Thank you for your interest in the section of my memoir below. If your email server clips the message, then you can read the full post on Substack. You can also listen to the post by clicking the audio button at the top of this page. When needed, visit the Bibliography and Support Resources. This post mentions incest abuse. If you’re seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.

“The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state, but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men. It therefore provides strong guarantees for the rights of the accused, but essentially no guarantees for the rights of the victim. If one set out by design to devise a system for provoking intrusive post-traumatic symptoms, one could not do better than a court of law.”1

~Judith Herman, MD

My body and voice shook in unison as I called the local police station to report the instances of incest. Quickly, I was told I had to drive 400 miles South to Newport Beach to report where the crime took place. So I did, even though I couldn’t afford the trip financially or energetically. Even though I had been raped all over the United States because I could be harmed whenever I was with my father and we traveled often. I drove all the way back to Newport, opened the door, and walked up to the female administrators at the police department.

“I’d like to report a crime: sexual violence by my father, grandfather, and an uncle during childhood,” I disclosed to them.
Without a beat or note of sympathy the woman behind the desk replied with a look of utter disgust, “You can’t even do that. Aren’t there statute of limitation laws or something?”

Tears welled up in my eyes as the pressure of rage pushed against my chest. Words came out: the story of my phone call, the officer’s instructions, the drive I couldn’t afford, the time, the feeling of being trapped in a car for a seven hour ride.

“I came all this way,” I finished.
“Okay, we’ll provide an officer for you to report,” she replied after a long eye roll.
“I’d prefer a female,” I requested.
“Well, for that you’ll have to wait.”

I sat deflated in one of the nearby chairs then waited for the next available female officer for a chance to be heard, for the support denied by my family and by my community; to be honored by law enforcement. Then, I saw her. A fit female dressed in black from head to toe in a uniform, her chest covered by a bullet proof vest.

We walked together to an empty room, sat down, then she asked a number of questions, created a case number, and that was that. At the end, she told me that I didn’t have to drive the 400 miles after all. I could’ve reported in-person to my local precinct and they could’ve transferred the report to Newport. My heart sank. All that effort for nothing. I never heard from her again. Eventually, I found the courage to call back and follow up about my case. The woman on the other end of the line spoke with the same annoyance as the ones I met at the station.

“There are no notes in your case file,” she said with an eye roll I could hear over the phone. “You just have to trust that the officers did their job.”

Blind trust: to police, to family, to community, to church, to God. But none of them had earned nor deserved it. Dr. Freyd explains that, “Institutional betrayal refers to wrongdoings perpetrated by an institution upon individuals dependent on that institution, including failure to prevent or respond supportively to wrongdoings by individuals (e.g. sexual assault) committed within the context of the institution.”2

First I had to manage betrayal trauma by forgetting my own stories, then I had to manage family betrayal, and now institutional betrayal. How much more betrayal could I carry?

I returned home and considered my options. I didn’t have the economic, emotional, or psychological stamina to challenge my father in civil court. The statute of limitation laws around different types of sexual violence turned out to be too confusing for even my friends with law degrees to help me interpret.

Did I survive rape?
Did I survive incest?
Did I survive child sexual abuse?
Could I condemn my father for all three?

Even if I did understand and sue him, lawyers may choose not to take my case without the likelihood of a substantial cash payout. Also, the chance of a judge and jury supporting a survivor of child sexual abuse with little to no direct evidence is harrowingly low, especially those of us who claim to have recovered memories of the abuse as adults. Evidentiary requirements needed to prove cases of child sexual abuse leave even sympathetic judges and juries with little likelihood of convicting an abuser.

Sadly, I learned that my experience of institutional betrayal with the criminal punishment system was more common than I had understood. However, due to low disclosure rates by victimized children, delayed disclosure by adult survivors, and lack of reporting by victims and families after disclosure, incest abuse is understood to be one of the most underreported crimes. Research shows that safe and quick interventions to end instances of child sexual abuse have been proven to be one of the most effective steps to the survivor’s recovery.3 However, most often after disclosures of incest abuse by victims, family members retraumatize them by doing nothing, denying it happened, minimizing the harm done, or blaming the victim for the abuse.4

Who would report someone they loved? Someone they lived with? Someone they were economically dependent on?

My case, like so many others, was not one worth consideration by the State. One survivor’s disclosure is often not enough. Instead, when a number of victims come forward accusing the same person of harm, a case may be taken. Any case that could be won, were the ones worth committing to. My and so many other incest survivors’ stories didn’t fall into any of these categories. So I was left without justice or support, while my father remained free to reoffend.

Of 1000 reported rapes of all kinds, only 25 people who harm will be incarcerated.5 And rarely is anyone sentenced for life due to sexual molestation or rape. The average time a person convicted of rape spends in prison is 8.5 years. Then most are released without any treatment or assurance that they are safe.6

Sexual recidivism rates for people who harm are estimated at 10-15%.7 However, these numbers require getting a conviction in the first place, meaning the victim must have disclosed and reported, and the system must have believed the survivor’s story. As this process is so infrequent, actual recidivism numbers are likely much higher. Lack of safe and transformative systems of accountability and treatment contribute to intergenerational incest abuse.

Some children must seek their own liberation and are left vulnerable in the foster care and other support systems. Most Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) is produced in the home, then published across the internet, making a victim’s trauma evergreen, streamable content for consumption. Often, victims leave the home young with a romantic partner who is still abusive, just less so than the family system. Some victims run away from their homes and land into any job they can. Many are abused during consentual sex work or they’re kidnapped and placed in sex trafficking rings. There is a high likelihood of being retraumatized as an adult after being incested as a child. This is called “The Incest Pipeline.”8

I couldn’t hold the responsibility of the cost and commitment of healing as a victim of serial sex crimes alone. I, like 96% of other victims of crime, hadn’t been aware of victim compensation programs that could be applied for with just a police report.9

It became so clear to me that the systems that failed to protect me from abuse, that failed to intervene, that failed to provide adequate resources for recovery, that failed to offer any sense of justice, also failed my father. His history of abusive behavior began long before my body. His siblings often shared what a terror he was, how much power he had over them in their family system, how he passed down the beatings he received from his father onto the younger and even more vulnerable members of his family. No one intervened. No one stopped him even then. No one taught him how to become a safer person.

What would intervention to end his abusive behavior have looked like when he was a child? When he was an adult?

Many theories suggest a number of reasons why people sexually perpetrate children. Some chose to act on pedophilia: a sole sexual desire for minors. Some premeditate the abuse and ritualistically plan and groom a child and their community to gain and sustain access. Some choose to perpetrate opportunistically, or just because they can, due to imbalances in power dynamics. Some perpetrate situationally because of the excuses of trauma, sexual neglect, or stress.10

There is no list of characteristics that accurately describes people who choose to sexually harm children or why. However some patterns have been discovered in studies: a sense of excitement and sexual satisfaction; coping with low self-esteem, stress, or unmet emotional needs for intimacy or affection; a sense of entitlement motivated by values of domination taught by white supremacy, the patriarchy, and adultism; lack of sexual education or boundaries; and/or social isolation.11

In many states, children who sexually harm other children are added to sex offender lists (some for life). This restricts reporting and treatment, even though treatment has proven to be effective to end recidivism by youth.12 Additionally, there are few places where adults who are attracted to children or are at-risk to harm can go to receive support so that they do not perpetrate in the first place. Vilification of this population isolates them from acknowledging and accessing help, so once they do perpetrate, they receive no assistance in ending the sexually harmful behaviors.

By failing to prevent abuse, intervene safely, and transform people who are at-risk to harm or have already harmed, the system built to protect children from sexual abuse in the home is actively contributing to repeat and increased victimization.

I returned to my little cottage and laid in bed to rest, when my phone began to vibrate nearby. I looked at the screen and saw a name I both awaited and feared, Kaylee, my childhood friend from church who used to swing on the park rails with me after gobbling down a few donuts.

“Hi Anna Banana,” she began. “I know we haven’t talked in awhile.”
“Hello, it’s nice to hear from you.”
“I had a memory,” she continued, “of your father.”
“Okay.” Here it goes. The moment I had been dreading and awaiting: that I likely wasn’t his only victim. My body tightened.
“One year when we were at Yosemite, your father made me and a few of the other girls all get in a line.”
“Okay,” my body continued to compress with that all-too-familiar pressure.
“He then asked us to play a game with him where he would grope all of our legs and then rate them from prickly to smooth.”
“Okay.”
“He fondled our legs over and over again. Then rated them. I didn’t win because mine were prickly. I felt so ashamed. I wanted to please him.”
“Kaylee, I’m so sorry.” My heart broke open.
“I know I wasn’t as supportive as I could’ve been when you disclosed years ago. I didn’t understand the depth of the problem of incest abuse, nor how to handle it. But I’ve been working with a therapist, who’s helping me to see his behavior as predatory and increasing my confidence in your story. I wish I would’ve supported you sooner and want you to know I support you now.”
“I appreciate your apology,” I began. “Although the lack of support from our community in general was painful, there was no rulebook about how to deal with these issues. I didn’t have one either.”

We caught up a little more about her life and mine and then hung up. I felt flooded. Sad that, as anticipated, I wasn’t the only child my father harmed sexually, validated with her strength to bring her story to me, honored with her apology, confident that I would have more support if I ever had to engage the criminal or civil legal systems. I now had corroboration in someone else’s story. It wasn’t justice, but certainly validation.

I needed to go to the sea, as only it was big enough to hold these massive feelings. It always held the stress of my home memories. My feet found their way back to the sand and my heart to the part of the water between the stacked rocks that shaped into two jetties. The chaos of the waves’ whitewash splashed against them fiercely. I approached those barnacle-studded stones, then removed my shoes.

