The Kiss of a corpse and Graduating into Trauma

I was thirteen when I kissed my baby sister goodbye. Not with words. Not with ceremony. With my lips on her cold, lifeless skin.

It was 1998. I had just graduated from the eighth grade. Most girls my age were taking photos in dresses that still smelled like department stores. I should've been one of them. My baby sister died during childbirth. She was born too early. Her lungs never got the chance to develop. It was yet another baby my mom had lost — another soul that didn't get to stay. My mom wasn't supposed to be able to have kids at all, but somehow, she had me. I became the only child. The only survivor. The only witness.

I was still a child, and I remember my mother, deep in grief, handing me my sister's cold, lifeless body in the hospital. She didn't explain anything. She just told me, "Kiss her." She was so blue. So cold. Her weight, her stillness; I didn’t understand why she was so blue. “All babies look like that when they’re born”; but what do I know to question my mother. A memory burned into me, and nothing softened the moment. Another moment of young tribulations of how loud and heavy silence can be. No one told me why or how to cope. It was just pain, handed to me like it was my turn to carry it. Something altered me that day, too. I didn't have the language for it then. I only knew that something about death had entered me differently than it did when someone I knew passed and maybe seeing them in a casket.

And as I stepped into the summer of that year, newly graduated, newly traumatized, I was cracked open again.

This time, by men.

I lost my virginity to being sexually assaulted. My body was taken without consent, my innocence violated, and my voice smothered under shame. The man who did it was an adult. A grown man who looked at me and didn't see a child-he saw prey. He put me in his car and drove me to his mother's house. It wasn't a date. It wasn't romantic. It was calculated. Later his mother would lie to the police about seeing me even though we made full eye contact and her only request to her son was to take me out of the house. He would discard me on a corned near my home. I would confess to my diary, scrub my skin until I felt clean but I never did.

Another man well over 6 feet tall, a different predator lifted me off the ground like a rag doll when he asked me for the time and carried me and my shopping cart into a friend's basement. I remember floating above my own body in that moment, like a ghost watching her own attack. I felt so small. Powerless. Weightless. I didn’t have a second to scream. I was so confused to being in the air like that. I would later find out one of them had a girlfriend. I ran into them both at a store. When I saw him, my whole body froze. My heart raced. I didn't even speak. But she saw it. She saw the terror flash across my face. She saw me disappear inside myself and questioned him; he would only rush her out the store and say he didn’t know me. I never forgot how beautiful she was and knew men well from that moment; that women do not always know the monsters they are with.

My diary would be read, it would be found out only because they read my diary. My own private words… the only place I felt safe… violated; and even then they still blamed me.and I would be offered a condom. I would not find comfort. I would not find help. I would not find guidance. I found a parental drive of assuming I was promiscuous and filing charges against “my boyfriend”; Detective Joe had black eyes and i never forgot his face. His partner was nicer and had softer eyes but I had no hope.

How does a girl heal when the people meant to protect her hold her accountable for her own assault?

I didn't know the answers. I just knew I couldn't die. Not yet. I had already held death in my arms once and I had kissed it willingly. That was enough; ao l pulled myself out of it. Alone.

Piece by jagged piece, I started studying psychology and about trauma, the brain, the nervous system; everything I could get my hands on. I read books that weren't written for kids my age, but I read them anyway repeatedly. I needed to understand what was wrong with me. Why I couldn't sleep? Why I was angry? Why I wanted to disappear? Why I tried to disappear?

I learned about survival. Fight. Flight. Freeze. Fawn. I realized I had done them all except Fawn. Those men made comments of me looking like a fighter and wanted to make sure I didn’t misbehave.

In my studies I learned and I began talking to myself differently. I started nurturing the wounded girl inside me as a child. I built internal scaffolding where there had been none. No one taught me how to regulate my emotions, so l taught myself. I dissected my pain with curiosity and tried to love the pieces that didn't feel lovable.

Years later in my thirties, I finally sat in front of a therapist. She listened to me, head slightly tilted, eyes wide. "You've done so much work already," she said. "Why are you here?" I answered without hesitation, "To take myself to the next level."

Because surviving is not enough; I didn't want to just exist. I wanted to thrive. I loved my body, my healed wounds, my gained knowledge that I welcomed to light other people’s ash to keep them going. To become the kind of woman I would've prayed for when I was thirteen. Healing was not a finish line; it was a milestone of my evolution.

I became someone who loves fiercely but has boundaries like steel. Someone who honors her past without letting it define her. Someone who mothers herself daily because the world never did. Someone who lights other’s peoples burnt out fires with my flame. Someone who is kind but not nice. Someone who is sturdy and never shakes in danger or betrayal.

Still healing was not a straight path like a glass staircase. Some days I was stronger than I would ever be while other days my frustration of lack of progress kicked me in my side all over again. A smell, a song, a headline; it could all bring me back. There were days my neck ached with pain I knew wasn't just physical but rather it was emotional residue that carried in the body like ash. My body remembered what my mind had tried to bury. But I refused to drown; out of pettiness perhaps and spite.

I'm not writing this for pity. I'm writing it because I'm still standing. Because I deserve to speak and always have freely; I write this for those who struggle to find their voice in adversary. For those in the trenches of their darkest tribulations. For those who need an example. For those who question themselves with their fist clenched in anger and tears of depression because both extremes can exist at the same time in your mind or body or spirit. It is not impossible. You are not dirty. You are not trash. You deserve good things in life. You are enough. You are not weak. You deserve to grow. You are what you need. You don’t need anyone to fix you. You can find guidance from others but you can fix you. Enjoy people because you want them not because you need them. Work on healing yourself not as the “finishing line” but rather a milestone of your evolution.