By KATE PIERCE
News/Managing Editor
It’s been eight whole years since the worst night of my life. What I didn’t know then is that night was also the beginning of freedom.
October is domestic violence awareness month. Domestic violence can take many forms, among partners, children, and roommates. It can consist of physical and verbal abuse, which at times can be explained away by victims.
This month is also the anniversary of when the eleven years of violence that my family was subjected to became something more than just “kidding around.” It became life threatening.
Reflecting back to October of 2009 from this current point in my life, I have realized that I now know the advice I needed when I was younger:
It definitely doesn’t seem like it now, but you are going to be okay.You are going to rise above the hurt, the shame, and especially the fear.
You have every right to be angry, to be upset. Even now, you still have the right to be angry and upset – but you’ll learn that it is easy to get stuck in these feelings. To move forward you should focus on your goals.
Your goals that you’ve set – to go to college, to become a journalist, to make lifelong friends, to live genuinely, and to graduate from college – those are all going to happen because you are driven. Your drive will help to pull you out of the pain, and into your future.
Along the way you’ll even get the chance to do crazy things you never even imagined, like go to the college of your dreams, write for several newspapers, officiate weddings, go on trips around the state, get an internship, buy your own car, work with amazing people who will change your life, and not only graduate from college – but graduate a whole year early.
I’m not saying it has been or will be easy. You will still feel uncomfortable and unsafe when people raise their voices, and when you apologize over and over people won’t understand why – won’t understand that you need to apologize to feel safe.
Little things will pull you back to that time in your life, and you will panic, not only worrying about how you are going to overcome it, but how to do that without being able to explain what it is you are going through.
You won’t be able to say his name without freezing up, and you will even struggle to consider yourself a survivor, and not just a victim.
You are a survivor. You won’t like calling yourself that, because survivor sounds like a word reserved for the people who live after a plane crash, or overcome illnesses. But just because your hardship is not the same as others’ does not mean that you have not survived.
You survived the verbal and physical abuse. You survived the trauma. You survived the gossip. You survived the overwhelming desire to give up on everything, everyone, and even your own life.
Not just once, will you survive each of those things. You will survive it every time, and you will continue to not only survive but thrive. Even though this experience will always be a part of who you are, it will not define you.
Live by the words of Beau Taplin’s short poem Unstoppable: “She was unstoppable. Not because she did not have failures or doubts, but because she continued on despite them.”You will not want to talk about it, and that is okay.
You will go eight entire years of not being able to talk about it. I still don’t want to talk about it – I just realized that I need to talk about it. You will come to find out that you know other people going through similar experiences, and you can use your message to give the help you needed.
You can use your hurt and your pain, and turn it into healing.