The waves crashed around the jetty and soaked me, but I wasn’t scared because I wasn’t trapped: at any time I could turn back to the safety of the sand. The salt water dried and tightened my skin. The wind wrestled my hair. And an internal peace replaced the external chaos created between whitewash and rock. I left the constancy of the chaos and the jetty behind, as my feet settled deeply into the safety of the sand.

Thank you for your interest in the section of my memoir below. If your email server clips the message, then you can read the full post on Substack. You can also listen to the post by clicking the audio button at the top of this page. When needed, visit the Bibliography and Support Resources. This post mentions incest abuse. If you’re seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.

“We cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care. An overwhelming majority of us come from dysfunctional families in which we were taught that we were not okay, where we were shamed, verbally and/or physically abused, and emotionally neglected even as we were also taught to believe that we were loved. For most folks it is just too threatening to embrace a definition of love that would no longer enable us to see love as present in our families. Too many of us need to cling to a notion of love that either makes abuse acceptable or at least makes it seem that whatever happened was not that bad.”1

~ bell hooks

~ ~ ~

Losing everyone in my family all at once was too much, so I decided to soften my boundaries. As the distance between my mother, father, and me grew, my brothers began to reach out, especially the youngest, Patrick. I was like a second mother to him and he, like my only son. He began to fight for me, to invite me back into relationship.

“I miss you, Annie,” he said.

I chose to reconnect with him once I felt strong enough to hold all of his complexities — his doubts, his disbelief, his questions — under two conditions: one, he must respect my boundaries that he can’t share my address or my phone number with anyone, and two, that he needed to accept my choice that I would never return to the family. We talked on the phone every once in a while and then eventually met up here and there. I attempted to connect with other family members as well: aunts, uncles, cousins. The same rules applied.

When I heard the news that Pops was dying soon, my brothers and I met up with him in a restaurant near his home in Escondido, CA. My brothers had told me that the contents of the handwritten letter I mailed to my mother with my incest abuse disclosure had not been shared with my grandfather. I felt clear that I couldn’t tell him what happened now, not right before he died. Pops rolled in, now dependent on a wheelchair and oxygen, me towering over the mountain of this man who I used to climb up on the grass of the golf course just outside his house.

“Oh, Annie,” he said to me in a voice that surrendered gratitude. “Hi, Pops,” I bent over and wrapped my arms around his shoulders. We held each other for a good long time and cried. We caught up about more trivial things: what life had been like for the both of us, the friends I found, the career I chased. Nearing the end of the meal he requested:

“Annie, will you sing at my funeral?” He always loved it when I sang to him.
“Grandpa,” I said honestly, “You know I can’t attend, but I will find a way to sing for you.”
“Okay,” he grabbed my hand in pain-filled understanding.

Pops passed not long after. For his funeral, I recorded myself singing one of his favorite songs, “Panis Angelicus,” (The Bread of Angels), and sent it to Patrick to play on the day of the celebration. He did.

Easter approached, so Patrick and I planned a weekend away together in Whistler, Canada, where my father had a ski condo we used to spend holidays at as children. I wanted to reclaim this space as an adult without my dad, so we found a weekend to go and met up there. As the holiday approached, I felt Patrick’s anger rising on the other side of the phone line. His questions met me with a crisp tightness, his answers caught in his throat. I could hear how much emotion he kept buried in his body.

More and more, it was becoming clear that my family was requesting that he play the intermediary between them and me. I wasn’t just answering his questions, I was answering their questions. He was their representative, which wasn’t fair to him nor me. But in this case, it was his job to set boundaries and I knew he wouldn’t, or maybe couldn’t. So my body once again became the receiver of my family’s energy passed down now through the portal of this little brother, now 6’3” tall and built like a tree. I knew he would never hurt me physically, but my body began to tremble thinking about spending time with him.

We enjoyed the first few days exploring the mountains, skiing, and revisiting all of our favorite restaurants. Then we returned home. Patrick sat on one sofa, while I sat on the lounge chairs across from him. His arms folded tightly across his chest.

“You know, I thought about bringing mom with me this weekend?”
Oh, no, here we go. I thought as my body tightened.
“Why would you do that, Patrick? You know my boundaries. I don’t want to see her.”
“Why not, Annie?!” His voice began to rise. “What did she ever do to you?! You need to just forgive Dad and come home or else — ”
“Or else what?” I interrupted.
“You don’t understand how much Mom’s suffering! You have hurt her so much, you have hurt us all so much.”
“Mom knows my boundaries too,” I stated stoically. “I will consider coming home when she leaves Dad.”
“How can you expect her to break up the family?!” His voice crescendoed.
“She’s not breaking up the family, Patrick. Dad did that when he decided to sexually abuse his only daughter.”

I began to lose myself in his blame. My empathy had limits. At 23, he was an adult now and so accountable for his actions. I stood up, my voice escalating to a pitch I had never heard before, as I shook.

“I left so that I could be safe!” I began. “Patrick, don’t you understand that love is safety and our family can’t even offer me that?! Why would I want to come back when you’re all just a bunch of bullies who justify the rape of children?! Your anger and shame should be directed at Dad not me!”
“How can you be so heartless?!” He raged back.
“Oh, fuck you!” I replied.
“You’re so selfish!” He rebutted.
“No!” I couldn’t take it anymore. My knees went weak with his projections, “I’m leaving. I don’t have to listen to this.” My body began to collapse.
“No, I’ll go.” He walked past me, “You’re staying here, you don’t need to leave.”

I watched him walk out the door and followed behind, then froze. Suddenly, it felt like time stopped, like everything was moving in slow motion. He walked away from me. As the distance between us grew, the reality that I would likely never see him again expanded within me at each step. The shadow of grief followed.

“I…” I began to stutter. “I love you.”

It turned out many of my family members and their friends who I had been in contact with were all strategizing to get me to return to my family. Another brother began to reach out:.

“The Catholic Church teaches forgiveness. It’s the foundation of the church. Jesus forgave those who crucified him, forgave those who turned him in, forgave those who beat him and hurt him far more than you have ever been hurt. He still forgave no matter what. More of us, including myself, need to forgive more. If you ever come back, it would be very very hard for me to forgive you for what you have done to our mother. [...]

Is my brother both demanding that I forgive my father for raping me serially, while also acknowledging how hard it would be for him to forgive me for setting a safety boundary?

The Rite of Reconciliation sacrament is supposed to heal the distance between God and the sinner, and the sinner and the one they harmed. The church is the intermediary, and a priest, the one whose words and hands complete the process. But all too frequently, the rite is abused to absolve people of issues so they believe they are free from culpability, without any apology, accountability, or assurance that the harm would end toward the person or community who suffer from the consequences of their sins — in my case, crimes.

In many states, clergy aren’t mandated reporters, so people who sexually harm children can disclose within those small wooden boxes in the corners of churches and be forgiven. Or victims are sent to priests to disclose instead of counselors because clergy are not legally required to report. Even the Pope Benedict after retirement weaponized forgiveness when he demanded that survivors of clergy child sexual abuse forgive him for his role in mishandling specific cases when he was an archbishop, while simultaneously denying any wrongdoing or responsibility.2

The stories of the prevalent child sexual abuse crisis by clergy still flooded media outlets. When the Boston Globe published the investigative piece in 2002, I had received group emails from family about the “the holy crusade” of defending the church in this time of crisis. One of the Dames of Malta, who I met in Lourdes, had been funding an organization in Haiti run by a perpetrating priest. She, like the Catholic hierarchy, tried to cover it up instead of centering the protection of children. The monsignor who had encouraged me to accept my own interpretation of Jesus on the same trip had pleaded guilty to buying a video and sex-toy shop to launder methamphetamine money and has served years in prison. And so sexual abuse continues through spiritual bypassing. My brother wrote:

“Incest in a family is a very real thing, Anne, and you are right, it’s not right. It’s horrible! I was also touched as a child by someone in our family. You will never know who it was, and I will never tell you. I decided to not let it define me. I decided to look past it and to live a life different from those who live in hate and want to see death and blood on the streets. [... Another family member] also had someone touch her as well, and she could have raised hell, but also chose a life different than that. You sadly are embracing a life full of hate and anger and now small lies to justify all of it. It’s terribly sad and a complete waste of a life.”

Is my brother validating the frequent sexual harm against children in my family system, justifying it, then blaming me for the pain of incest abuse in my family?

In my family’s mind, I was the perpetrator and they were the ones perpetrated against: the victims of family estrangement by their only beloved daughter. Coined by Dr. Freyd, a frequently used tactic by those who abuse and the bystanders who choose to support them is referred to as: (D)eny, (A)ttack, (R)everse (V)ictim and (O)ffender. DARVO. I committed from this point on to only surrounding myself with upstanders: or those who choose to side with survivors and do the work to ensure the safety of others. My brother went on:

“You know what love is, Anne? Love is having a Wall Street prick for a husband [my father] and still staying together. Love is having a husband who lies and steals and still stays together. Love is having a husband that very well could have hurt his children in multiple ways and still stays together. Love is coming within inches of divorce because the son [my brother referring to himself] pushed it so hard and still stays together. Love is the ability in seeing that there is still good in a person. True love is making sure you stand by that person no matter what and you fucking figure it out. [...] None of us will ever be our father. We have half our mother in us so we know how to love deeper and stronger and with respect and honor.”

Sadly, it seems as if my brother internalized my mother’s understanding of love. To stay always.

My mother’s situation pained me most because she too had been victimized. My father, though still abusive, was safer than her father and her mother. With my dad by her side, she had achieved so many of her dreams: class comfort, a car full of kids, saintly status in her spiritual community. I don’t blame her for not leaving because I understand the complexity of giving all that up to support me. But I do hold her accountable to the ways her choices contributed to the abusive environment I was raised in as a child; the one she continuously called me back to as an adult. I do set boundaries to ensure my experience of love evolves to hold the truth of safety. My brother admitted:

“[... Dad] was a lying, miserable cheat. He destroyed our family business, he destroyed our family inheritance, he destroyed relationships, he destroyed my name in the business finance sector [...]. He destroyed a lot of things and he did it for years. [...] It was horrible and all of us hated him. […] I coulda killed him easily right there on the spot. I wanted to so bad! I went to therapy for years and nothing helped my hate. [...] I wanted him dead, I wanted him in a car accident, I wanted him stripped down naked and beaten in the middle of town.”

