I’m not my past… not anymore

Trigger Warning: Sexual assault, incest, trauma

The reasons for me to tell this story today are many.

Firstly, all around me thousands of women are opening up and sharing theirs. Something as small and seemingly insignificant as a random assortment of letters and symbols — #MeToo — has become an unstoppable juggernaut, gathering momentum with every story shared, every past unraveled, knocking down the walls that we women had build around us. The walls that kept the world from seeing our wounded souls. The walls that also suffocated us. Everyday now I see women, stepping out of those walls for the first time in years, perhaps in their whole life, and I see the way they breathe free. I want to breathe free too, even if just once. Even if just to know what it feels like.

Secondly, my lifelong battle with depression and thoughts of self-harm have worn me out. I’ve done everything I could to deal with it and nothing brings me permanent relief. I’m back there in that abyss, every time. I recently read an article that spoke of how a very high percentage of depression people have a history of sexual abuse as a child. And that a big part of their recovery comes from them accepting and acknowledging their past. I am fed up of reading such articles which I know in my heart to be true, and yet not acting on what I know can help me.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, I am tired. I’m tired of carrying this burden of shame and pain around. It’s not mine. It never was. And yet by owning it up and fusing it with every single cell of my being in the last three decades of my life, I have made it my second skin. That skin needs to come off now. I will bleed, of course. A lot. But in the end, hopefully, I will recover.

They say the stories that you don’t tell, come to own you. True. I can vouch for that with my experience. This story, which I have never told a single living soul, and yet am somehow opening up to the whole world today, has come to own me too. It has twisted, distorted and morphed me into the person I have now become. A person I hate. A person I do not want to be anymore.

I was sexually abused as a child by my own elder brother. For years. I was a little kid back then, not older than six or seven, who didn’t even know what sexual abuse was. I would do whatever he’d ask me to do because he was my elder brother. He loved me. He was supposed to protect me. The abuse continued for a few years. Under the roof that was meant to be my safe haven. Perhaps, within the knowledge of my mother, the only person who they say can never hurt you or see you getting hurt. I’ve come to learn through my experiences how theoretical these precepts are. Everyone, if given a chance, can hurt you. A learning that has shaped me into the cynical and bitter person I am today.

For years, I pushed these memories into the deepest crevices of my mind. I think they regurgitated sometime, when growing up brought with it perspective and knowledge of what’s right and what’s wrong. But every time they surfaced I pushed them deeper inside. That was decades before #MeToo would happen. Me and my monster were living under the same roof. I had no one I could speak to. No one who’d believe me over him anyway. You see, by then I had acquired the infamous reputation of a belligerent young woman with a bad attitude. Someone who is too liberal with her thoughts and actions for her own good. Someone who was sure to bring a bad name to the family of not reined in. The biggest promoter of these concepts was my own mother. She could accept nothing less from me than my unconditional devotion and servility to my brother. When I didn’t deliver that, she never bothered to find out why. Or perhaps, she didn’t need to because she had known it all along. Either way, she’d picked her corner. I was all alone in mine.

During this time, I had other encounters of abuse with other people. A acquaintance of the family, who my mother was rather fond of, would often kiss me on the lips forcibly whenever he would find me alone, and fondle me. I was thirteen by then I guess. I knew what was happening was wrong. But I was also mentally relieved that his abused stopped at that, didn’t go as far as sometimes my brother would go. Besides, who was I going to tell? My mother? I’m sure she would have found someway to blame me for it. I remember thinking at some point, back then, how normal this abuse was. If my own family did this to me, how could I hate others for doing it? Maybe I deserved it, because I was a bad person. Thinking that way didn’t help lessen the agony, but at least it made some sense to a scared and confused teenager.

All this time my brother managed to get worse and worse, in his behavior towards me and his own personal life. The sexual abuse had stopped abruptly, perhaps when I grew up to be almost as tall as him and much fatter than him. Perhaps he knew I could hurt him if he tried something. God knows, I would have. But the verbal abuse became worse. He would call me names, disgusting little monikers he would come up for me, in front of my mother who would pretend like nothing happened. He suffered in studies, barely managing to pass at the end of the year, delved into almost all vices a boy his age could — stealing money, cigarettes, gutkha, porn, and I think at one point even drugs. My mother made sure no one ever even got a whiff of all those things. For his poor academic performance her explanation was simple — my father focused so much in building my confidence that I had come to overshadow my brother. In my mother’s opinion, if I did well in studies, it wasn’t because I wanted to, it was because I wanted overshadow him. If I did well in extra-currics and won awards, it wasn’t because I had an interest in them, but because I wanted to show him down. I needed to be cut to my size, she often told my father. He, thankfully, never fell for this nonsense.

