On the innocence of girlhood, the cruelty of silence, and the shame that was never mine to carry.
I remember being worried about my Algebra Regents.
I was a freshman in high school, sitting through an after-school review session, convinced that failing mathematics would be the greatest tragedy of my young life. I was at that peculiar age when you desperately want to be treated like an adult, despite knowing very little about what adulthood actually entails. My concerns were ordinary, perhaps even wonderfully insignificant. I worried about examinations, friendships, and all the little things that seem so terribly important when you are young.
Then two investigators from the New York State Police came to my school. I was called out of the classroom and brought into an office, where I would learn that I had been the victim of a sexual crime.
I was approximately twelve years old, still in seventh grade, when it began. It continued through the years that followed, until the person responsible was caught during my freshman year of high school.
For years, I had been living an ordinary childhood, unaware that someone was violating my privacy. I went to school, spent time with friends, worried about the things children worry about, and experienced the awkward beginnings of adolescence without knowing that moments I believed were private had been taken from me.
I sometimes think about the girl I was at twelve. She was only beginning to experience puberty, still learning to recognize herself in a body that seemed to be changing faster than she could understand it. She had no reason to imagine that someone else was observing parts of her life she had never chosen to share.
There is something particularly painful about realizing that your childhood was being violated while you were simply living it. I cannot remember every ordinary day from those years, nor do I want to spend my life wondering which moments were taken from me. But I know that, for a long time, I existed with a sense of safety I would later struggle to recover.
I was a child who believed that closing a door meant being alone and when I finally learned the truth, even that simple certainty was taken from me. I will not describe the details of what happened. There is something deeply personal about having your privacy violated, and I have spent enough of my life feeling that pieces of myself were taken without my permission. I do not believe that telling the truth requires me to surrender anything more.
What I remember most clearly is what happened afterward.
I remember coming home and searching my bathroom. I examined the room with a desperation that seems almost unbearable to remember now, looking at corners and ordinary objects as though they might reveal something I had failed to notice. I had spent years in that room without ever questioning whether I was alone. Suddenly, even a closed, locked door seemed incapable of offering reassurance.
I remember withdrawing into my bedroom and finding that solitude, something I had once enjoyed, no longer felt particularly comforting. I wanted to be left alone, but I was frightened by the possibility that I never truly had been.
Childhood depends, in part, on the belief that certain things are simply yours. Your bedroom, your thoughts, your body, the small private moments of a life that has barely begun. I had never considered that these things could become the subject of someone else’s violation. Afterward, I did not know how to inhabit them in quite the same way.
Before all of this, I had grown up in a close-knit family. I was loved, and I knew that I was loved. My childhood was filled with the familiarity of relatives, shared memories, and relationships I believed would remain unchanged simply because they always had.
What happened did not erase that love, but it altered the larger family in ways I could not have anticipated.
I think there were many people who did not know what to do with the truth. Perhaps there were loyalties they struggled to reconcile, conversations they could not bear to have, or a belief that allowing time to pass would eventually make things easier. I am old enough now to understand that adults can be frightened by things they cannot explain, and that silence is sometimes mistaken for a form of protection.
But understanding why people may have been silent does not mean I was untouched by it.
I had no way of knowing what the adults around me were thinking. I only knew that something terrible had happened, that the family I recognized seemed to be changing, and that I did not know where my feelings belonged among everyone else’s.
As I grew older, the experience followed me into parts of adolescence that should have been ordinary. I had little interest in dating, and for a long time, the idea of having a boyfriend made me uncomfortable. While other girls were beginning to discover the excitement and embarrassment of first relationships, I was learning to associate my own body with feelings I could neither understand nor explain.
There is something profoundly unfair about having your relationship with your body shaped by another person’s actions before you have even been given the opportunity to understand it for yourself.
And perhaps that is why, even now, at twenty-four, I sometimes feel dirty.
I find that extraordinarily difficult to admit.
There are moments when I feel genuinely disgusted with my own body, when the memory of what happened seems to exist somewhere beneath my skin, beyond the reach of everything I have since learned about innocence and responsibility.
I know, rationally, that I did nothing wrong. I know that the shame belongs entirely to the person who violated my privacy. But there are moments when none of that knowledge seems capable of changing how I feel. I think what troubles me most is that I have never been able to explain precisely what I feel dirty for.
I did not make the choice. I did not invite the attention. I was simply existing in a body that belonged to me, going about the ordinary business of being a young girl. Yet somehow, I became the person who felt ashamed.
