I really didn’t know how I was going to start this. There are so many emotions and so many things to be said of what has happened that has led to this very moment in my life. I suppose I will start out by saying that I went to an author reading here where I live. There were seven authors and they were all beautiful and talented writers and they all wrote from their soul and were brave enough to make a book and then to get in front of people and read from their book. I know as a writer that when we share something we have written, we are sharing a piece of who we are because so much goes into our writing and into writing a book. It is like seeing into the window of an author’s soul that they are so willingly and so bravely vulnerable enough to share. A woman sat down next to me and asked me if I was one of the author’s. It was like God was shaking me awake and telling me to write and telling me I could do this, I could be one of these people who touch another person’s heart the way these authors did for me tonight. While all the other authors were magnificent, it wasn’t until the last author that it really hit home what happened to me when I was younger. I will get into it in just a minute, but I wanted to go back to the part about me becoming an author. One of my very good friends told me tonight that that could be me because I was a good writer. I have never considered myself to be a good writer. I have proper grammar except for the run on sentences, but I am always trying to find a way to convey what it is that I am feeling or what it is I want my readers to feel. I do not always do a very good job and sometimes words evade me. I love to write, but most of my creative writing comes from a place of pain or a place of unhealthy mental stability. What I mean by that is when I am in a hypomanic state of my mental illness everything is go go go and never stop. I have been equated to the energizer bunny several times in my life. And with this constant going of my mind comes this most amazing creative side of me that just lets things out and lets things flow and lets my fingers fly. But it is not always a great place to be. Often in this state, I am irritable, grouchy, irrational, impulsive, and much delusions of grandiosity occurs and sometimes down right morbid at the existence of life and mankind. This hypomania often leads to a drop into depression so sharp and so suddenly, it is like being hit by a bus. And people can’t understand why. I am supposed to be on medication, a mood stabilizer that levels the highs and lows. Often with this medication, I am more stable mentally, but I lose so much of the creativity and my writing suffers. This is why many creative people with mental illnesses do not take medication. They do not like losing that side of themselves. I probably should be on medication, but I am choosing to try to overcome my mental illness through mindfulness of my actions and what I do when I start to feel a certain way. I have probably digressed somewhat, but that is okay. Tonight is about purging thoughts and emotions that need to be purged in order to heal. So this last author’s reading was about sexual abuse. She warned us, so that if anyone needed to leave they could. I am not sure if anyone did because I was sitting up front on the comfy couch. I knew that this reading would probably trigger me based on my conversations with my therapist. My therapist is convinced that I have PTSD, apparently not just for soldiers returning from war. I have always equated my post traumatic stress to the night I found out my dad had committed suicide when I was seventeen. My therapist agrees that this was a traumatic night indeed and has probably added to the heightened anxiety I feel at night, but there was something else that she said that makes sense. She asked me if I had ever been sexually abused or molested. When I was six years old, I was first sexually molested, I say molested, because sounds less harsh than sexually abused, for my abuser was only twelve at the time. I am pretty sure I have repressed memories from all the times it occurred, but with that suppression, I also blocked out other memories from when his younger brother did it and even my own brother. They were all young teens then, maybe a little older, but I have always thought of it has something not that bad because a. They were family and b. They were so young. I look at it now and realize how wrong I am. This is wrong and atrocious to do to a young girl. But it wasn’t even the act itself that was horrific, it was the fact that these young boys were supposed to be my family, my protectors. These two other boys were supposed to be like brothers to me. So, I am adopted and was since I was four months old. I also have a complex about belonging. I am not sure if that is just an adoption thing or if that is because when I was supposed to belong, I didn’t. I was so disposable as a human being for this family that those who were supposed to watch out for me, hurt me. Did they see me as this toy, that they could play with and dispose of because, hey, I wasn’t family, I was adopted. And even now as I write, I cannot express what it is I am feeling right now. Because these three boys are men with children of their own and they are still very involved with my family, being one is my brother. I still feel like I can’t say anything to this day because I am afraid my family will choose them over me because I’m just adopted. When I was six, I did tell about the older boy and it stopped, but the other times it happened with the other boys have gone unmentioned because I am pretty sure it happened after other boy stopped. I have this morbid picture in my mind where they are all sitting around talking and one is telling the other try this or do this, it’s okay, she’s adopted, she’s not really our family. So in hopes of healing by writing this down and getting it out and acknowledging the harm that was done to me, I write this with tears and a heavy heart. Because I sometimes ask myself, if I could block this trauma from my brain, what other traumas have I erased that have happened. It is a scary thought to realize that things could have happened to me that I don’t even remember and are they true or are they just me making up stories in my head as I do. I may never know or maybe one day I will remember when I am ready. If anything, this writing tonight has started my path of healing hopefully. I want you to know that if you have ever been sexually abused or molested, you are not alone, which can be a disheartening thing, but it also means that you do not have to travel this road alone and if there is one thing I want you to take away from this is that you are not at fault, you did nothing wrong, you are beautiful, bold, and strong.