Or “I might as well address how everything REALLY started”.
This past weekend, I unexpectedly had to face part of my past. After years of vaguely thinking about it, my mom and I finally went to a friend’s church. But this post isn’t about that experience, because I spent the entire time crying in a bathroom. Why, you ask? Because it was in a building that had once been something else, I had memories associated, and let’s just say I’m starting to understand how anything can be triggery for some people.
Might as well get it over with, since the title of this post is pretty provocative and veers a particular direction anyways - I had bits of my innocence taken from me when I was thirteen. (Incidentally, I haven’t voluntarily lost anything since then… but that is a different post.) Compared to the horror stories I’ve seen on various homeschool-survivor blogs over the last few months, what happened to me was relatively tame. Just hands where I didn’t want ‘em, in the general vicinity of my then-nonexistent breasts, several times over the course of a school year. Maybe not even a conscious act, but still a harmful one.
The boy who did that to me was two years older than me. It ended when my family left that homeschool group in hopes that something closer to home might improve my social standing. (In reality, it did the opposite, but how were we to know better?) I haven’t had any form of contact with him since - might’ve added him on FB at some point, but I can’t remember. Far as I’m concerned, he doesn’t exist anymore, but the wounds I got from him do.
A lot of the people I know who homeschool their children do so to protect them from the big bad world. Things like this don’t happen to homeschooled kids. Things like this aren’t done by homeschooled kids either - and yet as far as I know, E was homeschooled the whole way from kindergarten through high school. Didn’t stop him from messing with the brain and body of a young girl who just wanted to be seen and leaving an indelible blemish on my psyche in the process.
I only processed this as A Harmful Thing That Happened a few years ago - several years after it happened. And in hindsight, maybe that was part of the problem. I wasn’t some tiny brutally harmed by an adult; the person who touched me where I didn’t want to be touched was in my peer group, our mothers had bonded over raising difficult children, and it was generally not the sort of scenario people talk about in discussions of sexual abuse and homeschooled children. And the worst part was I let it happen. I was uncomfortable, yes, but I kept my trap shut. I’ve kept this buried in me for eight years. And now… now I’m done with that silence.
What happened to me may not have been as dramatic or horrific as a lot of the dialogues currently going around, but I am still a victim. I am still a survivor. And I am still reconciling what this means to me, what effects it might have on my eventual consensual physical interactions. It’s an uphill climb, but I’m doing what I can.
