“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”– Martin Luther King Jr.
My Interpretation: Sometimes the most damaging part of trauma is not what happened. It is what happens after. The disbelief. The minimization. The way systems turn a child’s pain into a procedural inconvenience. The way people call survival “strength” because it is easier than admitting how often children are left to carry what adults should have stopped.
This entire series will contain Trigger Warnings – please do not continue forward if it will interfere with your mental health. You matter.
Some experiences do not arrive as memories.
They arrive as wiring.
Before I had language for boundaries, → I learned silence.
Before I understood consent, → I learned compliance.
Before I knew what safety felt like, → I learned how to get smaller inside myself without disappearing completely.
I am not going to describe what happened in detail. Not because I am ashamed, not because I am protecting anyone, & not because I think people are owed the graphic version of my pain to take me seriously.
I am not writing this to satisfy curiosity.
I am writing this because patterns do not die in the dark.
They die when they get named.
What happened to me as a child involved multiple people.
There was a power imbalance so extreme it does not even belong in the same sentence as the word “choice.”
It was not confusion. It was not a misunderstanding. It was not “kids being kids.”
It was harm.
It was violation.
It was the kind of thing that reroutes a nervous system before a brain even has a chance to build language around what is happening.
& then came the second trauma.
The part people love to ignore because it does not photograph well, & because it forces adults to admit something ugly.
The system.
The interviews.
The paperwork.
The questions that ask you to act like a fully formed adult in a child’s body.
The way your life becomes evidence.
The court process was not “justice.” It was a performance of it.
I had to face not only what happened, but the people attached to it.
I had to sit inside a room built for procedure, not truth.
I had to watch the way adults can stand next to something monstrous & still focus on technicalities like they are ordering from a menu.
One of them was held accountable.
The others walked free due to age & the way evidence is treated when the victim is a child.
There are numbers & dates & legal explanations that can be offered to make that sound reasonable.
But the truth is simpler.
The justice system is not built for children.
It is built for proof.
& children do not bleed proof on command.
So, I learned that truth is fragile when it is inconvenient.
I learned that being harmed is not enough. You must also be “believable.”
⤷ You must perform pain correctly.
⤷ You must say it in the right order.
⤷ You must not be too emotional→ but emotional enough.
⤷ You must not seem rehearsed → but also must be consistent.
⤷ You must not dissociate → but also must not be dramatic.
Do you hear how insane that is?
It is a system where adults can harm children, & children are then asked to carry the burden of presenting their trauma in a way that does not make adults uncomfortable.
That does not feel like justice.
That feels like being harmed twice.
& then there is the thing people say to me that makes my eye twitch to this day.
“You got lucky.”
Because there was a settlement.
I need to say this plainly.
A settlement is not luck.
→ It is not winning.
→ It is not a prize.
→ It is not a glow-up.
It is a receipt for what happened when the world failed to prevent it.
It is money handed to a person as if you can exchange currency for a nervous system.
It is adults trying to close a file.
People love to say “at least” when they are uncomfortable.
“At least you got something out of it.”
“At least it wasn’t worse.”
“At least you got justice.”
“At least” is where empathy goes to die.
Because what I wanted was not money.
What I wanted was protection.
What I wanted was for it to never have happened.
What I wanted was for adults to act like adults.
What I wanted was for the system to work without requiring a child to crawl through it.
& what I got instead was a lesson.
A brutal one.
One that shaped everything.
Sometimes you can be the victim & still be treated like the problem.
Sometimes you can tell the truth, & still watch the world look for reasons to make it complicated.
Sometimes the most dangerous thing is not the person who harmed you.
It is the environment that teaches you your pain is negotiable.
So yes. There was a settlement.
& I have been called “lucky” for it more times than I can count.
If you have ever said that to someone, please understand what it implies.
≫ It implies the harm was balanced out.
≫ It implies the story has a silver lining.
≫ It implies the nervous system can be reimbursed.
It cannot.
What I carried forward was not “money trauma.”
⤷ What I carried forward was survival wiring.
Because trauma does not always look like fear.
Sometimes it looks like capability.
It looks like:
➩ being “mature for your age”
➩ reading rooms before you enter them
➩ predicting tone shifts
➩ anticipating needs before anyone asks
➩ never wanting to be a burden
➩ learning how to swallow discomfort & call it grace
➩ being the calm one, the helpful one, the easy one
Some people will read that list & think, “That sounds like a strong person.”