How does my brother both acknowledge what my father has done and excuse him simultaneously?

The responses of my mother, my father, my brothers, and my community all reflected what Dr. Freyd refers to as “Betrayal Blindness.” This can include repressed memories by victims, but she also finds that “perpetrators and witnesses may display betrayal blindness in order to preserve relationships, institutions, and social systems upon which they depend.”3 In my case, my family privileged their relationship with my father and their financial provider, the institution of family, and the social belonging that accompanies the silencing of the victim. My brother wrote:

“I woke up one day and asked myself if this is how I wanted to live my life? I asked myself if this is how I wanted my relationship to be with my father? I asked myself, is this the story I am going to tell to my kids? The hate was eating me inside and I could feel it. I started hating everything. I had turned into him and hate was to blame. It was so hard but I made the decision in one instant that I wasn’t going to live like that. [...] If that’s a life you want to live, go for it. You have a lonely path ahead of you.”

I accepted his choice to stay, could he not respect my choice to walk away?

Devotion to the family system often keeps people from understanding how safe and intimate chosen community can be for those of us who choose to leave. Some sociologists agree that the nuclear family, isolated from deeper community ties, always reflected hierarchy and property. The root of family derives from the Latin word, “Famulus,” which means “Domestic Slave.”4

Practiced in the United States, the patriarchal family has allowed men to own their wives and children. The government forced Native communities into nuclear families intentionally to break the tribal bonds that kept the populations strong. Today, the institution of the nuclear family puts so much pressure on one or a number of caregivers to earn economically, while also raising children. This failing social system carries so many symptoms of chronic stress, which is one of the many risks that increase rates of incest. For some the family is a safe haven, for others it’s a trap. My brother admitted:

“Anne, I moved on a while ago. With all due respect, and I mean this in no way to hurt you, but just as a point of reality, there isn’t much to miss about you. Talking to you is awful and negative [...], you are telling lies about our family publicly and to other women who have also been hurt, and you have unforgivable hate deeply rooted in your soul. Over the years people asking about Anne at family events has diminished. You cross my mind here and there and it does make me very sad. [...] I would take you back in a heartbeat now or in the future, but I hope that you can see, you have made moving on from you pretty easy. If that was your goal, then you hit it right on the mark.”

My head is spinning with the mixed messages, my heart is hurting.

“The only person that hasn’t moved on is our mother. She’ll never move on. She continues to cry herself to sleep at night because her own daughter blames her for something she didn’t even do. A mother’s love for her child is the strongest love this world knows. It’s a healing type of love, the type of love you so desperately need right now. You will be judged some day for your actions towards your mother and your choice of abandonment, Anne, and [Dad] will be judged someday for his actions towards you and to others as well.”

Am I supposed to center my mother’s needs above my own safety?

“I do love you and I would love with all my heart to see you back in the family you were born into, but hate, which you absolutely do have, consumes you. When you are unwilling to forgive and mend, hate and anger is normally the reason. God asks us to forgive and in that process maybe we have to live in a state that is abusive.”

The cycle of violence has completed. The tension, the explosion, and the honeymoon phases all present in this one conversation. I see it so clearly. He has no idea.

It was all there. The justifications of ideology, incest, and illness used by white supremacist patriarchs to transubstantiate family, religion, and love into cycles of violence. I felt deeply sorry for my brothers. For the father who continues to abuse, and the mother who keeps them bound to her constraints and calls her commitment love, calls her dependency forgiveness, calls her covert incest mutual support, calls her source of inspiration God. Uses the name of Jesus to condone violence against children, her own children. The glorification of suffering. The theology of sacrifice, salvation through mortification.

In an instant, I received validation in writing from my brother’s testimony: my family believed that love, defined by God the Father, meant to live in an abusive environment eternally. Now, my job was to end it. To finally break the cycles of violence against my body that began between the circular constancy of Bunya St. I was ready to end this generational acceptance of incest abusers and the spiritual allowance offered by God the Father to child rape apologists. I divorced myself from my family completely. It was finished, finally.

Thank you for your interest in the section of my memoir below. If your email server clips the message, then you can read the full post on Substack. You can also listen to the post by clicking the audio button at the top of this page. When needed, visit the Bibliography and Support Resources. This post mentions incest abuse. If you’re seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.

“It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.”1

~ Judith Herman, MD

Dressed in outlet-version, brand-named attire from head to toe, I strode down the school hallways weekday mornings trying my best to keep up with the style of my cool colleagues while pretending to be put together. But just hours before, night terrors wrestled me during sleep, insomnia shook me awake, and anxiety that my father might come after me haunted the daylight in between. I was telling more trusted people — friends of the past and present — what the men in my family did to me. Their threats to harm me if I ever disclosed arose from the bottom of my repressed memories.

First, Grandpa Jay tried to convince me. “This is what grandfathers do to their granddaughters.” My submission was my survival.

Then, my father threatened me. “If you tell anyone, I’ll throw you out into the streets, or worse I’ll kill mommy.” My silence was my survival.

Then I forgot about the instances of incest all together. My repression was my survival.

Now between my perpetrators and I rested miles of highway and coastline, farms and city skyscrapers, but my family still felt far too close, especially my parents. I saw their faces whenever I looked at myself in the mirror. I heard students call me by their last name, always reminding me I was their only daughter. I cringed knowing how intimately I shared the genealogy, the biology, and the identity of those who harmed me. The boundaries between them and me could not so easily be erected on the outside nor the inside of my body.

One morning, I arrived to campus and parked, then walked through the corridors lined with classroom doors and lockers, passed the small rose garden, and dragged myself into the Campus Ministry office, where my desk awaited me. The colleague I shared the room with sat in her seat and wished me a good morning, while I placed my book bag on the desk, pulled out the chair, and logged into my computer. An unread email bolded the text on the screen: Flowers For You. It read something like:

“Dear Anne, Flowers have been delivered to the administration building. Please, pick them up at your convenience.”

My body squirmed with worry. Who knew I even worked here?

I hurried back to the front of the building where the administrator sat. A beautiful bouquet awaited me with a card in a plastic holder stuck to the soil.

“Congratulations on getting your first job! Love, Mom.”
“I wish my mom would send me flowers,” the administrator said with a jealous tone.
My cheeks heated. “Do you mind if we speak privately for a second?”
“The only private place is the paper closet,” she laughed dismissively.
“Then let’s go to the paper closet,” I replied. She rolled her eyes surprised.

Together, we strode toward the door that opened into a narrow room with small shelves stacked with different types and colors of printing paper.

“I’m in the process of separating myself from my family. If they ever show up here, please send them away. They would never hurt a student or a staff member, but I’m not interested in seeing them.”
“Okay,” she responded with a strange look on her face. Not long after, the principal called me in to discuss the issue further.
“I heard you’re having some challenges with your family,” she started. “Is there anything I should know about?”

Do I or don’t I disclose to this authority figure? I needed support, I hoped I could trust her with my story.

“I recently remembered repressed instances of incest abuse. I haven’t told my family yet, just asked for no contact, but my mother showed up at my graduation uninvited, then sent flowers to the school today. I don’t even know how she knows I work here.”
“We added your name and biography to the Campus Ministry and Religious Studies pages of the website.”
“Oh, that must be it. Well I just don’t want to see them if they come.”
“Understood,” she said. “Do you anticipate this problem will impact your work here?”
“I certainly hope not,” I replied honestly.
“Okay,” I walked back to my office uncomfortably.

Clearly, I needed to set a stronger boundary with my family. It was time to tell my mother what happened to me. So I began writing a letter by hand. If I printed something, my father could just scan the content and change it. The dam of my body now bled water onto the page. I finished my disclosure and signed my name at the bottom, “Annie Marie.” I worried if my dad got his hands on the letter first that it would never be read by my mother, so I mailed my disclosure to the mother of my childhood friend Kaylee so that she could hand it to my mother personally.

Kaylee and I met as children at church. Often after the service, we ran to the donut stand, then, with sprinkled covered faces, we headed over to the bars at the nearby playground. Together, we swung like monkeys. But my favorite memories with Kaylee were our frequent camping trips during the summers to Yosemite National Park.

Although our lives took very different directions as adults, we stayed in touch with occasional checkins. Recently, I had called her to disclose my resurfaced memories. She, like everyone else I had told, didn’t quite know what to do. Neither did I.

“Can you let your mom know that a letter will be coming to her for my mother explaining everything?”
“Of course,” she responded sadly. Soon after, we lost touch.

A few weeks went by, then my mother wrote back. “Anne, I believe that your father raped you, but you should forgive him.”

I didn’t know what to expect in her response, but certainly not this: both an acknowledgement of what happened and the immediate demand to forgive. Quickly, it became so clear to me that for generations weaponized forgiveness had been used to pass the cycle of incest abuse from adult to child or child to child in my family system.

Shouldn’t the pressure be on the perpetrators to atone, not the survivors to forgive?

I sat with the hurt of my mother’s words. Her refusal to act after my disclosure matched her support of past people who had harmed. Back in grade school, there was a girl in one of my classes whose father beat her mother. Whenever conflict arose between the girl and me, her mother called my mother threatening to slit her wrists if I didn’t do something about it. So my mother sat me down:

“Annie, you must solve this issue with your friend or else her mother is going to kill herself! She is being beaten by her husband, you can’t even begin to understand how horrible that is.”

