With all the recent stories of women coming forward to share their #MeToo experiences, I thought I would do the same.
In the start of 2018, I decided to start making a lot of inner changes and sharing my story is part of that. I keep seeing people defend the attackers, and people saying the victims are making up the stories for attention. I'm twenty-one years old, and more than half of what I'm writing, I've been too scared even to say out loud.
I grew up living in Wisconsin and was lucky to have all my family living within a two and a half hour drive. This meant that our family had a lot of interaction, spent holidays together, would go to family reunions yearly, and was always in connection. Some of my favorite memories I have growing up is during Thanksgiving someone brought Jones Thanksgiving flavored sodas. Watching my brave family members take shots of soda tasting like cranberry sauce, bread and butter, or turkey and gravy brought me and everyone else to tears laughing.
When I was growing up, my relationship with my cousin was always close.
We would be playing together, or near each other especially when we were younger. However, as we got older, our relationship got more and more inappropriate, and the molesting began when I was only six years old. He's two years older than me.
It started small, with him just making a point to separately kiss me goodbye on the lips before our families were done visiting. It's not uncommon for cousins to sexually experiment on each other, and while some may make that case, this was different.
Over time it began to escalate.
My younger brother, cousin, his older sister, and I would love to play Sims together. It was the early 2000's, and Sims was super awesome, I miss it so much. He would make our characters "WhoHoo" in the game, and then turn to me, trying to either kiss me or make a suggestive comment. If I refused to kiss him, he would hold me down and squeeze my wrists until I did. If a parent or anyone walked downstairs, he could hear it a mile away and would be on the other side of the couch or not touching me in the blink of an eye.
He would push me down on the bean bag in the basement, holding me down asking me to bite him. All the kids would share a bedroom so my mom and dad could get their own bedroom while we would visit our cousins. One night when it was just the two of us in the room before we all went to bed, he made it a point to crawl over my head in loose boxers, forcing the only thing for my eyes to look at his *penis*.
I was raped. More than once.
If someone touches my sides, I'll get panic attacks. If its super bad, I can black out. My upper back is so sensitive that if it gets poked, chills go down my whole spine. If I feel someone breathing down my back, the air will leave my lungs, and I'll start to shudder. It's brought me trust issues, depression, horrible anxiety, PTSD, crippling panic attacks, and he's still just out there in the world like he did nothing wrong.
One time when I was sleeping on the couch in the family room, and he was asleep on the couch in the living room, which are both on the same floor, I heard him come into the kitchen and sit there in the darkness near me. It was like he was sitting there to see if I was truly asleep or not. I remember turning my phone brightness all the way up and playing games on my phone only to later lock myself in the bathroom for a couple of hours.
This was the last time I ever saw him, and by this time I was 15 years old.
When you go through something so traumatic for such a long time, your brain begins to shelter you. It blacks out a lot of the memories, and because of that, I don't get to remember most of my childhood. I'll hear stories about myself growing up or see photos of myself that I wouldn't have remembered without someone there to tell me about them. I have horrible dreams.
The kind of dreams that paralyze you to a point where you know it's a dream, but you can't wake up. I know they're PTSD dreams because they feel a certain way. It makes my body feel like I'm getting pressed down into the earth, the way the X-ray bibs feel that they place on you at the dentist, but if you put 100 on me. Things move in slow motion, and then all of the sudden I can't breathe, and there's a bubble forming in my mouth, and it feels like a giant stone is swelling and pressing down on my tongue. Then the claustrophobia kicks in, and I won't be able to sleep well. Other times I get nightmares of being raped again, and I don't get a lot of sleep on those nights either. I can't go to bed unless I am facing the door of the room I'm sleeping in.
I remember when my mom found out senior year of high school. She just randomly guessed after looking at family photos over the years between us, and as I inched more and more away from him in pictures, she finally put two and two together. I remember how my heart broke the minute she said it out loud because it meant that our family wouldn't be the same and it was because of me. It took a long time for me to understand and admit that it wasn't my fault. It took an even longer time for me to start being ok, and to learn how to manage the anxiety and panic attacks.
The #MeToo movement has given me the strength to share my story about my attacker, and to show that it can happen to anyone, at any age. Survivors's stories are valid and need to be recognized. I wouldn't lie about something that makes me so anxious that my hands are currently shaking so hard it's hard to type. The more and more people come forth and tell their stories, the more change will happen, and that's why I am sharing.
