A Personal Reflection Submission for the Rosa Parks Scholarship, 2006 Reclaiming my wounded soul I am voice where there was only silence. I am light where there was only darkness. I have a new life, and there is no room for your filth here. Thank you all for coming. My name is Elizabeth Chapman and my personal reflection is called Reclaiming my wounded soul. This essay was written in the spirit of Rosa Parks and her lifelong fight to give voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless. It is a voice for children so tiny and powerless; their voices too quite to hear. It s time to come out and say it. I was a victim of childhood incest. When I was no more than six months of age, my father began molesting me. This went on for two years. My mother left him, and took me and my sisters away. But the damage was done, and there was no undoing it. Dealing with incest sexual abuse at the hands of my father has been an incredibly difficult battle for me. In so many ways, because this terrible thing happened to me, I have had to reform myself. I can t take the hurt and harm back; I can only heal. But this wasn t a wound that just scarred me. It left an infection that still festered underneath. It caused me to feel guilt, though I wasn t at fault. It made me feel like I had a deep, dark secret to hide. It made me feel uncomfortable in my own skin. Worst of all, it made me feel like I had no real value unless some man, any man, wanted me. Sometimes the 1
irritation would come to the surface. I d get so desperate that I hurt myself. I d pull out my hair, scratch myself repeatedly with sharp keys, bang my head against a wall. Other times I contemplated whoring. Stripping down at a busy intersection and begging any man to take my body. Thankfully, I have a good head on my shoulders, and I never did this. But knowing that I thought about it is scary enough. The summer of my 18 th year, I started going to therapy. I wanted to get rid of the poison that was suffocating me. Everything I knew about men, relationships and about myself in relationships was wrong. It s like black was white and white was black. Like I was in a world where I didn t know the language. As I was working hard in therapy, I was also enrolled in college. I also began dating. It was like I had three lives. My school life, in which I have always excelled. My dating life, which was a complete and total disaster. And my real life, in which I peeled myself like an onion layer after painful layer. Soon my dating life began to show the signs of my childhood trauma. I had a serious boyfriend in high school, but now that I was single, eighteen and recently independent I was in a whole new, and entirely overwhelming situation. I found that men hit on me left and right. I was flattered. High on feeling attractive, young and single. I was naïve and easy prey. Flattery soon turned toxic. It intoxicated me. I dated a lot of men, too many of whom I had no business messing around with. I dated 34 year-olds, drug users, alcoholics, felons. Men who had no idea how to keep their own lives together. I won t blame my poor decisions on my father. I was old enough to make my own choices. I just convinced myself that what I was doing was OK. That it was OK for me to be in highly charged sexual relationships with not the best choices in men. That s what 18 year olds do, right? 2
The problem was, these relationships were all physical. And I couldn t seem to stop them from happening. From 18 until 20, I jumped from one man to another, physical relationship to physical relationship. I want to make it clear that I didn t have sex with most of these men. But that was only because I scared them off with my dysfunction. Things would heat up quickly, but then either I d get smart and get out, or I would spill my guts about my dad and they d run. Looking back I know I was looking for respect. I needed to be cherished, loved and desired for me and not my body. But the first message I got about love between men and women was flawed. My father taught me that love is shown physically. Sexually. That if I wanted to feel loved I d have to give free reign of my body. My brain knew that it was wrong, but I felt like I had to do it anyway. It was like an addiction. I was addicted to being physical. I was addicted to being considered attractive. I was so desperate for affection I didn t care too much where or how I got it. After my mother left my father there was no one else to fill that role. My older sister s male friends called themselves big brothers but they put the moves on when she wasn t around. An old family friend, a man that watched me grow up, flirted with me when I was a teenager, and when I turned 18 he said he wanted me now that I was legal. He was kidding, but only so much. There was no male figure in my life to show me that I was of value, not my body. And girls need that. It s too slippery a slope without it. So when all of the sudden men wanted me, and would approach me, I thought I might stumble into true affection. Maybe this guy would be Romeo. Maybe this would be my knight in shining armor. He never was and the situation only worsened. 3
I thought that it was oxymoronic to be in therapy about my father and to be out getting myself into bad situations with men I barely knew. But looking back now I realize that it was part of my therapy. I had to relearn a lot of things about men and women, and I couldn t just do that without experiencing male/female relationships. I couldn t just fix everything overnight. In a way I had to go through this in order to really dig into myself, find the broken me and nurse her back to health. I never liked what I was doing with these men. Not really. Like an addiction, I felt dirty, horrible, ashamed and depressed; I felt high too. But when the high wore off I panicked. The worst example of this happened with a man I dated. I told him if we were to have sex we needed to use a condom. But things progressed too quickly, and the next thing I knew we were both naked and he was putting himself into me without a condom because, he said, I was on birth control. I didn t want to have sex with him. I didn t want it, especially without a condom. But I panicked. I can t call it rape, and I don t know that he would have kept going if I had said stop, but the point is I couldn t say stop. I was frozen, with fear, disgust, sadness. I couldn t even open my mouth the slightest bit and say the tiny word no. I just stared at the flower print on my afghan and thought to myself I don t want to wake up in the morning. This is too terrible. I hate this. I want to die. He didn t seem to notice that I was in a whole other world. I know why I panicked. When I was my father s prey I was too young to speak. I had no choice but to lie there and take it. But just because I was 18 with a good vocabulary didn t mean that it was any different. I still froze up and took it. Swallowed more pain in the name of being the object of someone s affection, even if it wasn t really about me. 4
