refuse to be cowed by cruel, broken men who tried to break me and almost succeeded.

So that’s why I’m here. To talk about survival. Not the violence. Not what was done to me. Not how I overcame all the hurt and stood on the other side, whole and healed, because I don’t think I ever will fully be there.

I’m here to talk about the recovery. About life in the midst of this hell. About trying to survive this while simultaneously trying to build a career as an author and hold a job I’m proud of and raise a child who is the love of my life. To talk and give answers in the way I so desperately wished I’d had when I’d most needed it.

Maybe I should have waited till I was in a stable place, but that wasn’t what I needed to hear. I heard from so many who were on the other side, but their life seemed so out of reach from my own.

Moving forward, expect more of this.

I will still be me. I’ll still post my silly little notes about whatever flops into my head. I’ll still talk books and movies and adventures and all the quiet ways that make life loud and big. Because I’m a whole person, and I have to stay that way. I can’t be a monolith of survival and nothing else. But I want to be the space I needed two years ago, struggling to find reasons to choose to stay alive, and the space I still need now, where healing isn’t a thing I’ve reached but a place I’m slowly piecing together for myself.