All posts by : Cashel Campbell

I come from sleep.  Slumber made my path.  My path was set by God.  God called me here.  Here is where I am.  I am changing.  Change is and change does works I could have never imagined.  Imagination is missing in my daily round.  The daily round is filled with must do’s.  I must relax.  Relaxation is missing from my daily life.  Life is precious.  I never knew how precious until it was almost gone.  Gone I am not.  I will not push or punish myself anymore.

Free prose written by me 6/30/14

The first time I was molested, I was a child of 5 years old. 5. 5 years old and curious. 5 years old and laughable, happy, playful, talkative. 5 and confused too.  My world was falling apart around me, but I still found a space for smiling.  I chose parents who would guide and love me in ways that most children never get an opportunity to experience, but as a couple, it just wasn’t working.  No amount of love, I learned then, could turn a lie into the truth.  5 years old and watching adults bicker, looking up from my mini stance at grownups that I needed to show me where I was going, looking through my big glasses upward to bigger people who seemed too busy with the slumber they were born from to look down at the 5 year old…and so, the beginning and duration of the sexual abuse I endured by a bigger person than me, became a secret space where no one or nothing was to busy for my confusion…I can see this now as I retrospect.

5 years old…learning the body and sex and sexual things…5 years old and being objectified and used…5 years old and having an experience of a bigger person, 5 and not knowing any better because this bigger person was my bigger cousin…and you can always trust family right?  So what he made me do unspeakable things, he had time for me…HE MADE TIME FOR LITTLE ME amongst the confusion.  I never knew that shattered, secretive and covert space would leave a stain on my being for many, many years to come.  I learned that the pattern that develops out of abuse becomes wired into your being and her behaviors and her thoughts and her self expression and her self worth.  I learned that learning a lie disguised as the truth is still a lie at the end of the day.  I learned that the actions of another person on a baby Spirit stands to break that Spirit, if not for The Almighty’s powerful ways of divine intervention.  I learned that he was not the only person I would encounter with obstructed desires toward my childhood sexuality, yet he would be the first of 3 bigger people, all family, who would enter into spaces of my being to personal to have been touched at that stage of my life.

And time passes, and birthdays come and go and pain bubbles and drifts and becomes numb, and I felt alone.  I tried to find my way  through artistic expression and that gave me a running sense of  “I’m going to be ok”.  And more time passes and more birhtdays come and go and pain bubbles and now lingers and slowly becomes attached to my being, like a life support because I know it so well.  I found ways to always have men around me, to have access to their time and attention, after all, bigger cousin taught me that so long ago. As long as I was open to a mans desires then I was worthy of his attention.

This warped sense of self carried me for years.  I wondered why the bigger people than me never told me about these things or warned me about any of this?  How come the bigger people didn’t say that these atrocities happened to them too, when they were little people looking for guidance as they looked up to bigger folks? The answer,  I learned, was because these issues had yet to be dealt with inside of them BY THEM.  How can someone have warned me about a disaster they didn’t yet acknowledge within themselves?  They simply couldn’t…and in therapy, I learned that.

Therapy taught me how to create a positive skill set toward learning to love myself and helped me begin to dig up the old scars being ruptured by new wounds.  The prescience of molestation and sex abuse is no stranger to a few women in my family, and what we learn to live with, what we don’t discuss, what we refuse to acknowledge within ourselves can almost always be readily seen in the people who are closet to us.  Our old scars and new wounds threaten to damage and torment our offspring and those we call children if WE DON’T MEET THEM FIRST by healing the pain they create.

Therapy also taught me how and then The Almighty’s led me to forgive.  I will never forget when I confronted the primary abuser I experienced and told him that I remember what he did.  I acknowledged that he hurt me, that he robbed me of a place in myself that I had yet to know, that when I began attempting to know that space within me I abused her, with the wrong men and the wrong company.  I let him know why I avoided him for years on end and that the place where he abused me was a space I was forced to revisit for years, at family gatherings and the like.  That I had to sit and smile and eat and laugh through all of the pain inside because of the choices he made with the 5 year old me.  I let him know that my inability to choose caused ME TO ABUSE ME, and then I let him know, that I forgave him.  I didn’t want HATRED to be the story anymore.  Forgiving him would give me a new chapter within myself.

This took place on  a chilly winter evening when our whole family was gathered, again, at the residence where the aforementioned had occurred.  As we went outside for a talk walk, he apologized for what he had done to me and then he shared with me that HE TOO WAS MOLESTED, by his babysitter.  His life has been no easy feat, and now this?! He was mistreated in his youth too?!  My heart split open.  As cold as it was outside, I felt the warmth of connectivity between my cousin and I, from the most appropriate and familial bonding place.  I realized then that that moment was the time to release him from my heart as the villain and embrace him as my cousin who like me, was lead astray.

WE HAVE BEEN GOOD EVER SINCE…

The work I continue to do on this journey toward healing surrounds me fully embracing myself and my being.  I work on rewiring the lie put inside me early on in my life by dancing and creating my heart out.  I struggle sometimes, but it gets easier as my FAITH grows.  I often remind myself that the cycle of abuse is bigger than the moment when it first occurs.  The moment it actualizes in your life is a spark on a long chain of misuse that was set into play before you or I were even a twinkle in our parents eyes.  Negativity and mistreatment affect us all because as long as it exists somewhere its possible for it to exist RIGHT HERE, WHERE YOU ARE. WHERE I AM, but there IS AN END TO THE TRAUMA.

And so this beginning, this telling of my story IS THE END. I say NO MORE TRAUMA, NO MORE ABUSE, NO MORE MISUSE, NO MORE VIOLENCE INSIDE THIS BODY.  In my past I had lived it because I was it, but I am not traumatized anymore. I am free…free to love myself, free to forgive myself everyday, free to love others and forgive them for their transgressions.  I am free to cry for the little girl inside me who still gets confused and needs so much guidance…and I am so BLESSED to be equipped to LOVE and SEE her now.

~Dedicated to the hurt little ones inside of us all~

Cashel C.