I am seeing the shift happening with women (and men). We aren’t silencing our traumas. We are healing through our words. The shame of old wounds is coming to light. We are releasing like never before.

I wrote this many years ago about my rape. I didn’t share with a single soul until only a few years ago. It has been 36 years since that moment that would forever change the way I saw intimacy. And it has been in the last few months that I have finally spoken about that event without guilt, shame or self-judgment. It was also my last marriage that brought so much to light and one of the reasons I had to end the relationship. My silencing was unacceptable. My inner pain was more than I could handle through lack of self-worth. There were too many variables the returned to that stranger degrading me and taking my innocence.

No mas! No more! There is a voice inside that will never shut up again. And, I am seeing it from children to the elderly. We are no longer in a time of pushing secrets under the rug or in closets.

Every single trauma lives inside forever. What shifts and changes is how we explore those dark sides and experiences. It’s in those moments of un-silencing that the stories are no longer empowering the ego but allowing for healing to begin. This is a massive spiritual evolution.

I won’t tell you the story

Of an 18-year-old girl

Grabbed violently by a scarred-cheek man

With craters like volcanoes

Bringing her to a cold floor,

Licking her face like a dog,

Leaving his breath as a scar on her face,

Or how she fought the dull blade against her neck,

Tracing up and down to her stomach,

Desperately searching all parts North and South

While exploring with pain her intimate body.

 

I won’t share the rest of the details:

The kick to his balls,

Or the chunk of hair pulled from her head,

Or the bite she left on his tattoo-arm,

Or the way she set free with half her pantyhose

Still wet penetrated on her thighs

With runs and holes the size of her shame.

 

I won’t tell you how she drove home shaking

Or the hysteria that she felt,

Or the partial memory of her trauma still left in silence,

And the tears that are still somewhere

In the seat of a 1986 Nissan Sentra

Or the way that she got home,

The hot shower that she took

Until the water turned cold and numb just like her.

 

I won’t tell you how she cried

Placing her lilac skirt in the black garbage bag

And the silk white blouse and pretty new bra

Her husband had bought two weeks before

With the lacy-beige underwear as she shredded it with scissors

That she found in a drawer for clipping his young mustache

And how she wanted to die,

Just die, in that bathroom floor

Scrubbing her vagina over and over until it was raw,

Before he came home in two days

And wanted to have sex again like normal newlyweds.

 

I won’t tell you how years passed,

And how sex became a weapon,

And how many times the man visited in her sleep

Or the many times she wanted to tell her husband

But the shame tore inside

Because she wasn’t a slut or a whore or a bitch

Like he had pointed out on TV’s Sally Jesse Rafael days before,

But she was an innocent bystander in the wrong place and time.

 

I won’t tell you how many more years would overlap

And how the pain left,

But not really,

Because each lover that licked her face,

Or touched her stomach and body in passion

Reminded her of the crater-face-nameless man

And how only love could conquer the pain and shame.

 

I won’t tell you how this sleeps inside of her

But awakes with a movie scene or breaking news

Of another woman violently hurt

And how she bravely fights that sensation,

Brainwashing herself to believe it a nightmare,

But it wasn’t.

It was true and will always be true.

 

I won’t tell you how she looks,

Or how she searches to forget,

And often does but not really,

Cause the man haunts her dreams

Even after so many decades of his existence.

Once or twice a year she awakens to his visit,

No longer sweating,

She shakes herself to sleep

Or goes to the bathroom to throw up

The grossness of his spit lingering on her face.

 

I won’t tell you how she can’t verbalize it…

The details don’t tell the entire story

Because no one else was there to feel the invasion,

Or the disgust that has been left forever,

And how she prays that her children never know

Or have to be faced with the mortification of such act themselves.

 

I won’t tell you.

I cannot.

Just because

You may never understand.

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I love you. A part of you knows that silencing your traumas is no longer necessary. Speak, even if your voice shakes. Dare to share your stories so others can also begin to heal.

Millie