But how? I wondered in the fifth grade. And why can’t her mother get help from someone else, an adult? The police maybe?

“Oh, and you must keep this information a secret,” my mother finished.

I remembered the girl in my grade school class who was raped in the bathroom, and the women who were molested by my mother’s chiropractor.

“Oh, that girl’s just looking for attention!” My mother proclaimed confidently in response to the girl’s disclosure.

Then the woman who raised me took to the stand in the courtroom to testify to the strong character of her chiropractor, defending him instead of the survivors. She received kisses on the lips from her OB/GYN every time she birthed another baby without consent, concern, or complaint.

If my mother chose to do nothing all these years later, I can’t imagine what she would’ve done or not done if I had disclosed as a child.

My brothers’ responses were more typical. Apparently, my father found the same color pen that I used in my hand-written disclosure letter and put quotation marks around the word rape, contributing to the suspicions of my siblings.

One said, “Your story just doesn’t add up.”
Another asked, “Do you mean that dad emotionally raped you?”
The last said, “Why do you always have to be such a victim?”

I refused to engage with my father, but that didn’t keep him from communicating with me. He sent me an email denying everything, arguing that I couldn’t have been as successful as I was if he had abused me. He accused me of committing a grave injustice against the family for separating myself from them without reason. But I knew both to be untrue. The responsibility of injustice rested on his shoulders, while the burden of it crushed mine.

Perfectionism and high-achievement are often overlooked coping mechanisms of those raised in violent homes, so victims receive the support, validation, and attachment they need from extrafamilial community members.2 Because society celebrates perfectionistic and high-achieving behaviors, these victims often fall through the cracks of care, lacking the necessary identification, intervention, liberation, and recovery supports.

Without an apology, or accountability, or assurance that the next generation would be safe from the people who harmed me, I continued to distance myself from everybody, while my family’s story came to be that I went “crazy.” I wrote one last time to my mother to tell her of my reasons for separation. She responded:

“You cannot understand the challenge it takes to accept your decision. […] You may have chosen to rob me of the past […] years and the future years of us having a relationship, but you can never take away the 25 years of support, nurturing, care, commitment and loving memories we shared together. Together is the correct word here.

We mutually supported, nurtured, cared and were committed to one another. I was a very good, faithful and committed mother through your illnesses, surgeries, grade school, Girl Scouts, Theatrical Performances, Choirs, High School, Soccer, Softball, Water Polo, College, Relationships, Study Abroad, Depression Diagnosis, and Grad School. […]”

Throughout my childhood, I could never quite name the complexity of my relationship with my mother. Our closeness felt so deeply necessary for both of us. She became my best friend, but the partnership burdened me. The weight of it felt oppressive in ways I could not contain nor explain. Finally I found a phrase that named the harm of this type of relationship between parent and child: covert incest abuse.

A type of adultification. A form of parentification. Emotional incest abuse. An adult in the family or support system depending on a child to meet a family members’ needs for emotional intimacy and security. Often called a "“Surrogate Spouse,” the adult overshares feelings, engages in too much intimate touch even if not in places considered private, infantilizes the child so the adult feels needed. The adult enmeshes their own identity with the child’s, trapping the developing human into a web of emotional and ontological codependency.3 As my own mother described it: mutual support.

Is a relationship between mother and daughter ever supposed to be mutual? How old was I when this mutuality began?

Once the memories returned of my father’s contact sexual abuse, I immediately identified the behavior as harmful. But my mother’s non-contact abuse felt so much more confusing.

After all, what’s wrong with being loved too much?

I tried to reconnect to the parents of a few of my childhood friends, who attempted to support me in the best ways that they knew how. Many supported my choice to separate from my father. Most members of the community had experienced his lack of boundaries, his verbal abuse, his bullying, his hypersexualized behavior. But my distance from my mother caused them to question me:

“How could you separate yourself from a saint?” They asked me. “How could you deny a mother your love when she’s so unconditionally loving?”

They didn’t want the actual answer. I quickly found that if I wanted to continue to be in relationship with them, I had to follow one very important unspoken rule:

“Don’t tell us why you are choosing to estrange yourself from your family.”

That same Catholic congregation who left the food at the doorstep when I seized as a baby responded with silence to my disclosure of incest abuse. Chronic illness was an issue worthy of collective support, but incest felt far too taboo. This time, I was left alone to make meals by myself when my entire system — brain, body, and being — was refusing to function due to this history. My mother’s note continued:

“It is very easy to run away; its hard work to stay and make things work. Our family has worked; and continues to work at loving each other. There is no such thing as a perfect family or perfect love. There are real families and real love. […]

My heart has been deeply hurt by you. I have been humiliated by stories told to neighbors and friends and I have been humbled by the lack of being able to make any progress in restoring our once incredibly loving relationship.

You are loved by me, your mother, more than any one on this earth whether you care to except it or not. I will never stop loving you and living in hope that your heart will be moved in the direction of this truth. I love you.”

Still I couldn’t help but wonder:

What kind of motherly love justified emotional and sexual incest abuse, then passed it on to the next generation of children?

Thank you for your interest in the section of my memoir below. If your email server clips the message, then you can read the full post on Substack. You can also listen to the post by clicking the audio button at the top of this page. When needed, visit the Bibliography and Support Resources. This post mentions incest abuse. If you’re seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.

“In this climate of profoundly disrupted relationships the child faces a formidable developmental task. She must find a way to form primary attachments to caretakers who are either dangerous or, from her perspective, negligent. She must find a way to develop a sense of basic trust and safety with caretakers who are untrustworthy and unsafe. She must develop a sense of self in relation to others who are helpless, uncaring or cruel. She must develop a capacity for bodily self-regulation in an environment in which her body is at the disposal of others’ needs, as well as a capacity for self-soothing in an environment without solace. She must develop the capacity for initiative in an environment which demands that she bring her will into complete conformity with that of her abuser. And ultimately, she must develop a capacity for intimacy out of an environment where all intimate relationships are corrupt, and an identity out of an environment which defines her as a whore and a slave.”1

~ Judith Herman, MD

In my studies, I learned that before Eve another woman came to be created equally from the earth with Adam. Her name was Lillith, which means, “Intelligence.”2 Adam said, “Lie beneath me!” and she replied, “You lie beneath me!” Adam raped her when she refused his demand of superiority, so Lillith called to God by name, a thing no human was supposed to do. Then she grew wings, transubstantiated herself into an owl, fled the Garden of Eden, and was last seen hovering over the sea.

Following her departure, the men who penned Lillith’s story turned her into a monster. A demon. A rapist. A manipulator of misbehaved children. Time and time again, Lillith is said to have inspired subversion in previously subservient women and to be the cause of still-born births in the wombs of pregnant persons. Or she was simply forgotten, her story erased. Arguably, this has been one of the most successful smear campaigns of a woman who chose to set herself free throughout mythological history.

Then came Eve, but even her creation story could be interpreted so very differently than it has traditionally been told. Feminist theologian Phyllis Tribble reads the myth of Eve and Adam as poetry. In Genesis 23, Yahweh, “I am,” created “`adham” — a Hebrew noun that means “earth creature” — from the ground. Then the same God took a part of the clay that made “`adham” to mold Eve — which means “to breathe life into.” The author of Genesis 2 introduces gender for the first time at the end of the story after Yahweh makes two earth creatures out of one. Only then does Yahweh refer to woman, or “`ishshah” in Hebrew, and man, or “`ish.”4

Some say that Lillith returned to the Garden of Eden in the form of a snake. Sneakily, she slithered back through the gates she had once flown away from, between the greens that sprouted out from the ground, and up the Tree of Knowledge: the only one that Eve was told she could not eat from lest she die. When Eve arrived, the serpent whispered into her ear:

“‘You will not die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate [...].”5

Eve too, due to Lillith’s return, learned the truth and set herself free. The liberated became the liberator. Eve went East to live between the rivers. In response, the men who penned Eve’s story blamed her for banishing humanity from patriarchal paradise, and for the inequitable powers of the patriarchy, and for the difficulty by which the earth would provide sustenance, and for the pain that birthing persons would know during procreation. God said that from the earth humans came and to the earth they must return. Death.

So Lillith liberated herself, then Eve. Now, it seemed that they were both inviting me to set myself free.

But how would I free myself from family? The foundation of my identity, economy, and social standing? The most sacred circle in humanity according to my family’s Catholic ideology?

I needed time, I needed space to process the complexities of my memories, this new incested identity, these chaotic currents of feelings that crashed against all parts of me. The only person I still spoke to regularly at this point was my mother, so I called her. My body shook as it anticipated her answering the phone — one ring, two rings, three rings.

“Hi, my beautiful daughter,” she greeted me.
“Hi,” tears began to well up in my eyes.
“How are you?” She continued.
“I’m just doing okay,” I replied.
“What’s the matter? I’ve been worried.”
“I just need some space. A lot’s going on right now, and I’d like time to figure it out. Do you mind not reaching out for a few weeks?”
“Well, I want to be there for you. Can you tell me what’s wrong?”
“No, I’m not ready. But I’ll tell you when I am. Until then, can you please respect my boundaries?”
“Of course,” she confirmed.

I found a new therapist who lived closer by. Instantly, she validated my memories and began to teach me about the, “The Incest Family.” Incest abuse happens in families of all racial, ethnic, cultural, and class demographics. However, research suggests that incest families differentiate from non-incest families in a few ways:

“The incest family’s dysfunctional patterns that seemed to support and maintain the incestuous behavior were a rigid family belief system, a dysfunctional parental coalition, parental neglect and emotional unavailability, and the inability to nurture autonomy in family members.”6

According to the little research available, approximately one in five children will be sexually abused.7 Of reported cases, over 30% of those were perpetrated by a family member.8 Child-on-child abuse (COCSA), especially Sibling Sexual Trauma and Abuse (SSTA) is estimated to occur just as frequently, if not more so, than adult-on-child abuse.9 I wasn’t alone in this pain, which made me feel both relieved and uneasy.

