The Afterwards: A Gut-Wrenching True Story of Child Sexual Abuse, Domestic Violence, Alcoholism and Liberation

The world tells us that it is one big cubicle and that there is a box for each one of us. For people like us, survivors of abuse, there is a box that we must fit into, if we don't want to be chewed up and ruthlessly spat out. These people are psychologists, psychiatrists, courts, welfare officials, the law, and most importantly, people we are the closest to. They claim to know how we must act, how we must feel. They are the professionals, and how we are supposed to cope after a traumatic event, or years of distress at the hands of our abusers. And, when we don't feel what they assume we do or expect us to, we feel like failures. We feel that there is something wrong with us. We feel removed. It's almost as though we have almost screwed up our own brokenness. "Could I not even get that right?" As I watched all the broken around me; the tears, the pity, the hurt, the anger and after listening to all the what-if's running around in my head, I realized that it was okay to stand up, and deal with it my way. It was okay to dream of making the rest of my life, the very best of my life. I didn't have to linger in it. I didn't have to have the rest of my life dictated to living with what happened to me. It happened to me, it was not me and it was not going to define me. It happened to my sisters, it wasn't who they were and it should never have defined who they became. It shouldn't have. It did. Like me, they didn't have to carry the scars around with them, for the rest of their lives. They did. The world didn't understand that. They learnt from text books and adopted a kind of a uniformity for how to counsel a survivor, because they assume they know our state of mind and what we went through. They follow guidelines, but they aren't flexible in the way of each story is different, and each survivor is different and each one of us deals with our stories differently. They have placed rules on how we should have felt, and what we should have done. Then they tried to teach us how to attempt to survive normally. They didn't really know how we felt or what we had been through. They could never begin to imagine what we've had to endure. They were convinced to follow what they had been taught, so they followed the rules of their textbooks and we followed the idea that we were failing because our plan to survive might not have been theirs. Our plan was not in their books or behind their degrees and in the end, we were left feeling worse than we did when our journey to healing began. Still, my plan might have failed my sisters, but it got me to a place where 'the thing' is no longer what haunts me even though The Afterwards was not so kind. It has brought me through some of the very worst of times, and it has pulled me out of what would probably have been the darkest period of my life. My plan hasn't failed me yet, so, I won't be changing something that's already brought me this far. They tell us that their way is just safer for us, and that there is no room for finding our own path after our traumatic event. They want us to fit into the exact dimensions or designs of how they think we should act, feel, behave and integrate into society afterwards. So, we end up spending our entire lives suppressing the fact that we just cannot fit into any sort of box. And then, as we begin to convince ourselves that something might be wide off the mark with us, we begin changing and adapting bit by bit so that we can fit in, because we must, just like everyone else. Just like the books say. Just like their classes taught them. Exactly as they were lectured. But as hard as we may try to conform to what we are supposed to be feeling, we end up feeling worse. Just like every other person we meet, we realize how desperate they too are, to fit into a box that was once given to them. When we finally realize that we just cannot fit in properly, we surrender and make new boxes for ourselves, in the hopes that nobody knows, and nobody sees.