My father was one of those absent, but trying to be involved kinds. He tried to be a good provider (and that took a lot for a middle class family-man with a modest education and a small job). But most importantly, he tried to make me feel as significant a member of our family as my brother. To a large part, I owe the confidence I have now, the one that has become my shield over the years, to my father’s efforts. Hence, I could never bring myself to speak to him about it all. It would have broken him. So I just tried to end my life and the pain that came with it, once when I was eighteen and couldn’t take it anymore. An unsuccessful attempt, clearly; the only thing it managed to do was to give my mother a chance to prove to everyone what a ‘drama queen and attention seeker’ (her words) I was. That was the last time I thought of speaking to someone. I knew, by a concerted effort over the years, my own mother has killed my voice, buried it under the many bad attributes she had assigned to my personality in the opinion of our family and acquaintances. They all believed her of course, because they thought — as some of them have themselves come to confess to me in recent years — why would a mother say anything bad or vile about her own child unless it was, painfully, too true?

For reasons I will never understand, perhaps my naivete, perhaps the lack of any other option, for the better part of my twenties I tried to reconcile with my brother and my mother. Through years of reading about such things and introspection, I had come to a realization that my mother was a very sick woman. She needed help. Therapy. Medication even. I felt sad that she was born in an era when people in India weren’t receptive to such concepts much. My brother was also being groomed to be a exact version of her, in many ways. I tried to bury the past, so to speak. Told myself I was better off, because by then I had read and heard cases of little girls being sexually abused or raped by their own fathers. At least my brother was never able to inflict any major physical damage, I told myself. I was too young to understand that the real damage happened inside the folds of your soul. How the verbal, emotional and sexual abuse I had met in the hands of this mother-son duo was changing me inside, I was yet to register fully.

None of my efforts bore fruit of course. We distanced more and more, as we was destined to I suppose. Because there was only one way to get them to accept me into their fold, be a pathetic loser worse than my brother and worship him day and night. And with every achievement I gathered, I distanced and antagonized them more and more. On one occasion, it even culminated into physical assault by my brother. Something I could only save myself from by threatening to call the police. I was twenty-six then, educated and with a successful job; and yet I remember feeling so very small that day.

And then I did the absolute worst thing I could do in their opinion. I married a man of my choice from a religion we were taught to abhor. Thankfully my father stood by me. But that upset the mother-son duo even more. ‘How dare I do something like this, when even the boy of the family had an arranged marriage?’ was my mother’s lament. Of course, the people she lamented this to had no idea that my brother had had his own share of girl friends in his time (One of whom, I had reasonable evidence to believe, he had even impregnated, forced into an abortion and later dumped. My mother was aware of all this, of course. And the only reason none of his relationships materialized into marriage was his verbal and sexual monstrosity.) Anyway, hurt by my father’s decision to support me, my mother went to the extent of promoting lies like I physically assaulted my mother into submission for this decision, or that I was pregnant and hence had to get married. That a mother can get that vile for her own child, is a fact I would have never believed had all this not happened to me.

Anyway, I did marry that man, and every day I thank my stars that I did. That was my only escape from that life of hatred and repugnance. I finally got to leave behind the family I was unfortunately born in and yet was never meant to fit into; to build a new one of my own.

My mother died of a heart attack a few months after my wedding. Somehow, my brother managed to legitimize his hatred towards me using her death. He now openly claims that I killed my mother by breaking her heart through my reckless acts and decisions. Thankfully, all the people who matter to me, including my father do not believe him. But now he has cut me off from my father. I cannot visit him. I don’t speak to him for months. If my brother gets to know I visited, he creates an emotional hell for my father (who lives with him) the likes of which a retired old man like him doesn’t deserve. So I have no option but to back away.

But ever since the all these stories of sexual abuse survivors started surfacing, I haven’t been able to shake off this thought. This thought which made me speak up today. If it all came back to me, wouldn’t it all have come back to him too? Wouldn’t he too remember what he did to me? And could he not see how even after all that I tried to patch things with him and my mother? How delusional does he have to be to still try and cause me pain, when he knows he was the monster who smothered my childhood? How would he feel when reads this story? Would this anonymous piece, if it ever manages to reach him, remind him of what he did to his own little sister? More importantly, would he be ashamed of himself and try and make amends?

I do not yet know the answer to these questions. I just know that I want to move past this decades of pain and hatred. I have to. The toxicity of it all is killing me inside. I’m blessed enough to be married to a man I love and who loves me. I have a little boy who is nothing less than a blessing. I have a successful career in an art form I am passionate about. To sum it all up, I have everything I need to be a happy, wholesome person.

More importantly, through the #MeToo stories I have witnessed and learned of women who have endured much, much worse. The more I read their stories of exemplary courage in coming through it all, the more I was reminded of the smallness of mine. I have let this past and this pain control me for far too long. I had made this the axis of my life. And so I am the only person who can break away from it. I need to. I owe it to myself.

I realize I do not have space for this pain anymore, in my life or my heart.

My pain, my past, doesn’t define me. Not anymore.

I let it all go, today.