What I Wasn’t Taught Was From Whom

When I was young, I was molested by a babysitter’s son.

I didn’t remember it for a long time.

My young mind did what it needed to do to survive. It folded the memory neatly and tucked it into a dark, forgotten corner. It stayed there, undisturbed, unretrieved, for years.

Until I ran into him as a man.

As our eyes met, something passed between us before a single word could.

Recognition flickered in his eyes.

And then

he ran.

From me. From the memory. From the guilt.

That was the moment the past refused to stay buried.

The memory did not return as a tidy story. It came back as sensation. A bodily truth. A visceral recognition that what I had survived had been shaping me all along.

The way I cringed from touch.
The way I shrouded myself in oversized clothes.
The way I folded inward as my breasts developed, as though I could shrink, vanish, stay safe.

My body knew long before my mind allowed itself to remember.

Because our nervous systems store what our young minds cannot hold.

I never spoke up. I never demanded justice.

At the time, I didn’t even have the language for what had happened. And later, when I did, I wasn’t convinced it would matter. A slap on the wrist, maybe. Disbelief, more likely. The preservation of his future, always.

Justice has always been selective, especially when the harm is done to a girl. Especially when it happens inside the spaces that are supposed to be safe.

As a white woman, I was taught that I was protected.

What I was not taught was from whom.

The promise of protection has always been conditional. It works best when you stay quiet. When you don’t disrupt. When the harm comes from outside, not inside the house.

White women are told we are shielded by the very system that often harms us.

And Black women have been saying, for generations, that this promise was never real. They have been naming the violence out loud while many of us were encouraged to believe in a softer version of the same patriarchal lie, one that required our compliance. Our silence. Our forgetting.

I heard them.
I just didn’t hear, or trust, myself.

Little me, who tucked that memory into a dark corner, wishes I had.

Because forgetting is not healing.
Forgetting is containment.

And systems built on containment eventually begin to crack.

That cracking is loud right now.

White male dominance, the unquestioned authority, the ownership of narrative, the control over whose pain counts, feels like it is losing its inevitability. Not gracefully. Not quietly. But chaotically.

Before something dies, it fights.

It tightens its grip.
It grows louder.
It becomes crueler.

This is true in bodies.
This is true in systems.

What we are witnessing is fear.

The harm continues. But the blinders are slipping.

Some are frozen in shock.
Some deny what they’re seeing.
And some of us are awake in a way that hurts.

Old pain resurfaces.
Buried memories return.
Anger, grief, and clarity collide in the body all at once.

This is not regression.

This is remembrance.

Awakening is not gentle. It destabilizes what depended on our silence to survive.

We will not go back.

We will not pretend we don’t see what we see.
We will not soften the truth to make it easier to swallow.
We will not mourn the death of something that required our containment in order to exist.

Some things need to end.

Because nothing new can be born while we are still contorting ourselves to fit inside a lie.

What comes next is not fully formed. Birth never is. But it will not be built on amnesia. It will not be built on false protection. And it will not be built on the bodies of women treated as collateral damage.

What was buried is rising.

It is uncomfortable. It is chaotic. But it is finally, mercifully, the truth.

Always,
The Clever Confidante

Have you ever felt your body react to a truth your mind wasn’t ready to face? I’m listening in the comments.