All of My Trust, all of My Self [My abuse story]

It's been a long time

As I'm writing this, life is inching me closer and closer toward my seventeenth birthday. I never thought I would make it to that age alive, but here we are approaching that number that any other teenager should be excited for. Just another year and I'll be an adult. But I don't feel like one. I never have.
Mentally, I'm still that scared little girl from ten years ago, hiding away under her covers and hoping the monster would go away if I just shielded my eyes way from it. Sometimes I still catch myself crying out for help in the dark when I'm having one of my worst days.
It's coming up to the ten year "anniversary" of my abuse and yet the memories of it have scared me more these past couple of years than they ever had before.

Up until recently, I went about my life like everything was fine. I was always aware that something weird happened to me, somewhere pushed deep into the back of my mind, but when I closed my eyes I could never see it clearly. There were always blurred figures and muted noises, like I was watching a horror movie through a blurred lense. I wasn't distressed by it at all because I couldn't see what was happening right in front of me. My memories were gone.
Professionals call these "repressed memories", a self-defense mechanism that trauma survivors adopt to protect themselves from disturbing memories. If you don't know what happened yourself then you can't get upset about it, right?
Though, the thing about repressed memories is they do resurface, and it's a painfully long and upsetting process.

During a sexual education class, though, when one of the teachers brought up the term "consent" it hit a raw nerve that I didn't even realize existed. Somewhere in my mind, a switch went off and all I could think of was the word "no". Over and over.
My first memory had resurfaced, and even though I still couldn't picture it I remembered all of the times I told my abuser no, and I knew that he didn't accept that as an answer. I could remember him pushing me to accept his "offer" and breaking me down until I caved in and accepted. I remembered that he was 14-15 years of age and I was 7-8. Then that was it.

I went home and cried that day, even though I didn't fully understand why I was upset. I told my mum that I just had a bad day and she accepted that as th truth. I couldn't bring myself to tell her what I was truly feeling. When I got to my room I just sat on the floor of my bedroom with my back to the red hot radiator and stared at the carpet in silence. It was dark because it had been storming and my room was flooded in dark blue light. The burning on my back didn't even register as I leaned further into the radiator and just stared blankly at the floor in front of me. I just wanted to feel something but I felt completely numb. For the first time in my life I could feel what it felt like to feel nothing.
It was fucking awful.
I barely even blinked. I felt like a shell.
I just wanted to know what happened to me as a young child but a huge part of me was scared to find out.
Stuff like this wasn't talked about a lot, because it wasn't normal. Teenage boys weren't supposed to do that to young girls and everyone knew that. For some reason I felt like I was in the wrong at the time. I thought that it was all my fault.
Why was I even upset? I couldn't recall the whole story. I only had small pieces, but they were there and they were real. That was so very strange to me.
I didn't understand how you could just forget something like that. Especially something that bad, but I wasn't educated on stuff like that at all. It's something that shouldn't have happened and something a child should never go through. No parent should have to prepare for their child being abused, especially by someone they thought they knew so well.

I managed to recover from that incident after a few weeks. The thought still bothered me but it was bearable, I could live with it.

A lot of time passed and I thought I was just going to move on from it, but I started to get severely bullied and it was ongoing for a few years.
With the name-calling and the embarrassment, it brought back so many feelings of self hatred and shame. I felt disgusted in myself. All of the same things I felt when I was being abused.
All of the stress and emotions I were feeling brought more and more pieces of memories to the surface, bit by bit I was creating the full picture in my head.
Every time someone made a comment about my body (sexual or insulting), I imagined that these people could see me as I was all of those years ago. My broken body with the bite marks and tear stains.
Every time people called me names and made fun of me I felt like I was worthless, nothing but an object to poke fun at and use for other people's entertainment. Exactly how my abuser made me feel.

Two boys followed me home one day and shouted at me as I was entering my house: "Let me in so I can **** and ****". Something gross that I don't even want to give them that by writing it here, and once they passed by, I let out a scream. I paced the hallway with my hands in my hair and I could feel myself panicking. I didn't know where to direct all of the stress, and I shouted as loud as I could before hitting the closest thing towards me. It was a window, lucky me. My hand went right through it. I was crying my eyes out and bleeding all over the place. I felt disgusting, rotten, ashamed and embarrassed. I just kept whining and I couldn't stop, it was quite possibly the worst I had felt in my whole life. Looking back on it now, I'm able to identify that it was a trigger response. The jokey cat-calling had triggered my fight or flight response and I chose to fight that time. I still don't know why, but at the time all I could think of was how I was "overreacting" and "acting stupid".
My mum took me to the hospital that day. I told her I just fell into the window and she believed me.
I had to tell her so many lies to keep her from worrying,
but I only got worse from that point.