As good of a transcription as I came up with of when I told Noah the things from my childhood. It was the first time I had really sat down and tried to tell all of the details like this.

“I push and prod at these different parts of your psyche and I can see where damage was done, but you don’t seem to be broken now. I can’t find any cracks in your mind to push on. I don’t get it. How did you fix the damage?”
She had to ponder this for a few minutes. She looked down at her bowl of vanilla soft serve with caramel topping and considered her psychological damage. She bit her lips compulsively trying to figure out how to answer.
“How much do you actually know about my past? I’m not sure what I have told you specifically or what I have alluded to.”
He leaned in, in that earnest way of his, and looked pensive. “Well, I believe that you have been sexually abused. I don’t know if by one person or many. I strongly suspect that there was a family member based on some of your proclivities, but I don’t know for sure. That’s about it though. You haven’t given me any details.”
She pulled back into the booth trying to eliminate whatever closeness he had created. She started thinking back over her life and felt pain. She closed her eyes and tried to school her features to blandness. It is an old battle, one she rarely wins—to remain composed while thinking about old hurts.
“How much do you want to know? I can give you a general over view and let you understand the scope without bothering you with details or I can tell you all that I am able given memory blips and composure issues.”
“I would like to know everything you are comfortable sharing with me. Be as detailed as you want to be.”
More minutes passed in silence as she sat with her eyes closed. Swimming through the memories of pain is like living through them again. She debates pushing it away. There is no room for this pain in her life right now. But as the pain surfaces and envelopes her something pushes to the front of her mind.
“You want to know me.”
“Yes, I do. You fascinate me. I like you.”
“Do you think hearing about my past will change how you feel about me? Will you think I am more broken?”
“No. I evaluate you based on your behavior with me, and how your life is right now. That will not change. I will have more context and depth to my view of you, but that is all. I won’t stop liking you no matter what has happened to you.”
She closed her eyes and tried to let that soak in. She desperately wanted to believe him. She has never been able to trust that her past wouldn’t influence how people feel about her. She has usually been let down by people who claim that they will still feel the same way. Somehow this boy is different. Somehow his intensity will carry her through this.
“Let’s go to the mall.”
“Uhm, ok. Any specific reason?”
“I feel safe in public places. And I know I won’t break down crying in public. I won’t let myself. If I’m going to tell you this shit I’m not going to make myself even more vulnerable by crying in front of you.”
“Anything you need.”
The drive over to the mall was very tense for her. She compulsively gripped and released the steering wheel. Her knuckles were totally white and when she noticed she tried to relax. She hates revealing her stress.
They got to the mall and walked in companionably. He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her in close to his body. He isn’t a big man, and she isn’t a small girl, but somehow he makes her feel small and safe. He will protect her from anything that comes up—even her own fears and ghosts. She pushed herself to smile in order to acknowledge how good the posture feels.
“Would you prefer to hear things mostly chronologically, or do you want to hear stuff in some sort of relative order based on crappiest to most mundane or vice versa?”
“Probably chronologically would help me to understand things the best.”
“Understand of course that I will jump around a little because things get fuzzy in my head. I’m sure I will leave things out in this brain dump. I may wander backwards and forwards finishing one string of events before I move on to another.”
“That is perfectly understandable.”
They walked slowly for a while past the stores. She pondered stopping and grabbing ice cream, even though she had just had some, just because it would give her an excuse for pausing. She tried to start a few times, she opened her mouth and nothing came out. She pulled away from his embrace and sat down on a bench. She needed to be able to look at him sometimes and still have an excuse to not look at when she felt scared. Facing forward on a bench is a great excuse.
“You know that I was ridiculously ‘precocious’ when it comes to sex, right?”
“I know that you started giving blow jobs at an age most people would consider horrific, but I don’t know what the age was.”
“I was four. The fact that I started giving blowjobs at four makes me think that something probably happened to me before then that made me inclined to behave sexually, but I can’t remember what. My parents divorced when I was three because my mother discovered that my father was molesting my sister. My sister says he had been doing it since she was a toddler but she never told our mother. My mom only found out because my sister confided in a friend who told her mother who told my mother. Very stupid and soap opera-ish, isn’t it?”