No.
That sounds like a person who learned early that safety came from self-containment.
I learned to take up very little space.
Then I learned to manage everything inside myself.
I learned that closeness came with conditions.
That love required adaptability.
That my needs were negotiable.
That the safest version of me was the one who did not ask for much.
& when you grow up with those rules, you do not call them rules.
You call them personality.
→ You call it independence.
→ You call it self-sufficiency.
→ You call it “I am fine.”
But the truth is, “I am fine” is often just a polished version of “I do not trust anyone to come.”
This is how patterns begin.
Not because you want them.
Because your body chooses familiarity over uncertainty every single time.
That is not weakness.
That is conditioning.
When a child learns that adults do not reliably protect them, that child grows into an adult who tries to protect themselves by controlling everything they can.
✔ Your tone.
✔ Your reactions.
✔ Your needs.
✔ Your expectations.
& then you grow up & people compliment you for being low maintenance.
They do not know that “low maintenance” is sometimes just “I learned not to ask.”
They do not know that “I do not need anything” is sometimes just “needing things was unsafe.”
They do not know that “I am independent” is sometimes just “I got tired of being disappointed.”
This is the part that matters for anyone reading who has felt alone in their own trauma.
✧ You are not broken because you stayed quiet.
✧ You are not dramatic because your body still reacts like the past can happen again.
✧ You are not weak because you learned to survive by adapting.
You were trained.
& trained things can be unlearned.
But only when we name what they are.
The justice system failure mattered because it taught my body something specific.
→ It taught me that if I wanted safety, I could not rely on someone else to provide it.
→ It taught me that adults will debate your pain like it is a topic instead of a wound.
→ It taught me that being harmed is not automatically enough to be protected.
So, I became vigilant.
I became capable.
I became hyper-aware.
I became the kind of person who can carry a lot & still show up looking fine.
& that is the part I need people to understand.
Sometimes “fine” is not fine.
It is functional.
Functional is what you become when the world does not want to make room for your pain.
I am writing this because I am done living inside a system that taught me to minimize myself.
I am writing this because I have met too many women who think their reactions mean they are defective.
The panic.
The rage.
The shutdown.
The over-explaining.
The constant scanning.
The inability to relax even when nothing is happening.
That is not you being dramatic.
That is your nervous system saying, “I remember what the world did when you were small.”
This is also why I am keeping this non-graphic.
Because the details are not the point.
The point is what you were left to carry afterward.
The point is how it shows up later:
→ in who you trust
→ in what you tolerate
→ in what you call love
→ in what you excuse
→ in how long you stay
→ in how much you swallow before you speak
That is the series.
This is Part 1 because this is the beginning of the wiring.
↪︎ Not the beginning of my worth.
↪︎ Not the beginning of my identity.
↪︎ Not the beginning of my story.
But the beginning of a pattern that tried to disguise itself as normal.
& if you are reading this thinking, “This feels familiar,” I need you to hear me clearly.
> You are not alone.
> You are not crazy.
> You are not “too sensitive.”
> You are not making it up.
You are a person whose body learned something too early.
& you have been carrying it ever since.
I am writing this once, so I do not have to keep explaining myself in fragments. So, the context lives somewhere, & I do not have to drag it into every unrelated room. So, my story has a place to exist that is not my nervous system.
This is where it started. My life had changed in every way imaginable after this point.
⤷ From learning what therapy was before I got my first menstrual cycle.
⤷ To relearning family dynamics & seeing how they would forever be changed.
⤷ To learning (many years later – welcome 30’s) how to love myself properly.
Part 2 will be about what repeated.
Not the sensational version. The quiet version. The version that looks like family dynamics, like silence, like dismissal, like favoritism, like the slow shaping of what you believe you deserve.
& eventually, this series ends where it is meant to end.
With me setting it down.
Because I am done being abused.
I am done being minimized.
I am done being told I am “lucky” for surviving hell with a receipt.
I want the story out there because someone else needs to read it & realize they are not alone.
Because someone else needs to rage too.
Because someone else needs to stop calling their survival “weakness.”
Because someone else needs to see that resilience does not mean you were not harmed.
It means you kept living anyway.
& now, we get to do something even better than surviving.
We get to choose what comes next.
Xoxo ♡
Whisper to the ghosts. Yell into the void. Just don’t be an asshole.