Within just a few days of asking for space from my family, the flooding of contact came. From my mother, my brothers, my grandparents, my mother’s friend, my mothers friend’s child. The calls, emails, and social media messages kept pinging my voicemails, inboxes, and desktop notifications. My family reminded me what I owed them and how separation was a sin.

“God wants the family to stay together at all costs!” They said.

Eventually, their messages became less questioning and more threatening. So, I changed my number. I blocked my family’s emails. I left all social platforms. I needed my once comfortable public life to become very private, very fast. It was all so confusing, but I had to keep on living.

My graduate school asked me to lead a trip to El Salvador with a number of the professors. So with new people, I retraced my footsteps back to the land called “The Savior.” I took the redeye, landed at the airport, breathed in the tropical air, gazed at the fullness of the clouds, and once again felt the sun on my freckled face. Still seeking to find that same sense of salvation that had brought me here a few years before.

On our way to the UCA, we stopped by the gravesite of the four churchwomen from the US who had been raped then murdered during the Civil War: Maryknoll Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, and lay missionary Jean Donovan.10 This place became a memorial mound where faithful Catholics and activists visited to grieve these women’s fatalities.

I went to the grass to sit by the gravesites of these four women and quickly realized that survival is not a privilege granted to all those who experience sexual abuse. The churchwomen were raped and murdered; I was raped and lived. A half-life was better than no life at all. For the first time, I understood that although the suffering of survival felt so heavy, it was still an opportunity. I left the land feeling just a little bit lighter.

I returned back to Berkeley knowing now that I needed to figure out how to better hold and manage the costs of survival. The trust fund had been spent. The amount in my bank account dwindled because my 10 hours a week student employment at my graduate school couldn’t cover the expenses of rent, groceries, and therapy. I had no idea where I would find the energy to manage one more thing between the memories, the grief, the school assignments, the work study hours, and my need for more and more sleep.

But survival needs continued to override the fatigue. So I pulled myself out of bed, created a profile on an online babysitting app, and prayed I would be connected to a safe family quickly. Eventually, I received a message from Charlotte.

“Hi Anne,” her email began. “We have three children under the age of 10 and one on the way. We live just up the street from your school and are looking for childcare. Would you be interested in interviewing?” I wrote back feeling a bit desperate, “Yes! I would love to meet you.”

I showed up at Charlotte’s large wooden door a few days later and knocked. She answered in a flowy, pink shirt with tassels hanging from the neck. Luna, the youngest, came running down the aisle in a bright turquoise tutu with a blue striped shirt. Winter followed in a sleek, green, cotton dress with playing cards in her hand. Sienna, the oldest, was with the neighbors.

“Welcome,” Charlotte invited me in.

I stepped through the doorway and felt a strange sense of belonging. I slipped off my shoes per their request and felt my feet touch the oiled wooden floors, absorbing the grace of this family. Floor to ceiling bookshelves caught my eye, while handmade fairylands rested in the corner waiting to be explored. Joshua, Charlotte’s husband, sat in the living room in an outfit of all pastels — dress pants, a collared shirt, and a vest. We talked. Or, at least we tried. The girls had stronger voices.

Instantly, I fell in love. Apparently, it was mutual. I was hired the next day and became the newest extension of their family. As we got to know each other, eventually I disclosed to them my history of incest abuse and present recovery process. Quickly, they shared with me that the issue of incest abuse was a far too familiar reality in the generational pasts of their family too. They had chosen to break the cycle and now modeled how to do so. Charlotte showed me a way to be an empowered woman and caregiver, while Joshua was particularly sensitive to my mental health needs.

“I’m having a hard day,” I said. “The memories are really overwhelming and I can’t process everything. But it’s okay, I can manage.” I concluded to ensure he wouldn’t worry.
“It’s not okay, Anne,” he gently responded. “You don’t have to do that here. You don’t have to pretend to be okay when you’re not.”

I felt unworthy of this amount of love and care. The pieces of me that kept myself safe by being independent and isolated wished for me to stop engaging in this loving system of support. I belonged and I didn’t. I was hired to be a caregiver, when I needed someone to care for me. I was their friend and their employee, when what I really needed was my own safe family. I was trying to survive my day-to-day life, while also comprehending why my father would abuse his own daughter. It was exhausting.

My master’s program neared its end. I had interviewed at a nearby high school to be a religious studies teacher and campus minister. I feared receiving the opportunity just as much as being rejected from it. If the school said no, I had no idea where else I would go. I didn’t feel confident in any other subjects for a career change and needed a high paying salaried role to afford to live in the SF Bay Area near my small support system, while building a life from scratch, and paying for my healing process out-of-pocket. If the school said yes, then I would have to wrestle with my Catholic identity on the classroom floor, teaching young girls how to hold the tension of being a Catholic and a Feminist simultaneously.

A few days later, a friend and I went to the pool to swim and release my nervous system of all the excess energy. I pulled myself through the water as my brain, body, and being looped between the fears of the past, present, and future simultaneously. I lifted myself out of the water, walked to the women’s locker room, removed my suit, and showered off. My friend followed. We were both naked now. My phone rang from an unknown number. I answered, my heart pounding in my chest.

“Hi, Anne! Do you have a minute to talk?” It was the hiring manager from the high school. Technically, this wasn’t a great time in the hollow and echoing chamber of a public women’s locker room, while I was naked and vulnerable.
“Yes, this is a great time!” I lied, smiling big to make my voice sound more enthusiastic.
“We loved your interview and your teaching presentation. The students gave you excellent feedback.” I was waiting for the...but…
“So, we’d love to offer you the job!”

Immediately, I started jumping up and down, my breasts out, bouncing all around. My friend gave me an inquisitive stare, eyebrows raised, and a curious thumbs up. I lifted the thumb on my left hand back to communicate the yes part of me longed for. I hung up the phone and put it down, then melted into the floor sobbing. My friend wrapped her naked body around my body in a congratulatory embrace. I showered off the chlorine and the fear of the future for one moment and felt relief.

I could support myself now. I could stay away from home. I could be financially independent from my father. I had a job. I would no longer be codependent on my abusers.

Graduation day represented the ending of one life and the beginning of the next. A ritualistic walk down a new aisle where I would be safe and celebrated. I dressed in the required black gown and square cap with a maroon shawl wrapped around my shoulders. Then, a friend came running up to me frantically, “Anne, your mother is here.”

My school community knew what I was going through and did their best to hold the complexity of the uncovering of repressed memories of incest that required complete space from family.

“What?!” My heart sank immediately, as my body tried to decide if I should fight, freeze, flee, or fawn as a response.

How did she even find out about the event?
She wouldn’t have come alone.
Is my father here too?
What should I do?

My body trembled, as I walked down the aisle surrounded by the faculty and families of other students. My eyes scanned for her in the audience, but I couldn’t find her. After the celebration, I walked away ready to go to dinner to celebrate with a friend. Then, I saw her approaching me. I froze. I didn’t see my father.

“What are you doing here?” I asked gently as she put her arms around me.
“I wanted to see you,” she responded sadly.
“Okay.” I didn’t know what else to say, I was so conditioned to protect her from pain.

She handed me an envelope. I put it in my pocket and walked away. After dinner, I opened the card and a check for $500 fell to the floor. Even though I needed the money desperatley, I ripped it up understanding well enough by now that my family never gave anything for free.

During the summer months, I worked for Charlotte’s family to make just enough money to cover rent and groceries. I kept driving Green Bean down south to explore places to live near my new employer. Any official rental property wanted a good credit check, a large security deposit, and the first month’s rent, none of which I could provide. I cried in my car on the drive back to Berkeley, as time quickly sped by with no ideas to where I might reside.

Annie, it’s going to be okay.

I heard that same voice from within placate me. When I returned home, I redirected my search to Craigslist, which I had avoided due to fear of being hurt when showing up alone as a woman to someone’s home. Then I saw it. Pictures of a beautiful little cottage with wainscoting and sand tan walls, a tiny kitchen, golden-hued wooden floors, and windows that overlooked the landlord’s garden — a slice of paradise just for me to recover. The cottage was 20 minutes driving distance from my new school.

The price listed was beyond my budget, but it was beautiful and felt safe both which inspired me to reach out to the landlady and say hello. We met. While shaking, I explained to her my situation, the space from family, the lack of credit, the need to create a payment plan until I could afford the first month’s rent and the security deposit, as well as meet my basic needs. Surprisingly, she agreed.

“You’re meant to be here,” she said to me lovingly. “I can feel it.”

For the last time, I stuffed my Santa Fe with everything I owned to move to my first chosen home outside of school. Once I paid my landlord the security deposit and got caught up with rent, I went car shopping. I bought my first car, then I left Green Bean, still my father’s property, on a side of the street near my old school in Berkeley for my parents to pick up and drive back to Bunya St.

Thank you for your interest in the section of my memoir below. If your email server clips the message, then you can read the full post on Substack. You can also listen to the post by clicking the audio button at the top of this page. When needed, visit the Bibliography and Support Resources. This post mentions incest abuse. If you’re seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.

PART III: HOLD

“Behind the story I tell is the one I don’t.
Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.
Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes,
food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love,
behind this moment is silence, years of silence.”

~ Dorothy Allison

Chapter 11: Memory

“The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social contract are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried.”

~ Judith Herman, MD1

Thanksgiving arrived, so I returned home for the holiday. Per usual, all of my extended family members in the area and any friends without family held hands in a large circle in our front yard between the off-white house and the red brick wall on Bunya St.

“Everyone list three things they’re grateful for!” my father demanded.

