Written By: Abby Rogers, 16, North Carolina
Trigger Warning: Sexual Abuse
I became a survivor of sexual abuse before I ever stepped foot into a high school gym
class. It began a few weeks after I turned fourteen, lasting over an indefinite two to three month
time span the summer before my freshman year. The events were horrible and traumatizing.
Nearly three years later, I still struggle recount the details as I vomit them out to each new
therapist I meet.
After the first incident, I told no one. My abuser was a white man, only a few years older
than me. I dismissed his behavior with a wave of my hand.. I tried desperately to convince
myself that I had imagined it or that it had never happened at all. It worked for a week or two-
until it happened again. And again. And again as the cycle continued, finally coming to an end
upon adult intervention. He was never held accountable for what he did to me. No justice was
ever served. And although the abuse had stopped, I am still dealing the impacts of it going on
three years later.
At fourteen, I found myself struggling to find air. I was drowning within an ocean of
friends that to even entertain the idea of revealing to them the details of my afflictions paralyzed
me with fear.
“They wouldn’t understand what had happened to me,” the voice inside my head was
convincing, rendering me a prisoner on an island of self-inflicted solitude. It wasn’t that I didn’t
want to tell anyone- it felt like I was screaming from the mountaintops, yet I was on mute. So, I
internalized my pain and started to devolve. I became a recluse. I stopped playing sports, rarely
(if ever) went out, disconnected from my friends, allowed my grades to slip... the list goes on.
And while all of these events are akin to a stereotypical high school metamorphosis,
endured by most during their adolescence, for me they were emblematic of my deterioration. My
story was eating me alive, clawing its way out from within the walls of my brain, begging to be
heard. It encroached on places my trauma had no place in being, inhibiting me from doing
rudimentary things I once enjoyed, manifesting itself in aspects of my daily life.
I lived like this for almost a year until the fall of 2017.
I don’t remember where I was on October 5th, 2017, but I remember how it felt. It was
the day the New York Times released their investigation into the allegations against Harvey
Weinstein, igniting the courageous, furious, and unapologetic #MeToo movement.
The initial report didn’t mean much to me at first. I was fifteen- I didn’t recognize half of
women that had come forward. But in the following weeks, as I scrolled through my Twitter
feed, I quickly began to realize that this was simply not another headline. This was the opening
of the floodgates that would release a tsunami of accusations, stories, and narratives of survivors,
destroying anything that obstructed its path to justice.
Even after I understood the gravitas of the movement, for months I didn’t tell anyone my
story. I didn’t publicize it. I didn’t shout it from the rooftops like I thought that I might if I got
the chance. I didn’t start to introduce myself as a survivor. I didn’t submit his name to the local
newspaper and demand that he be excised from the city. That wasn’t my place.
One of the first people I told was my English teacher. She had taught the man who
abused me a few years before she taught me. She was the only person that I could rationalize
telling. I paced for five minutes before walking into her classroom and asking her to speak
somewhere in private.
We made our way to the teacher’s lounge and sat parallel to one another on two computer
chairs. I instantaneously broke into tears, trying frantically to hold them back as I mustered out
my story. I’m sure she was unable to decipher any details of what I less-than-eloquently had
attempted to say. Regardless, the same woman who chastised me for saying ‘like’ too many
times in the same sentence just three class periods ago pulled me into a massive bear hug and
told me that everything would be okay.
After telling her, I slowly began to tell a few close friends. I told my school counselors. I
started to go to therapy. I willingly surrendered to them the knowledge of my darkest torments,
handing out invitations to my island of previous solitary, lifting the burden upon my shoulders
that had become too much to bear.
It’s difficult to fathom the state I would be in if it wasn’t for the brave women who
predated me. And as much as I would like to believe that time heals all, that I would have
eventually found healing, the truth is that I don’t think that I would have. The #MeToo
movement was my healing- not just having my voice heard, but hearing others’. My story is just
one raindrop that comprises the storm, for girls like me, I hope the rain will never cease to pour.