Letters have always been a beautiful landscape to me, one I could write as freely upon as the breeze blowing across the Minnesota summer trees, the one place where I could know someone was listening, even if it was just God. The one space where I could watch the ink from my pen sinking permanently into the paper, putting the truth into an 8 ½ by 11 frame that no one could deny or question or try to manipulate or spin or call me an outright liar for finally saying out loud.
Journals for years were the keepers of the letters I wrote to myself, the liberators of secrets I could tell no one but that journal. My story sadly is not a unique one, but it’s still mine, and being able to tell it now for the first time on what is really not just a letter to my sister but an open one to the whole world about what happened to me and can happen to you if you don’t know how to tell your truth to those who don’t want to hear it. Or who might be afraid, who have a FEAR of hearing a truth that shatters their perfect picture of who someone is. Someone they could never see in the light or shade you or I might have, especially when you know the shards are going to cut everyone who that truth hits and hurts. Sometimes letters are written but not intended to be open until years afterwards, simply because healing is within and why expose so much pain to those who will not be open to hear my truth. Exposing truth too soon as a wounded soul potentially could jeopardize my credibility, due to my lack of self-love, confidence and courage to stand my ground.
That was one of the reasons for years, my letters to myself were the only places I could have those conversations no one wanted or would have wanted to have with me. Its where I could listen to how they would all play out the aftermath of the truth, how little they wanted to hear it, to consider it, to decide it was easier to say it didn’t happen at all or that I somehow invited it. Women have only in recent times become reliable narrators when trying to tell the truth about sexual assault, it was watered down for so many, diluted to the point by those in positions of authority who didn’t want to do anything about it that it might as well have not happened at all.
Dear Tammy,
I can’t believe it’s been such a crazy year! You turned 14, and you’re doing so great! You’re on the Track Team and made the Honor Roll, that felt nice, having mom’s attention, she even ordered us Pizza to celebrate when she saw the report card. She loves for everything to look easy with less responsibility, no drama, after all, my brother just got home from his latest stay at Juvi…
But who can you turn to about what’s been going on? Who could you tell? Would they believe you? He’d just deny it, say I was making it up, maybe he’d hurt me worse than he’s already tried to. I can’t imagine what must go on in those places to him to turn him into this much of a monster, my own brother…
If I could go live with Daddy, I would right now, but I’ve already asked and I’m not sure who, but somebody said it “Wasn’t a good idea right now sweetie,” it could be my Grandma or my mom… I just want it to stop. I spend the night at friends’ houses when he’s home, but then there’s been nights when I thought he was gone for the night with his friends and instead, he came home fucked up and I had to hide. I feel like the closet is the safe place, and the monster is outside trying to get in… Stay strong and be quiet, xoxo”
Society thought for a long time that sweeping it under the rug would eventually turn the truth to dust, that somehow the victim would even get distance by running far enough away from it. But if you’ve never let go of that fear, you hold onto it even more tightly, even if it’s chasing you, or haunting you, and that’s the experience the victim has even if everyone else has moved on. The fear only tightens its grip around you if you don’t have any room to let your truth breath, its suffocating but it doesn’t kill any pain. You just live with it almost analogous to something like a message in a bottle you’ve thrown like a desperate castaway out into the universe, praying it reaches someone who can save you.
Dear Tammy,
ITS TIME TO GO!!! You need to get out of that house before Tony and Mary come back? Thank God they are gone now, back to Juvi again, but now… How do you explain to your older sister that her boyfriend is trying to hurt you… I’m afraid he’ll do it again when she comes home. Sometimes you must just feel like a rag doll, even though everyone tells you you’re as beautiful as a Barbie Doll…
Remember you’re a fighter, a winner, and not a sinner, not NEAR as bad as your siblings anyway. You make your mom proud whether she tells you enough or not because you stay out of trouble and on the straight and narrow, and it’s going to take you somewhere better in life, better than where you are right now. Better than you feel about yourself right now. You’re strong, and you’ll survive, but you need to tell someone if it doesn’t stop, xoxo
What I learned in the long run is you can only save yourself. I started saving myself when I was 15 and moved out of my mother’s house, enrolled myself in high school across the country and began living a grown-up’s life while I was still very much a child. I’d been on a solo path most of my life up to that point, the youngest of NINE half-brothers and half-sisters, with a single mother who’d rather go out and date than stay home and raise me, and an alcoholic father who I loved dearly but who’s moments of affection randomly depended on whether he was sober or not that day. He loved me, and to be clear, was NEVER one of my abusers, but his absence facilitated an environment where a vulnerable little girl was like a lamb being led to the slaughter for the right predators.
