It's been almost six years that I've maintained a deep dark secret, unwilling and feeling unable to relinquish the burden on my shoulders. Caring friends and family offered their empathy, but could never actually hear the full story. I have been shunned into a tormenting silence and finally, I feel the strength, ability, and courage to unveil a darkened past that I have.
I'm blessed to say that I am not a victim, but a survivor. I survived a relationship built on the basis that I was to be a follower. I was to obey instructions given to me by someone who claimed he loved and cared for me. I was silenced at a fragile age when development and maturity were just reaching me. I was quieted and forbidden to have an opinion. What I thought no longer mattered to my friends and family, but more importantly, it didn't matter to me. I was a slave, by my innocent ability to trust someone who knew exactly how to manipulate me.
The pain that I felt, the bruises that I obtained, the nights of pure numbness are distant memories that still bring goose bumps to my skin and shivers down my back. I am haunted by the past that I permitted myself to have. I believed in a lie, when the truth was directly in front of my face. The only reason I ever pulled back and tried to better myself was for a savior. A guy who became one of my closest friends saved me, in a time when I didn't even realize I needed to be saved.
While you spat the cruel words and lifted your hands to me, I was most scared of myself. I couldn't get myself to leave. I didn't feel my worth or believed that there was better for me in the world. I was young, and naïve, and had been so carefree. I was now destroyed, damaged, hurt, used, abused.
Years later, I still don't discuss the details of this past that I have. I refuse to lay my every thought and emotion out for the world. I am scared to be so vulnerable again. No matter what anyone says to me, I know how evil someone can become and I am scared that the person who is truly genuine will be pushed away by my own fears and worries. My future could be so bright and is still so bright, but I don't know that I'll ever be strong enough to open my heart and eyes to what I could have. I am capable of disallowing the past from defining my future, but I don't know how to go about this. I am lost, in a sea of misery, and I am struggling.
Friends tell me all of the time that they are there for me, but I don't know how to be there for them. When they need me to open up about my past, I don't know how I can tear down my walls and let them in.
It's the figurative walls that I have built around me that keeps me from actually opening up to people. I'm an outgoing person, but I am not a welcoming person. While I have plenty of friends around me and plenty of people interested in creating a future with me, I am incapable of having their hopes and feelings become mutual with my own.
I'm a girl who needed to become a fighter in order for me to get away from him. Even though he is gone and the fight is over, I am still holding the spear, ready to utilize it. I'm still fighting, a fight that isn't even there.
But I'm done fighting. I'm done with the walls. It's well past time to trust the people who have proved their loyalty. It is time for me to prove my loyalty and trust to them. I owe my friends and family that much. I need to talk about my past so that I can move on and have a brighter future. It's time for me to be the strong, loving, outgoing, funny girl that I once was.
I will come back from my past and I will come out stronger than I ever was before.
Thank you to everyone who has stuck by my side, no matter how difficult it may have been at times. I do appreciate your never-ending love, support, encouragement, and friendship.
God bless.
