If you’ve survived sexual abuse, you probably already know that most people want your story to be digestible. They want a neat three-act structure: Act I, the before. Act II, the horror. Act III, the triumphant return to normalcy. They want to believe the “after” erases the “during.” That’s the thing that lets them sleep at night—the myth that trauma is a one-time storm and not a climate you’re forced to live in.
But you know better. You know survival isn’t the cinematic moment where you walk away from the wreckage in slow motion. It’s the Monday after, when you’re brushing your teeth, wondering why toothpaste tastes like metal. It’s years later, in a grocery store, when a certain aftershave or the sound of a zipper turns the air into static. It’s knowing you can be fine for weeks, even months, and then one small, invisible trigger can send you right back to the beginning.
People think sexual abuse changes you like a single event changes the plot of a story. In reality, it changes you like gravity changes your posture. Over time, without realizing it, you hunch in certain ways, adjust your gait, protect the fragile parts. You build instincts that feel like superpowers in some contexts—reading danger in someone’s tone of voice, sensing motives before they’re spoken—but feel like curses in others, like never quite believing anyone’s kindness is real.
You might also know the weird, complicated truth about survival: it’s not always about fighting. Sometimes it’s about playing dead. Sometimes it’s about saying the exact right thing to make the threat pass over you. Sometimes it’s about shrinking so small that the person hurting you forgets you’re even there. That doesn’t make you weak. That makes you strategic. You survived the game by learning the rules you never agreed to play.
And when the world talks about “moving on,” you probably understand that it’s more like “moving with.” You carry what happened the way you carry your own shadow—it’s not all of you, but it’s always there, stitched to your feet. Healing isn’t about cutting it off; it’s about learning how to walk without tripping over it. Some days, you’ll stumble. Some days, you’ll sprint. Both count.
Here’s the part no one says enough: what you did—what you keep doing—is extraordinary. You withstood something that was designed to fracture you in permanent ways. And maybe it did fracture you, but you kept the pieces. You’ve arranged them into a life. Maybe it’s a life that still aches in certain places, or one you’re still figuring out how to inhabit fully. But it’s yours. And that’s not nothing. That’s everything.
If you’re reading this right now, it means you’re still here. You’ve made it through moments that would have erased someone else. You’ve lived days where your only victory was breathing until the sun went down. You’ve felt like your skin didn’t belong to you and still managed to keep it. That is not a small thing. That is defiance.
I don’t know you. But I’m glad you’re still here.