He reached for her hand, certainly in a gesture of goodwill, but she pulled it back as if he was trying to burn her. If he touched her right then she would lose it. She can’t lose it right at the beginning. That isn’t dignified.
A long deep breath, she let it out very slowly and began again. “As far as sexual stuff goes I remember choosing to fool around with a lot of different boys during the next few years after that. If I played with a boy at all I was likely to suck his cock. I don’t think I used that terminology, but it happened anyway. That was the main way I managed to relate to males.”
“When I was seven I was raped for the first time. It was awful. I had a fight with my mother right after it happened and I didn’t feel safe talking to her about it, so I didn’t tell anyone.”
“I bottled it up inside and squashed it down and tried to pretend it didn’t exist. It was even more important that I push down how I felt about it because not long afterwards my brother was hit by a car while he was riding his bike.”
“My mother had to rush to where my brother was living with our dad to take care of him. We had been living in Texas and my brother was still in Los Angeles with our father. This was the first time she abandoned me. She left me with my sister for a few weeks with the understanding that some distant friend of hers would drive me cross-country eventually.
I didn’t know her friend or any of the other people in the vehicle. I was a scared little girl crammed into a van with a bunch of strangers for days on end. I was desperate to see my mom because I felt totally alone and scared.
When I got to where she was staying in LA she ignored me. My brother was in a coma and she spent all of her waking hours with him. She sent me off to live with some friends of the family.”
“You say it was the first time she abandoned you?”
“Yeah, she made a habit of it over the years. I have lived in over 40 places and my mother has lived in fewer than half of them with me. I would stay with people that I didn’t even know sometimes. I wondered more than once if foster care would really be any worse and if I shouldn’t just run away and get put in the system.”
“Anyway, not too long after this stuff happened I ended up living with my mom, my sister, my nephew—he was born while my brother was in the coma—and my brother in a ghetto neighborhood in LA—this was after my brother was out of the coma and released from the intensive hospital but before he was moved to permanent group home status—we lived in that house for 18 months, one of the longest stretches of living anywhere for my life before I was 16.”
“To say I hated living there is such a complete understatement as to be laughable. I tested into GATE there and that was cool. Well, it was cool until the GATE kids beat me up for having too many answers in the after school enrichment program. The fucking smart kids hated me for being smart. I just can’t win.” She tried to smile and look at him. Making fun of herself was the only way she could try to break the tension.
“While we were living there my brother would come into my room at night with a knife.”
“He was trying to kill me. He hated me for being normal when he wasn’t anymore. This is why I can’t sleep by myself,” she looked up trying to keep back tears. This is a pointed example of one of the ways in which she really is broken. He smiled at her reassuringly and stroked her shoulder.
He said, “That makes a lot of sense to me. I haven’t been sure if there was a concrete thing in your past motivating that or if it was generic fear. It seems perfectly logical to me though.”
“He had a really bad brain injury and it wasn’t possible to completely recover from it. While we lived there he went from being in a wheelchair to using a walker. That was significant progress.”
All of a sudden she jerked back from his touching her. She started breathing harder and faster. She closed her eyes and tried to push the tears away. “While we were living in LA I made friends with a boy who was a little older than me. I felt safe around him for some reason. It was one of the stupidest things I have ever done in my life. I told him about being raped. He decided that the best response to my admission was to sodomize me. That is why I can’t have anal sex. I was nine and he did a rather significant amount of damage to me.”
“Once those tissues have been significantly damaged, and scar tissue has built up, the scar tissue is like a dotted line and will tear over and over again. I could barely walk home when it happened because I was in so much pain. I don’t remember what exactly had happened with my brother, but my mom and my sister were screaming about something. I went straight to my bedroom and crawled into bed and cried.”