Even though this was all happening, other things at school really progressed. I became involved in campus life, made good grades and a lot of friends. I also decided to take the self-defense classes offered by the Department of Public Safety. In one semester I took all three classes they offered (basic, keychain and advanced). I loved it. I started to learn how to use my voice. To yell NO! at the top of my lungs. I learned how to fight panic and how to fight for my body. But it didn t change me overnight. I still freaked out in the arms of men. I was still confused as to what a healthy relationship looked like. I was still horribly wounded. Therapy got deeper. The layers were bringing me closer and closer to my deepest pain. I felt like this pain defined me. That under my A grades and good work ethics and hopes and dreams I was nothing more than the body my father abused. For this reason I held onto it and to him. To let go was to give up my core self. My father and I share a special relationship. I was his firstborn daughter (my older sister has a different father). We both have red hair and blue eyes. We are both smart. And we have the same birthday. I was daddy s little girl, even if it was in the sickest way imaginable. But it was something to hold on to. And all girls love their fathers no matter what. And the small child inside of me loved him fiercely. She couldn t understand the pain he had caused. So when I finally found under all those layers, the child whose innocence he had stolen, my world turned on its head. Those Thursdays in therapy were the hardest days of my life. I would literally stagger home. I would crawl into bed, suck my thumb and hold on to my oldest stuffed teddy bear. She was at the surface. So scared and raw. And I was the adult. The adult who was finally going to show her the right way, finally going to treat her right. I rocked her. I 5
talked to her the way you talk to a small child. I told her she was beautiful and that I would take care of her. I told her that I wouldn t let anyone hurt her anymore. And when I got stuck or confused she told me what to do that was right for both of us. She became a voice in the silence. She became my light in the dark. And she helped me rebuild myself without his poison inside me. I regained some innocence, trust and even peace. I let go of a lot of the anger, and grew to realize I no longer had anything to fear. I think right around that time everything started to calm down. Because now I had a promise to keep to a small child, even if she wasn t real and was a part of me. Eventually I got into a relationship that was stable. Admittedly, it was all about sex at first. But he respected me, and when I panicked I could voice it and he would let me go, or hold me, or let me cry. We became friends and I trusted him. I began to feel like I was giving my body, not that he was taking it. I became comfortable with my sexuality and my body. I felt like I was walking down the right path, not the ones that had led so often into despair. I was in control. I wasn t addicted to the high. I didn t want the high. I just wanted him to laugh at my jokes, and he did. I wrote this because I want to share with the world my story. It is yet another part of my healing process. It is my way of saying that my father s abuse no longer chains me down. For years it has been the force that pushed me to prove myself and to succeed. But it no longer has the same hold on me. I have remade myself. I have learned to trust myself, fight for myself, know myself. I m not going to lie. Sometimes I m still afraid. It s always hard to have a birthday or to watch a father push his daughter on a swing. And sometimes he seems so close I can almost smell him. But I don t live in fear of him, or other men, any more. I 6
can t take it back. The scars will never go away. But I know that I am stronger now. Braver now. And more powerful than he could ever imagine. I wrote this reflection because too often I felt like I was the only one. I felt alone in a shame that wasn t mine. And it consumed me and owned me for too many years. As a child I had no voice, and I couldn t protect myself. I couldn t make sense of things, and I blamed myself. I am done with that. I am announcing that I did nothing wrong. This was done against me. He molested me. He took what wasn t his to take. There is no excuse. There is nothing that can take it back. I was innocent. I was a victim, and I was his daughter. He betrayed me. I didn t betray myself by letting him do it to me. I didn t let him. I am different now. I am a certified self-defense instructor. I am well-known on campus. I am about to graduate from college with honors. I have a new boyfriend and we don t even have sex, a mutual decision. He respects me. He treats me with genuine affection, the kind I searched my whole life for. But even without all that, I would still be different, because I now know in my deepest core, that I need validation from no man. I can make myself feel valid. But I wouldn t be here if I had let my father stop me. If I had chosen to be a victim and not a survivor. Reclaiming my wounded soul was the hardest fight of my life. The most painful. But the most rewarding. I have scars. But the festering infection is gone. I feel pain sometimes, and I know I always will. I can never know what it would be like to sit on my father s knee without it being threatening. He won t give me away on my wedding day. We can never have that relationship I so craved and so needed in life (and still crave and need). But I have learned what love between a man and woman is supposed to look like. And I learned it by holding that small child that was me. It s 7
about love, compassion, laughter, integrity, honesty, RESPECT. I love myself that way, and I expect no less from others. I deserve that, just like all people do. Thank you. 8