I woke up yesterday morning, made breakfast for me and the kids and turned on Mickey Mouse in the kitchen. I took my coffee and toast into the living room and turned on the news. Christine Blasey Ford was giving her opening statement. I didn’t know it was going to be on live TV. Her words hit me like a sledge hammer in the gut. Almost eighteen hours later I am still raw. I’m trying not to cry. I can’t describe exactly how I’m feeling. I’m just flooded with memories and emotions about what happened to me at 15 and how I never told anyone. I can feel that shaken feeling you get after an attack. The soreness on your arms, I imagined what the bruises looked like, as I sat in the bath yesterday. I remember crying softly so my mom couldn’t hear me. I had the door locked. My mom was right outside, I could have told her what happened to me, the trauma I just endured. I never did. Yesterday Christine Blassey Ford gave me permission to acknowledge that what happened to me was wrong and not my fault. And I feel pain in that. What happened to me, when I was fifteen altered me. When I talk to parents now about their teenagers, I always preface that, I was a bad teenage, I was always in trouble, I did bad things. In our Being Human Residency, we had already been talking about the stages of development in our kids and ourselves as kids. My stinky, bloody, dark, teenage box had already been pried open. My years of sexual trauma is intertwined with myself as a child. Being taken advantage of. I want to run from it. I get scared, I might get in trouble for being depressed about this stuff. For being triggered like this. One night, when I was sixteen, my mom told another mom, “It wasn’t your daughters’ fault, my daughter’s the ring leader here, she’s a bad seed”. I think my mom may have even been grabbing my hair and shoving me in the car. I have been taught it’s my fault I was sexually assaulted. I thought it wasn’t important because it happened when I was a kid. That anything in High School didn’t count. Never talk about it. I don’t really know what steps to take to work my way out of this, I don’t know how much I should try to bury it again, pretend it didn’t happen, or write about it, or talk about it, or cry about it. I still feel ashamed by it. I feel uncomfortable.