She couldn’t suppress a small sob, “And a few weeks later when I was walking home from school I was gang raped. Shit like that doesn’t happen, right? Apparently my mouth had managed to piss off a few too many people with gang connections and they wanted to make an example of me,” her voice broke off. She put her hand up and covered her eyes. Maybe if she couldn’t see him, he wouldn’t be able to see her pain.
It took a few minutes of breathing slowly and deeply to be able to continue. “Eventually my brother was placed in full time group care because my mom and sister couldn’t really take care of him full time. We moved to Apple Valley to follow him to a care facility. This was one of the crappiest places I have lived. And let me tell you anything is better than LA after the experiences I had there. So for about four years my life was just hell on earth.”
“I could tell you all the hideousness that makes up Apple Valley and then I won’t stop talking for a month. I hated Apple Valley with a flaming passion. After living there for six months I couldn’t leave my house because the kids in the neighborhood would literally sit on my front lawn waiting for me to come outside so they could beat me up. Ok, so I was a nasty bitch, but did I deserve that?”
He put his hand out again. This time he just left it near her body instead of making contact. She looked down at it and put her fingers in his palm. He curled up around them. She smiled. That much contact didn’t scare her.
“Despite the hideous things that happened when I was in LA I consider Apple Valley worse for a few specific reasons. It was when we were in Apple Valley that my father molested me. It went on for a while.” She stopped and looked down. “That was one of the most hideous things to happen to me. It was worse than being raped. It was worse than any of the physical damage that the other events caused. I could somehow manage to get the other people out of my head and still function. I couldn’t get my father out of my head.”
Her voice got softer, almost a whisper: “strangers hurting me is a bad, horrible thing—but my father hurting me invalidates all of my safety and security within my home.” Then she gasped.
“And I still didn’t tell anyone.”
“After you are hurt this many times it becomes almost a reflex to deal with the pain on your own. I learned how to be in my head alone and not share that space with anyone. For years it seemed like no one cared. Right before we left Apple Valley my mom decided to sue my father for more child support. I told her that he had molested me. I told her those words and wouldn’t give her any details or supporting evidence. She didn’t push; I kind of wonder if she even cared. She used the leverage for more money and then we were gone. We moved back up to the bay area.”
“This move was right before I turned 13 and it was after this move that I knew I didn’t want to leave the bay area ever again. Ok, I like traveling and going on vacations to other places—but this is my home and the only place I have ever felt good for an extended period.”
“I haven’t really even been that safe here though. When I was fifteen I had a break down. I completely lost it. I had been a cutter for years, since right after my brother’s accident, and I tried to kill myself very seriously a few times when I was fifteen. Overdosing and slicing my arms open.” She looked down and traced a path along her arm, “I still have scars.”
“I went in an out of psychiatric wards that year. I had so much trouble keeping myself together at all. Eventually I hooked up with a really amazing therapist and I credit her with keeping me from succeeding in killing myself. I still keep in touch with her and let her know how my life is going. She considers me one of her rare happy endings. I like believing that my life so far looks like a happy ending.”
“It is harder to explain all of the things that happened through this period. I learned how to make friends. I learned what stability felt like. I learned how to control my mouth. I started feeling like maybe I was worth something. Then my father pulled some shit.”
“I was in AP classes and getting shit at school for not doing adequate research and I didn’t type my papers. I called my father and told him that I needed a computer for school. I was sixteen. He told me that he would give me a computer if I came and visited him for a weekend. I told him that I would see if mom could get the time off work—the custody agreement said I wasn’t to see him alone. He told me that either I came by myself or I couldn’t have a computer.”
“That was the straw that broke the camels back for me. I hung up the phone and called the sheriff’s department and began the process of pressing charges. My mom came home from work to find a sheriff in our house taking my statement. She was really bewildered. Talk about a shit storm.”
“My fathers side of the family banded together against me and declared me a malicious liar. Despite the fact that when my father was taken in for questioning they kept him in jail long enough to detox him, he was a serious speed freak and alcoholic, and he confessed to everything. He told the police details of things I didn’t even remember. I never learned what those details were though because the trial didn’t happen.”
