“Nobody’s Girl:” The Book Review That Never Was

TRIGGER WARNING

Child SA

I made it 18 minutes into listening to the book “Nobody’s Girl” by Virginia Roberts Giuffre before breaking down. There’s 13 hours and 39 minutes left and I can’t predict when or if I’ll be able to listen to more, much less, finish it.

I’ve gone to bed in the middle of the day. Leaving paint to dry on brushes. Wasted. All wasted. My imagination? Gone. My nose stuffed up. My eyes burning with tears. My cats pacing around wanting to be fed. My child here with me needing his mother. It is that quick that I can go from “super productive” to “useless” to anyone including myself.

Already, as a survivor of my own story of childhood sexual abuse, I recognized myself in her words and knew almost instantly that she was me and I am her. I know that the experiences of sexual abuse led to more disrespect of my person and my mind and my spirit growing up and then living as an adult similar to her. I am a child still in many ways living inside an adult body. People say your development stops whenever “it” happened. That means I am 8 years old.

I pray that before I die, I learn to protect myself and to take care of myself like I deserve, like we all deserve. Virginia never did. She chose relationships and stayed in relationships where she continued to be hurt. Many people don’t learn how to know or have healthy relationships after these experiences. And whether someone else is allowed to abuse them or they abuse themselves or both, they die still bound by the darkness of what happened to them so long ago.

Men and women, once children, never will understand why. It never goes away. It’s always there. We are not holes to stick things in or to lay there and take whatever fantasies pass through another’s mind. It doesn’t wash away. Time doesn’t shield us from the chance opportunities that suddenly invoke memories that are as clear as the day they happened.

It’s like I’m a child again with feelings I don’t know what to do with. with physical pain I keep secret. With scents I am repulsed by.

Why isn’t the suffering of one person enough to believe? Why must we beg? Why must we be retraumatized and threatened and made fun of rather than heard? Can they not promise that it will be dealt with? That they won’t do it anymore or again? Why cant they say that they don’t agree with it? Why is it protected more fiercely than its own victims?

I stop there knowing that it’s once again something I will deal with alone. Society is continuing to look the other way and to act like we were born to absorb toxic levels of stress…to be resilient regardless of the circumstances and lack of consequences. Until there is light shed on these crimes, survivors will continue to be the ones punished and treated as the ones to blame.

painting by olivia clawson

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