There is a grief in that which I have only recently begun to recognize. Not simply grief for the innocence I lost, but for the relationship I might have had with myself. I wonder what it would have felt like to grow into womanhood without occasionally looking at my body through the memory of someone else’s actions. Whether I might have been more comfortable with affection, less apprehensive about intimacy, or simply kinder to myself in the quiet moments when nobody else is around.
I will never know, and I think that uncertainty is its own kind of loss.
What made these feelings lonelier was the silence that seemed to surround what happened within parts of my extended family.
As the years passed, I became aware of how easily the person responsible could still be mentioned in conversation. His name could appear in an ordinary exchange, accompanied by the familiarity of shared history, while I sat quietly with the knowledge of what that history meant to me.
I understood that family relationships were complicated. People could have feelings about someone that did not disappear simply because he had done something terrible. But I struggled to understand why those feelings seemed so much easier to acknowledge than mine.
Why was there room to consider what had become of him, but so little curiosity about what had become of me?
It is a question I have never entirely managed to put aside.
I did not want to be the subject of every family gathering, nor did I expect anyone to spend the rest of their lives discussing what happened. I wanted the ordinary comfort of being with people I loved, without feeling that my experience had become something everyone was careful not to disturb.
But there were times when I wished someone would ask me about it. Not out of curiosity, and certainly not because I wanted to recount the details, but because I wanted to know that the little girl who had been hurt had not disappeared from everyone’s consideration simply because she had continued growing older.
I think there is a difference between allowing someone to move forward and expecting them to do so quietly.
For a long time, I mistook my own silence for evidence that I was coping. I attended school, grew older, participated in family life, and learned how to speak about a thousand things other than what had happened to me. From the outside, I imagine there was very little to suggest how often I thought about it.
But children do not always announce their suffering in ways adults recognize. Sometimes they withdraw. Sometimes they become unusually private. Sometimes they grow into young women who can discuss almost anything except the thing that first taught them to feel ashamed.
I do not write this because I want to condemn my family. I loved them then, and I love them now. I know that what happened was painful and complicated for more people than myself, and I do not pretend to understand every conversation or feeling that existed beyond my knowledge.
But I have spent years trying to make room in my understanding for everyone else’s complexity, and I am only now realizing how little room I sometimes left for my own pain.
I was allowed to be hurt, even if the people around me were hurting too. I was allowed to be angry with people I loved. I was allowed to wish things had been handled differently without denying the love that existed in my childhood. Most importantly, I was allowed to be a child who did not understand any of it.
I am twenty-four now. I have lived enough life to recognize that people are rarely as simple as the roles we assign them, that families can love one another and still struggle terribly, and that time does not necessarily resolve the things we have learned to avoid discussing. I wish I could tell you that I have made peace with what happened, or that writing these words has somehow relieved me of everything I have carried for so long.
But I cannot.
I do not believe every painful experience must eventually become a beautiful story about healing. There are things that remain painful because they were wrong, and growing older does not require us to discover some greater purpose in having endured them.
Sometimes, I am simply sad for the girl I was. I think about her sitting in that after-school Algebra Regents review, worrying about mathematics, entirely unaware of what the afternoon would bring. I wish I could return to that classroom, not to warn her or burden her with knowledge she was never meant to carry, but simply to sit beside her for a little while.
I would like to know what she was thinking about, whether she had finished her homework, whether she was looking forward to the weekend. I would like to remember her as something other than the girl to whom something terrible happened. She was a daughter, a friend, a student who worried about failing mathematics. She had opinions, ambitions, insecurities, and an entire life unfolding before her.
I think I have spent so many years remembering what happened to her that I have sometimes forgotten to remember who she was.
And perhaps that is what I want most from writing this.
Not to make something beautiful out of what happened, or to persuade anyone that I have finally overcome it. I want to remember the girl who existed before the shame, and to recognize that she did not become less deserving of tenderness simply because someone else failed to respect her innocence.
I wish she had known that she could grow older, fall in love, become a woman, and still have moments when she felt terribly young and frightened. That she could love her family without making herself responsible for their complicated feelings. That she could speak about what happened without owing anyone the details.
And when I think of that afternoon now, I no longer want to remember only the moment everything changed. I want to remember the girl who was there before it did, sitting in a classroom after school, worrying about an examination, with an entire life still waiting for her.
Her body was hers before any of this happened and it remained hers afterward.
And no matter how many years it has taken me to believe it, there was never anything dirty about the girl who lived in it.