The Things No One Saw
For a long time, I thought abuse had to be a single thing.
A person who hit you.
A person who screamed at you.
A terrible event you could point to and say, There. That is what happened to me.
My life was never that simple.
There were things that happened to me that were clearly wrong. There were other things that probably looked ordinary from the outside. There were people who were cruel. There were people who were careless. There were people who failed me because they did not know what they were looking at. There were people who probably believed they were doing nothing wrong at all.
And there were years when I did not have the language to separate any of it.
I just knew that something always seemed to hurt.
I Learned Early That Other People Knew Things I Didn’t
Some of my earliest memories are not memories of one dramatic event. They are memories of being outside of things.
Outside conversations.
Outside decisions.
Outside explanations.
Adults knew things I didn’t know.
People talked around me instead of to me.
I learned to watch faces. I learned to listen to conversations that were not meant for me. I learned that sometimes you could tell something was wrong long before anyone would tell you what it was.