One-by-one, we all said our set of affirmations. I named the routine litany: my family, my friends, the ocean; then ate plates full of potatoes and turkey. During the weekend that followed, my father, mother, brothers, and I drove down to Joan and Pop’s house on the golf course. As the day progressed, I felt so left out, so different, so othered from my own family, that I needed to take a break from them. Our values had divided so distinctively that I couldn’t quite find a way to relate to them, or for them to relate to me. Often, I felt both offended and lonely by their conversations and their company.

I walked out and sat on the curb, so I could manage the reactivity of my inner screamer with external silence. Suddenly, Pops came and stood by my side. He had noticed my absence. Then, with far too much effort, he sat his big, brittle bones beside me on the low sidewalk.

“What’s wrong, Annie?” he asked.
“I just can’t relate to our family. I feel so alone. Ever since I got back from El Salvador, I can’t seem to access any joy, pleasure, or gratitude.”

“You know,” he began one of his war stories, “when I flew back to the US after the war ended, I didn’t go home for weeks. I didn’t call my mother. I just rode trains around the country and sat with myself. As an engineer, I never saw direct combat. Instead, the military gave me a community and a sense of meaning that I had never experienced before, and I have yet to experience since.”

“I’m so sorry, grandpa,” I grieved. “Thank you for telling me. It’s helpful to know that you understand.”

While we shared this brief moment of intimacy, a conflict had erupted inside the house. Something had happened between my father and one of his sisters. She ran to the bathroom crying and he followed her. As I was told, she turned around and grabbed my father’s genitals and pinched them hard. In response, he reached for her breasts and twisted the nipples. Now, she was crying in the bathroom, while he was defending his actions.

“Why would you do that?” I asked him.
“She started it,” he replied. “Sometimes that’s just how siblings treat each other.”

While I drove back to Berkeley to return to school, I considered why my father could so easily justify the sexual molestation of family, and blame his sister for all of the wrongdoing. I remembered the few instances where my brothers had tried to touch me inappropriately when we were growing up. Immediately, I had disclosed the moments to my mother and she sat them down and asked them to respect my body. It never happened again.

I settled back into my life away from family. My graduate program offered complimentary spiritual direction to students. So I returned to this practice, which I found so comforting in El Salvador with Father Matthew, to guide me through the intense transformation of my worldview. Instead of sitting in the garden of the Peace House, I walked a few blocks down the street to see Sister Joan in her office. She had the same name as my paternal grandmother, but taught me about a much more gracious God.

Joan began to connect me with a source of divinity face-to-face without a male intermediary, without the Sacraments of the sexist church and the so-far-fixed family dynamic I was slowly separating myself from. Sister Joan was an expert in the practice of Ignatian Contemplation developed by the Jesuit founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola. Joan showed me how to use my practiced imagination to safely connect with this source of love that felt so deeply necessary.

Instead of getting lost in perfection in my head — the Garden of Eden that would never be real — I could redirect the power of my creative mind to focus on the voice of love in my own life. Scripture stories could be used as a composition of place, a starting space. I imagined myself on Noah’s ark.

God could meet me there and share some advice. I entered into the stories of Jesus too. The breaking of the bread. The time sitting around bonfires with friends. The walking on the water. The resurrection. I imagined being satiated. Being warmed by endless healing flames. Being accompanied side-by-side along the tops of impossible tides. I would no longer climb the mountain that was my paternal grandfather, nor cling to the whitewash that was my father.

Christmas came, so I returned to Bunya St. for the holiday. The warm winter weather in Newport provided the perfect opportunity for my family to visit the beach and take a walk. My mother and I strode across the warm sand holding hands with the salt water lapping against our feet.

“So,” she began. “I’ve started having flashbacks of my childhood.”
“Oh?” I questioned curiously. “Flashbacks of what exactly?”
“That I was sexually abused by my father, Jay.”
“Really?” I replied. “I’m so sorry. Do you want to say more about that?”

“It was so much: oral, rape, sodomy, molestation of my breasts, his hand forcing my hand to his penis.” She recalled these memories with a smile on her face, which perplexed me. “I didn’t know if the memories were true, so I asked a few others in our family, and they said they had also been abused.”

“Do you want to say anything to Grandpa Jay?”
“No, I’m not ready.”
“That’s understandable,” I replied. “Do you think he abused any kids in my generation?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she questioned, in a tone that suggested she couldn’t quite go there.
“Do you think other family members may have abused children? What about dad? He’s always been so obsessed with sex.”
“Well, he was never around,” she said, which I noted wasn’t a no.

I returned to school and researched more about recovered memories of child sexual abuse. From the work of Dr. Jennifer Freyd, a researcher and survivor, I learned that developmental traumas, especially when the perpetrator is a provider, can cause Betrayal Trauma. A child’s brain can’t hold the complex reality that the hand that feeds them is also the one that harms them, so victimized children compartmentalize their experiences. Some survivors glorify the abuse, some minimize it, some normalize it, others internalize it. They may only recall the good memories from childhood, while repressing the instances of incest abuse.2

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), describes dissociative amnesia as a condition that “causes people to be unable to recall important personal information, usually due to trauma or stress.” The brain buries it, while the body is often the first vessel to speak through illness or by some other means until the memories can be retrieved. Sometimes though, they are not. The average age of disclosure for child sexual abuse survivors is in their fifties.3 My mother had just entered this decade of her life.

My studies began to focus more on the prevalence of sexual violence throughout history. Specifically, my class read Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us, by Rebecca Ann Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock.4 Parker shared about her adult-experience recalling instances of child sexual abuse by a neighbor. In her body too, she felt this deep embodied pressure, pain, and rage that she couldn’t release or escape in healthy ways.

And there was so much more. My professor revealed stories to me about the serial rape of so many girls and women that had often been erased. Like the “The Comfort Women”: 200,000 girls, mostly from Korea and between the ages of 12 and 16, that Japanese soldiers kidnapped during the Second World War and took to “comfort stations,” where they enslaved and raped these children.

But alongside this horrible reincarnation of memory, we also recovered the language survivors adopted to explain their pain, as well as the resiliency they found in solidarity. The Comfort Women adopted the word, han,5 the describe the pain left over from the serial sexual violence of their bodies. Suh Nam-dong, a professor of Minjung theology6 explains han as a “feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered, a sense of helplessness because of the overwhelming odds against one, a feeling of acute pain in one’s guts and bowels, making the whole body writhe and squirm, and an obstinate urge to take revenge and to right the wrong — all these combined.”7

Reading the stories of these survivors’ pasts felt both deeply uncomfortable as well as strangely familiar. My mother’s words made more sense in reflection to these stories. It was as if the wounds of all of their wombs somehow whispered into mine still clinging to the confusion of silence inviting me too to speak. While I lacked a verbal language to express my emotional experience, my inner screamer was learning a verbiage that seemed to be resonating.

Easter approached quickly. Although my family expected me to return home for the holiday, I wanted to avoid Bunya St. My awareness of the dysfunctional patterns of my family increased, while my ability to normalize them decreased. Besides, the resurrection of Jesus certainly didn’t feel worthy of celebration, as I felt so trapped in a state of suffering constantly. I sought support from Joan.

“You know you don’t have to go home for the holidays, Anne?” She challenged me.
“What? They’re my family. I have to spend the holidays with them.”
“No,” she responded. “You’re an adult and need to do what’s best for you and your health. You’re always more stressed when you spend time with them than when you return. Why don’t you just stay at school?”

I arose on Easter morning curious about how I would feel on my first holiday without family. I chose to spend the day by myself, as I wasn’t ready to be welcomed into someone else’s house. Instead, I got dressed and went for a long walk. Surprisingly, I felt deeply at peace. An entire day without the obligations of family, without the messy expectations of perfection, without the constant anxiety of keeping up, without the secrets. I wasn’t lonely without my family; it was lovely.

A few months passed, so my mother chose to visit me in Berkeley. I wanted to introduce the beauty of the land to her, especially the trees. So my classmates, my mother, and I all went on a hike in Muir Woods. We made our way up the mountain, together observing the Redwoods standing so tall above our heads. I approached one, placed my hands around its trunk, and felt the fullness of its body. Then suddenly, I felt a hand opening the top of my elastic waistband and reaching down my pants. I turned swiftly to see my mother standing behind me.

“Mom, what are you doing?!” I asked, horrified.
“I just wanted to pat your po-po,” she replied. I pulled her aside.
“That’s private. You don’t get to touch me like that. Also, we’re in public with my friends. That’s deeply inappropriate and embarrassing.”
“I created that body,” she teased.
“That doesn’t give you the right to touch my body if I don’t want you to,” I replied.
“Well, touch is important to me,” she defended. “You know I wasn’t touched appropriately as a child.”

At dinner that night, I tried to continue to set boundaries with her, or at least explain the growing differences in my values and that my future may not be as she expected it. But she grew more defensive, switching the subject of conversation to her:

“Do you know how much it hurt me that you didn’t come home for Easter? The only reason I came here is because you don’t want to be with us at home!”

In that moment, I knew the conversation was over. She returned to Newport Beach, while I went back to Berkeley.

Content Invitation: The stories below contain simple descriptions of instances of child sexual abuse. Please, take care of yourself as you need in order to read the rest of this chapter and refer to the support resources post for help. If you would prefer, you can also skip the italicized sections below to pass by this more graphic content.

Days later, I laid in bed still processing this interaction with my mother. My head rested on my white pillow sprinkled with small pink flowers and green leaves. Tears fell down my cheeks, as I suddenly started to receive the memories.

All of the sudden so much of my suffering since I left home for college made perfect sense: The smell of beer on breath. The weight of bodies on my body. The stretching, the burning, the horror, the hurt. The monster under the bed was real. The demon in my body was them. My brain spun in my head, I wanted to exit my own skin.