Those letters to myself in my journals were often my only escape from all of that. A place where I could hope, where I could re-invent, where I could pretend, where I could make some sense of the unexplainable, the unspoken… Not just of things I couldn’t say, but of things that weren’t said to me that a small child needs to hear to feel love, to see it reinforced day in and out, my letters were a world of words where I could give myself those reassurances, those explanations for absences I lived with in my real life. Why my mother was gone so much… why my father had left our family. Making sense of my childhood as a child was like piecing together a collage, a patchwork of moments of happiness woven within a much larger quilt that sought to not cover me, but cover up so much of what was going on.
Drugs and alcohol were another escape in the houses I grew up in, both for my parents and older siblings, and eventually me when I was barely old enough. Sadly, they were also a gateway for me to walk through into black-outs where those I trusted became those who took advantage of me at my weakest. Still, though I almost got sucked into that black hole, what always pulled me back out was the fear of becoming like them. I wanted a better life for myself, and so when I was 15, left school, wrote my mom a letter and headed West for brighter horizons. The letter was actually written before she’d came home one afternoon and found me packing, but it still gave her more depth on why I felt ready enough at 15 years old to be on my own. The fact she didn’t try to stop me from leaving told me everything I need to know about how she’d feel about my absence.
“Dear Tammy,
You made it! You’re free, free of threats and fears that in spite of whatever might be in front of you, lets the future be a reminder to you that they’re in your past. You’re in control of who you let in, and you don’t have to shut the world off, you can embrace life as a normal teenager for the first time in your life. Turn the radio up as loud as you want kid, you’re free, enjoy the people you’ve come to trust as your friends, and make as many new ones as you want. Make new sisters if you feel that close, a family of them who actually care about you, who love you the way family should feel. I’m not telling you to go out and join a cult! (laughs) But don’t be afraid to be in love with Mike, your heart led you this far, and his letters helped bring you here, so make sure to give that romance a chance, xoxo”
I’d been raising myself for years, and unlike most kids who run away at 15 with no support system out into the great unknown, usually to less-than-ideal ends, I knew where I was going and even re-enrolled in high school once I arrived. From there, letters became my control of the amount of freedom I kept between myself and the past. I loved to write myself letters in the future when I was that age, where I’d reach out to my 25 year-old self and talk about how life was going for me: I owned my own business, I was married to a man and a family who loved me, hadn’t started a family of my own yet but was well on my way to building the picture-perfect life.
Things wouldn’t quite work out that as life rolled forward, but no matter how my life was going once I was out on my own, if I wanted to tell my family back home about it I could, and if I didn’t, I didn’t. Those letters kept the parts of life I wanted to share and those that were mine separate and apart from each other so I had room to breathe once I was living on my own. I found work right away, had my own apartment and was attending High School, and really thankful for the family I’d made among my roommates and friends, vs. those I was forced to live with and in really unhealthy and unsafe situations before I’d left home. Looking back on it now, I felt safer with strangers…
Being on your own for the first time, life is just rushing at you, first in how easy it actually can be at first to afford to live on your own if you have roommates, and at the same time, how scary it can be if you don’t know the person you’re living with the way you thought you did. It was in letters from this person that I was partially drawn to move across the country, it was the words, the emotions, the conveyance of wanting me in his life that had pulled so strong on my heart strings that I eventually couldn’t stand being away from him. When you couple that with not being able to stand where I was living with my absentee mother, the perfect storm was created. The letters I’d written him back leading up to when I finally took the leap of faith and moved out on my own had been filled with my own dreams, my own desires, my own hopes for the future… First, we have to talk about the past.
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