“My brother killed himself three months before the trial.”
“He went to a gas station and bought a container of gasoline. Then he walked behind a shopping center and doused himself with gasoline. Then he lit himself on fire. He burned 80% of his body. The hospital kept him on life support for a little while. Probably the only magnanimous thing my father has ever done was letting my brother die.”
“My family blamed me.”
“I went out to Michigan to visit my aunts right after my brothers death because it had been planned and paid for long in advance—there wasn’t a good excuse for them to cancel the trip. My aunt told me that I was not allowed to tell my cousins how or why my brother died. They thought he passed away because of complications of the accident. I wasn’t allowed to tell them that I was prosecuting my father. There was some strange thing that happened while I was there and I said, ‘Damnit’ in front of my aunt’s new husband. She spent three hours yelling at me about my disgusting mouth and how I had no right to speak to her husband like that. I haven’t really talked to her since.”
“My dad killed himself the morning his trial was to begin. He took the cowards way out and sat in his garage with the motor running. He left notes for everyone in the family. Mine was the only one ever released though because everything went into evidence files. I got mine because I was the prosecuting witness or something. He told me that he died in peace knowing that my suffering had just begun. He told me that he was killing himself in order to avoid killing me for murdering his son. He told me that I was an evil liar and god would punish me for it.”
“This from a man who told me that I should investigate black magic when I was ten.”
“I still haven’t really spoken to my fathers family. Once in a while I send Christmas cards but they aren’t acknowledged. For all I know they throw them away as soon as they see who they are from.”
“It was kind of amazing though. Not long after my father died I realized that I didn’t have anything bad in my life anymore. The main sources of stress were simply gone. It was an interesting thing to realize.”
“I feel like I bided my time until I turned eighteen. Nothing much happened. I went to school and built some of the most important relationships of my life. I met some people who became an incredible support network for me. They liked me and appreciated me. Over time I became less bitter and angry. I started making peace with the monsters in my head.”
“Right when I turned eighteen my boyfriend asked me to marry him. That was interesting. I think we were going to get married just because it wasn’t ok with his parents that we were living together without being married. Not the best reason in the world. I realized that it was a bad reason and left two months before the wedding.”
“Despite the abrupt ending the relationship was incredibly significant to me. He was the first person I sat down and told the entire story of all the hideousness of my life to. He loved me anyway. He accepted me despite my huge areas of instability. He was willing to help me deal with my shit even though he had no background for understanding it. I will never stop being grateful to him for the impact he had on my self-esteem.”
“My life since then has been really amazing. You know about it already though. You know about my partner. You know how I have learned self-confidence. There are many people in my life who accept me for who I am, warts and all.”
He interrupted her, “But how did you manage to heal though? How come you aren’t still a mess?”
“Well, I decided that I wasn’t going to be broken anymore. Let me draw a picture for you: if someone managed to go through their entire life with absolutely nothing bad ever happening there will be a picture. But that almost never happens. Usually there are small cracks through the picture, fissures of hurt or bad stuff. Sometimes, if the stuff is bad enough, the whole picture is dropped and it shatters into hundreds or millions of pieces. It looks like a jigsaw puzzle now. People try frantically to put the jigsaw puzzle back together because they want the picture to be the same again. They always know the cracks in the picture are there and they are never happy with it.”
“My picture was dropped and shattered before it even had a change to be made. I never knew what the picture was supposed to look like. So I have all these weird ass jigsaw puzzle pieces. If I put chunks of it together and there are weird cracks, I don’t see them as cracks. I just see the picture they are now. I don’t have any basis for comparison for the picture being anything other than what it is. I like the picture I have made out of the pieces. I think it is beautiful. I think that is how I manage to be more stable in my shit than lots of other people are. I have learned that nothing is ever going to be “normal” for me, it just is. And I’m ok with that.”
“Does that make sense?”
“Yeah, it does. I’ve never thought of it that way.”
“Do you still like me?”
“Yes.”

And he still likes me.