All of the sudden my childhood history returned to me: I spent my first six years tumbling under the weight of men, not water, while also clinging to them to survive. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t find my way up, or my way down, or my way through. There was no way out. It seemed to have started when I was two. Others had abused me too. I had been imprisoned in my own home, exploited and raped by the people who were supposed to support me. The war was behind closed doors, the wounds buried so far beneath the skin, the chaos trapped in my body for only me to see.

Then, I saw her. Me, on my knees, my mouth open in a silent scream, hands bound so I couldn’t leave. I was only three. I remembered the wailing woman on the wall in the chapel in El Salvador. The children kidnapped and raped in Korea. The author of the ashes. My inner screamer. My mother. I now knew what I had felt in their company: the solidarity of this very specific source of suffering. A history of serial rape against my body finally telling me its story:

That word came to me with such ease. “Incest,” as if the use of it were a calling to me. But this new identity, this sudden knowledge, this hidden history, didn’t fit who I understood myself to be. An ontological shift — a change in my being with the forcing of the first penis, the perpetual penetrations and molestations. Transubstantiations that should’ve never happened due to someone else’s sins.

The flowers of my comforter held me now in this temporary garden of my bedroom that offered space for me to finally receive the revelation of this secret solidarity with other serial sexual abuse survivors throughout history. Most of my resurfacing stories were recovered memories: I had forgotten them and then reclaimed them as a part of my history. Some of the stories surfacing had been continuous memories: I always knew that they happened, but had yet to process them. Other instances remained non-narrative memories that still stuck to the bones in my body, but lacked a clear story.

In these instances, I had walked away. But I could not run away from home. I could not set boundaries in the place I was raised with no locked doors by the father who groped my mother, and the mother who devoted herself to my father, and the community who celebrated my mother’s commitment to him as a sign of sanctity, and the church that blamed my body for all of it. Now just like Jonah in The Giver, I was given back at least some of my memories and it changed everything.

I knew I needed help, but didn’t know where to go, nor how to get there. I could barely support myself, but couldn’t go home. Immediately, I grabbed my cell phone, scrolled the contacts list until my first therapist’s name, “Barbara,” appeared and clicked “Call.” My back sat up against the hard wall now.

“Barbara, I’m remembering memories of incest abuse. I don’t know what to do. How do I know if they’re true?” I cried.
“Annie,” she began gently. “I’ve been seeing your mother in therapy these last few weeks. It’s clear to me that your family has a lot of secrets. In families with a lot of secrets, sexual abuse is common. I wouldn’t doubt if they’re real. Find your truth, for it will set you free.”

Finally, I reclaimed the silenced parts of me hiding in my own body. My challenging transition away from home to go to college. The nightterrors of being raped. My avoidance of parties. The slow shutdown of my system. The han in my pelvis. The state of my half-life. The need for isolation. My deep sensitivity to sexism. Finally, I had the answer I had been seeking since my body started shaking when I first drove away from the only home I have ever known at 18.

It was my father’s hands, my grandfather’s hands, and my uncle’s hands that caused the disruption in the cycle that was my life. But incest was not an issue that could so easily be untangled as a knot in a necklace. No bath, holy or not, could heal this. No prayer practice. No comfort object. No medication. No gratitude exercises. No wonder nothing had worked for me.

Thank you for your interest in the section of my memoir below. If your email server clips the message, then you can read the full post on Substack. You can also listen to the post by clicking the audio button at the top of this page. When needed, visit the Bibliography and Support Resources. This post mentions incest abuse. If you’re seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.

My fingers passed the rosary through my hands, as my lips offered incantations to Archangel Raphael, the patron saint of healers, guides, and protectors; marriage, joy, and travel. Word to word, bead to bead, I devoted nine days of prayer to the angel in hopes that he would intercede, so that I could meet someone, anyone, who could save me from this suffering.

Eventually, I returned to El Salvador on the same redeye flight that I had taken the first time down, but without the shoulder of a potential love to lean on. The Casa program offered alums the opportunity to volunteer for the year as a Community Coordinator (CC) to live in a house and accompany the students through their semester. I applied and within months received a call from the program directors inviting me back to that beautiful country where I had felt so surprisingly at home.

The man who ran the program picked me up at the airport, gave me a cell phone, and dropped me off at Casa Ita, the smallest of the three houses that students resided in. I settled in and made my new room more cozy by sticking inspirational quotes, images, and pictures of loved ones awaiting me back home on my walls. I stood on my bed, the mattress surrendering under the weight of my feet, as I stuck the paper to the orange painted wall with double sided tape. On it, a poem written by Antonio Machado1, read:

The next day, I arose and walked just a few blocks to arrive at the home of the founders of the program for a welcoming of this year’s staff. Some of the faces around the table looked familiar: I knew the Salvadorans from my time as a student, as well as one of the CC’s who had studied abroad with me. The other CC I hadn’t yet met, nor a priest who had been hired to support the staff and students. Father Matthew would teach Philosophy, as well as offer spiritual direction to the community.

A few weeks into the semester, Matthew and I gathered in the garden for our first spiritual direction session just outside of the “Casa de Paz” (Peace House). We sat across from each other, he the listener and me the speaker, as we began to explore the wounds and wisdom motivating my life with a cautious curiosity. Matthew sought to listen to my silent inner screamer. But she hadn’t yet learned to speak, so she communicated with compulsive thinking, constant worry, and picking and scratching. Still Matthew’s patience pursued me, his intelligence invited me, and his spirituality taught me to be differently. We began to practice an unfamiliar form of safety.

“What’s your relationship with your father like?” He began.
“Sometimes I enjoy his company, but mostly I feel afraid of him. I try to avoid him most of the time,” I replied.
“Why?” He questioned.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What’s your relationship with your mother like?” He continued.
“I love her,” I responded. “She’s my best friend and always there when I need her, but I don’t ever want to be like her.”
“Why not?” He continued curiously.
“Because she has no sense of identity apart from my father and that’s not a future I want for myself.”

In weekly spiritual direction sessions throughout the semester, Father Matthew listened attentively to my family’s values passed down to me. He called out the lies I had been taught by Disney, by the Catholic Church, by my family, by society: that I needed a male savior or a husband to survive. Colette Dowling has coined this, “The Cinderella Complex.”2 Or the idea that women have been socially trained to be dependent on men to meet their spiritual, physical, emotional, and economic needs.

“Prayer or a man will not save you from this suffering,” Matthew insisted.
“Then who will?” I asked desperately.
“I think you need to return to the US and go to therapy,” he suggested.

Heartbroken, I flew to LA just a week into the second semester, where my parents picked me up. Once again, I landed back in my childhood bedroom with only prayers, Bear-Bear, and the statue of Mary. I simplified my bedroom by deconstructing the wooden four post bed, carrying it down to the garage piece by piece, then climbing back up the stairs and placing the mattress on the floor.

I posted the same poem by Antonio Machado that I had pasted to the plaster orange walls in El Salvador. I hung a picture of Mary of Nazareth on one wall. Mary’s face shone brightly, with a metallic gold halo resting around her head that matched the gorgeous frame that held her in place. Her promise for healing still settled me, even if I felt enraged that it still felt so out of reach.

I began to see Barbara once a week, technically a therapist, but mostly the grandmother I wish I would’ve had. She listened to the stories of my family and began to teach me the pedagogies of psychology. She offered behavioral changes, not rote prayers, to practice. Namely, the importance of boundaries. While I took care of everyone else, Barbara was more concerned about who was taking care of me. I began to practice distancing myself from unnecessary interactions with my family and dealing with the guilt of not meeting everyone else’s needs all of the time.

My brothers and I attended a group therapy session all together with Barbara. The four of us sat there in a circle on sofas and chairs. I was trying to get us to be on the same page, so that we could possibly influence our family to change. They all named the same issues, admitting their awareness of them: our father’s power, our mother’s powerlessness, the rest of us caught in between. They acknowledged my father’s obsession with sex, but they felt the situation was fixed and were just supposed to deal with it. Just like my mother did. After all, we were family. I didn’t agree. And the constant work to try and change them when I had so little energy exhausted me.

I needed more support to manage the confusing currents flowing through my body in this context of family fighting my new personal beliefs. When a famous Palm Reader visited Newport Beach, I knew I just had to see him, so I could seek more answers to my failing and flailing system. Maybe he could help me understand my inner screamer, the pressure in my pelvis. So, with my mother and all of her friends, I walked to my next door neighbors house and waited for my session to begin. I sat before him while he held my palm gently.

“You had a terrible childhood,” he said. “One where you didn’t have any control.”
“Yes!” I agreed, “I was very sick with seizures and surgeries.” Finally, I felt validated. He looked at me as if he knew something I didn’t.
“You have a demon inside of you,” he continued. “Once you kill it, you will come to live a long and beautiful life.”

I began urgently. I chose to pursue a Masters in Theological Studies for nothing more than to get me away from family. With the Catholic degree, I could eventually work in parishes and hospitals, at high schools and community colleges, or I could pursue a PhD and become a professor. With a full-tuition scholarship, the ability to earn with a work study job, as well as take out student loans, graduate school meant I could finally break my financial codependency on my father and family.

So, just after my 23rd birthday, I moved away once again from my childhood home on Bunya St. I hopped in the car, turned on the engine, then created miles of distance between my father and me, my mother and me, my brothers and me. Between my grandparents too: Pops and Joan, Jay and Magdalene. The hot, flat, agricultural land between Southern and Northern CA began to lift into hills covered with green trees and a cool breeze. It was Fall now, and the leaves had begun to fall.

My school sat on the top of a hill in Berkeley, CA. Just outside campus was an apartment building the school rented out to students. The penthouse, a six-bedroom, one bath apartment, had been reserved for community student-living, like Casa Romero in El Salvador. I parked my car after the long car ride, walked all my things up the few flights of stairs to the top floor, chose the smallest room in the house because it felt cozy, and unpacked.

