You Took a Vital Piece of Me, and I Let You.

Dear my Abuser,

This letter is the hardest letter I have ever had to write. I’ve stared at my glaring laptop screen for many hours now trying to force the words out of my head. The irony is that this started because you forced my silence and left threats dangling in the suffocating air. Writing this feels like I’m breaking my code of silence and chancing many people’s lives. You know, the lives you gave me responsibility for day in and day out for many years. I still feel an overwhelming responsibility to keep my loved ones safe from you. Sometimes I do wonder if they were just terrifying threats rather than intentions. And telling a 10 year old girl to have sex with you or you’d kill her mother or sister, was a perfect plan to keep her silence and use her little body. Congratulations because I guess it worked and you got everything you wanted and more. You won.

Or did you? Because here I am and I’m still alive and I’ve survived too many deadly situations. Some at the hands of yourself but many others from my bare hands. Swallowing tablet after tablet to either sleep or kill myself escalated to over a hundred overdoses. Somehow I am physically managing. Sure I have stomach ulcers and a bad liver function, but I could be a lot worse. I could be 6 feet under. It’s horrible sometimes because I do get fleeting thoughts of wanting to die. I suppose when you are hit with flashback after flashback every single day it starts to make you question what’s the point. Feeling your hands straggling me or your fingers dancing along my ribs at anytime and anywhere is terrifying. Always being on high alert is exhausting and my poor heart must beat so incredibly fast I do worry it will give out on me. I have many scars and the one I despise the most is my very first one. I didn’t begin self harming off my own back and you know the reason why I started to cut. It was my punishment, remember? You taught me it and I excelled to the point that my left arm is now covered in scars. Reminders of my failings; when I told you no, not tonight. But even then you still abused me. My actions to stop you meant I was forced to fulfil your needs and then take my punishment after.

I feel sorry for the little girl who’s round face was surrounded by golden ringlets. The girl who loved books and losing herself in stories. She stayed up most nights and read under her dolphin covered duvet. I’ve still got that flashlight. She had so much potential to be a beautiful and confident young woman. Instead she was forced by yourself to become a woman at 10 years old. How can anyone comprehend this? Can you? You must have seen me as something other than who I was. You turned me into a terrified ghost of a child. At school I stayed silent because talking to the grown up people was too hard. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone about our special time on Saturdays. So maybe I became mute and maybe that was incredibly stupid looking back. Hindsight hurts sometimes but then I try and put myself in her shoes and they are a little small on me now, but I know she was too afraid to talk. It wasn’t her responsibility to tell someone. And so through the years she lost a fair bit of weight but she did developed breasts and curves much to your disgust. I think Anorexia came about because you didn’t find me attractive as a woman. You wanted me like the 10 year old you specifically chose all those years ago. The problem is that Anorexia is incredibly dangerous and isolating. It made me suicidal from very start and eventually I stopped eating completely until medical professionals intervened. But anything to please you and anything to keep my family safe. I honestly would have died if it would have protected them. Hand on heart. 

Because of you I have struggled to form relationships and it’s still a huge issue for me. Naturally trauma gets much worse when you are intimate with someone. The flashbacks increase and the nightmares become more vivid too. Your actions lead me to associate pain and terror with sex and there always has to be a catch. No one can just like me for who I am because there has to be conditions. Having this belief means I’ve had many failed relationships since the abuse started. As soon as I get close to someone it’s a risk. This big uncontrollable risk because how do I know they won’t hurt me? You taught me that I have to please others and it’s selfish and shameful to even mention my needs. The man is dominant and anything he wants, he will get. End of story. But I’ve realised that not every man is like you. Not every man will force me to do things I don’t feel comfortable with. Not every man will sleep with me and then push me away until they want sex again. It’s going to take a lot of therapy to banish the beliefs I formed during the abuse. I don’t think I’ll ever have a relationship where I will feel completely comfortable. You ruined that for me, by the way. It makes me think life would be better alone or in fact 6 feet under. Relationships, even with friends, are too difficult at times and I struggle immensely to stay grounded. Life is difficult when you believe everyone wants to hurt you. Somedays I don’t leave my flat because I can’t force myself to take that risk. I end lying to those around me saying I’m ‘fine’ or I’m out when actually I’m in my bed hiding under my duvet and having multiple panic attacks. You see, talking about abuse to anyone can make the other person feel a bit awkward at times. I know people mean well but sometimes it’s hard for them to help because luckily they’ve never had a shared experience. 

I get incredibly jealous of my friends sometimes because I want my childhood, the one I was supposed to have. I want to not be this freak who hides from the world and spaces out. I hate being who I am. I don’t trust easily and I have this push-pull nature with relationships. As soon as think someone is leaving I push them well away because I can’t handle rejection or abandonment. You have made me into a scared young adult who is incredibly behind in life. I will probably need years of therapy now because you chose me rather than my sisters. What did I do wrong? Why did you choose me? And these questions circle my head a lot and I doubt I’ll ever get answers. All I know is that you had three daughters and you chose me. One in three. And reporting you to the police took guts because breaking a silence so strong was a risk. Telling people what you did to me was a gamble. And then losing my whole family the minute you were arrested absolutely destroyed me. They all chose to listen to your pretty lies and many would yell at me because I had ruined your life. I’m sorry about that. But good news for you, you got off without court. Apparently my failing mental health and being trapped in an Eating Disorder Unit was enough to ignore my 3 hour interview detailing the abuse in immense detail. The mental Health that you created saved you from years behind bars. I was too fragile to attend court and the case was dropped. You’re a free man and I feel incredibly invalidated. I feel terrified of you. I lost everyone for nothing. No justice. No calm. No anything. Really all I got was a stay in a refuge and then homeless accommodation.

I want to hate you but honestly I love you. You’re family. I feel kind of protective of you even though you completely failed to protect me. I hate what you did to me. I didn’t enjoy your games and the way you always criticised the person I was growing to be. You made comments about my body and that I needed to lose weight constantly. Maybe that triggered Anorexia. You always said you wanted me to stay small and dainty; like a rag doll. When I feel you on me I wish I could scrub my skin and bleed you off my body. But I’ve tried this, and all I’m left with is soreness and those same fingerprints in-between my thighs. I tried starving myself and that only made me completely numb for a while. I hate that you made me despise myself to the point that I cry everyday when I look in the mirror. All I see is my eyes and how sad they always look. Something died inside me when you broke my body. Something just lingers behind my eyes almost like I want to cry but no tears come. Sometimes I wish I could get it over with and kill myself already. End the ongoing abuse I experience in the form of flashbacks. I scream sometimes in the night because I’m kicking you and biting you to try and get you off me. I used to lie incredibly still when I was a little girl. I thought that’s what daddy’s do so I let you do everything you wanted to do to me. But in my dreams I try my best to fight like I wish I had done in the past. I wake up completely disorientated and scared out of my skin. I check everywhere for you. And sometimes I can still smell your cologne. That’s just how powerful flashbacks can be for me. Almost like you’re still abusing me even when you’re gone.

You took a vital piece of me, and I let you.

Sophie-Al