I experienced sexual violence as a child! This sentence followed me through years of silence, confusion and meaning making and till date I am still processing what it meant to live through it at that age. I knew something left me but I didn’t know how to explain what I thought at the time had been taken from me. I was just a child when my sense of safety was interrupted, fear lived within me and I no longer felt familiar in my own body. For a long time, I did what children often do in the absence of words, I went silent. I carried it quietly, without knowing that what I carried had a name and without knowing that it was not mine to hold alone. My childhood did not end where my pain began, it continued and grew, shaping my early understanding of the world.
In my case there was no clear beginning to healing, because for years I was still inside the experience, trying to make sense of it. All I can remember is I was slowly going on, then I grew into an uncertain version of myself before I could understand what had happened to me and then I grew beyond her. I began to notice something else began growing within me, a quiet internal refusal to remain only in the shape of what had been done to me. That refusal was not loud, It was not immediate. It was gradual, almost imperceptible but it was there and over time, it became my foundation. I came to understand my life not through the moment of pain alone, but through what I built in its aftermath, piece by piece, slowly, deliberately, sometimes without even realizing I was rebuilding anything at all. Looking back I’m amazed at how I landed into something close to wholeness from brokenness. There was no single moment that shaped me but a long enduring becoming. I have become a woman who does not disappear in difficult rooms, my presence and work speaks with force. I have become a woman who transforms pain into insight and channels it into meaningful action with lasting impact.
I make It is a daily intentional effort not to remain within the confines of what happened to me. I work constantly hard to form and expand beyond those boundaries. I have chosen not only to survive, but to live in a way that is fully mine, very grounded, deliberate and uncontained by the past, that is what thriving has meant for me. Today, I do not carry myself as someone who has “overcome” a past life. I carry myself as someone who has grown through it and continues to grow beyond it. Everyday I find new ways of becoming, I see in my every action and step how I keep unfolding. I chose to have dominance over my past self that was locked up in chaos, voicelessness, shame and fear. This is my journey and it continue.