My body continued to tremble as it stretched away from the unfamiliar and experienced the new. Just like when I left for LMU, I unrealistically expected myself to get better as soon as I moved out of the house. Instead, I became sicker: deeper sleeps, demonizing dreams, an inability to participate in usual social routines, constipation, harrowing fatigue, constant picking and scratching at my skin.

Suddenly, my usual coping strategies proved to be inaccessible. The sea, with its endless horizon, was far away from me. The salt water in the bay lapped the shoreline gently at the bottom of the hill, but felt far too cold to swim in. I got in the bath, sometimes repeatedly each day because it provided me access to the water, which helped me to relax.

A razor rested on the edge of the tub. While I sat on the floor of the bath in the fetal position allowing the water to pour over my heavy head, hurting heart, and burdened body, I stared at the sharp blade longingly, feeling confidently that one deep slit across a wrist would get the job done quickly. Death felt like the only liberation from this suffering.

Annie, it’s going to be okay.

Suddenly, an ease settled onto my shoulders then into my soul, as I heard a voice speak softly and clearly in my mind. I remembered that same tone, that same message, when I tried to run away from home the first time as a little girl. Now, I lived over 400 miles away and had finally left my childhood home, but still felt it so deeply present within my bones.

Thank you for your interest in the section of my memoir below. If your email server clips the message, then you can read the full post on Substack. You can also listen to the post by clicking the audio button at the top of this page. When needed, visit the Bibliography and Support Resources. This post mentions incest abuse. If you’re seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.

A memory returned to me of a time in Lourdes, France when I sat across from the monsignor who accompanied the Knights of Malta to the place of pilgrimage to help those in need of healing. I wrestled with the differing expectations of the Jesus of my parents and the Jesus of the Jesuits. Following one or the other would take my life in a very different direction and I couldn’t figure out which one was right. The priest replied.

“Who is Jesus to you?”

This new life of tropical heat and walks to the university, of attempting to dialogue socially in broken Spanish and to teach English to children in La Chacra, of arising to a classmate singing “Oh Danny Boy” in a beautiful baritone voice in the shower every morning, and the community holding hands to celebrate our time together in song before every meal, felt quite ideal. I loved it and hoped my parents would too when they booked their tickets to El Salvador for a week-long visit.

When my parents arrived early in the morning on that same red eye flight and after the bus ride, they said hello to William who awaited them at the iron front gate of Casa Romero, pulled the garage door back, and entered. I met them in the entrance room with the landline from which I had called them once a week to check in. My father did as he always does: he squeezed me into his body softly the first time, then more aggressively the second, so that my breasts squished into his chest over and over again. While my mother offered a gentle hug and hello. Then together, we found our way to the courtyard where I introduced them to my new friends.

My parents returned to their recommended hotel to rest, then we met the next day to visit my praxis site. James, my mother, my father, and I all hurried into the dilapidated taxi and drove to the edge of the city to be with the community and their river of laundry and trash, stories and schools, parishes and pupuserias. My parents played with the students delightedly during recess then watched me proudly, as I tried to teach the kids basic concepts of English through song. We all stood, placed our hands on our heads, then shoulders, then toes on repeat, as we tried to sing together:

“Head, shoulders, knees, and toes, knees and toes.
Head, shoulders, knees, and toes, knees and toes.”
Then our hands moved to other parts of our bodies, as we belted:
“Eyes, and ears, and mouth, and nose!
Head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes!”

The kids practiced speaking English with my parents, while pulling on their loose shirts saying awkwardly, “Hi! How are you?!” This was just about as far as the conversation could go with the students’ level of language skills, my parents’ comprehension of Spanish, and my limited capacities as a translator. But as fluent English speakers, James and I easily met the necessary requirements to be language teachers, so we volunteered to instruct with no prior experience.

We ate lunch with the priest, then headed up to sit with the elders and their embroidery. I could see that my father began to grow antsy. He had endless energy and sitting with people who spoke slowly in a foreign language, and sewed even more so, irritated him. My mother presented as always, nearly perfectly, making it difficult for me to ascertain her true feelings. The day ended and we returned by taxi to Casa Romero.

“Tomorrow, we’re going to a resort!” My father retorted. “I’m here to be on vacation.”

We spent the rest of the week hopping from resort to resort on the beach trying to find a place that suited my father’s needs. While his frustration grew, so did his critiques. He treated the Salvadoran staff like trash, so my mother tried to correct him.

“Don’t you dare correct me in public!” He demeaned her.
“I wish someone would just be nice to me!” My mother screamed and ran away. I froze and then followed her.
“Annie, are you exercising?” My father interrupted, “Your ass is getting fat!”
Both offended and confused, I turned to reply, “Why are you looking?”

Finally, the week concluded and my parents returned me to Casa Romero then took a taxi to the airport. I went back to my room and rested, depleted and concerned. My new way of being did not resonate with those who raised me. That night before bed, I opened my closet door to see the full length mirror hanging there. I saw my skin, turned around, looked at my rear end, and felt ashamed.

The next morning, I arose to the day, got dressed, scurried out of my bedroom, and walked into the courtyard of Casa Romero. There a beautiful older woman sat under the avocado tree with one thick braid in her silver hair, the tail pulled and pinned up and underneath. She appeared to be so reverent in her own body, and immediately I knew that I wanted to get to know her. So I introduced myself and quickly learned that she was the mother one of the students in my community and came to visit from the United States for a few days. She appeared to be the epitome of grace.

“Will you teach me how to braid my hair like that?”
“Of course!” She replied lovingly.

So I sat on the step, while she pulled up a chair behind me. In her right hand, she grabbed a brush and carefully combed my hair of its knots, then gently pulled the top into three separate strands, and began to weave over and under and over again until the braid shaped atop my head. Then, she rubber banded the end and used a large bobby pin to secure the tail under the long strand.

“Done! Now, go look in the mirror,” she asked.

So I did, and for a moment I saw myself differently. I felt beautiful. I returned to sitting at her feet, while she pulled the bobby pin and the rubber band free, unweaving the braided hair so that it fell once again atop my shoulders.

“Now, you try.”

She asked to hold my hands and guided them, as I divided my hair into three strands and began that same dance over and under and over and under again until I arrived at the end, which I secured with the rubber band. I pushed my index and middle fingers underneath the now braided hair that met my neck and found space there for the tail to be tucked within. Then, I stuck the remaining length of braid underneath and pinned it to stay.

“Well done!” She celebrated. “Now, go see yourself.”

So I returned to face my own face in the mirror and saw once again — albeit a bit of a messier version — that same beauty I had seen in me for the very first time.

Eventually, the waking, the teaching, the singing, the eating, the stories before bed by Adam, and the dreaming of war and rape through the evening, led to the conclusion of my time in El Salvador. Four months passed by far too fast. As my semester abroad ended, Adam and I discussed what we were going to do about our relationship. He lived in Milwaukee, I lived in LA. Besides, tensions had arisen between us throughout our days about his devotion to traditional Catholic practices and my growing rebellion, his rituals and my rage. So we chose to close our romantic time together and stay friends. But my heart broke open once again.

My classmates, who had become the most intimate of companions, released our hands after singing our last prayer of “Vamos Todos.” For the final time, we ate those delicious boiled beans, fried plantains, and soft tortillas with a pinch of salt and a squeeze of lime. We said goodbye to the community members at our praxis sites who we had the honor to accompany and be accompanied by. Then the bus arrived. William, whose endless energy who had protected us through the night, waved us goodbye.

At that moment, the imagined future that had felt so full was instantly pulled out from underneath my feet. The country called “The Savior,” the liberated Jesus I met there, the community of care and equity, the new friends, and the Prince Charming I hoped to marry, suddenly all left me. And in the space that remained came the debilitating anxiety and fatigue. Without a future to be full of, I felt completely alone with this struggle that raged within me, the inner screamer that I could now feel was so alive within my body.

I landed alone back in Los Angeles with my bags in hand and saw my family awaiting me: my father, my mother, and a few brothers. Together, we drove to Bunya St. following the direction of the sea. My father parked the car in the garage and I leapt out, grabbed my bags, passed the front yard, hurried to the green door, up the stairs, and landed right back in my childhood bed and wept. Instantly, my small, Catholic, seemingly perfect world in Newport Beach became deeply shaken by the voices of the historically marginalized people who I met in El Salvador.

I thought of James, my praxis partner, and all he tried to teach me about white supremacy and privilege, as I finally saw it all so clearly in this wealthy, white city by the sea. The next time I spoke over the phone with James, I apologized for the cost of my ignorance and the labor it required of him to educate me. I felt both the gifts and the guilt of my privilege as a white woman from a wealthy community. At least verbally, I began to stand on the side of those historically oppressed and opposed the privileges that rich people granted themselves at the expense of everyone else.

“You’re a communist bitch!” My father attacked me.
“You’re no fun anymore!” Friends said in response to my progressive politics.
“You were brainwashed in El Salvador!” My mother screamed at my new ideologies.

Their messages were clear: I did not belong if I did not align with their beliefs and attune to their lifestyles. There was only one way to serve my community, my family and their God: to blindly obey or leave.

I felt relieved to return to LMU, as the summer ended, . In my final semester of collegiate life, I dragged my body from the house I lived in with a few friends off campus, down to the bluff, and into the school for classes, exhausted after a merely 15 minute walk. This former Division I athlete who played in NCAA championships could now, only three years later, barely get out of bed.

The university offered basic yoga as an elective and I signed up in an attempt to practice embodying my body. I wanted to love all of me and this felt like an attempt at doing just that. The integration of ancient Eastern medicines and the Catholic tradition moved me as my classmates and I waved through the cycles of “The Salutation of the Sun.” I offered my practice in prayer to the Son Jesus, while I gazed to the ceiling arching my spine, then pushed my pelvis up into the air and my hands back for Downward Facing Dog. But being with my body like this initiated a new type of stress, one I had yet to experience.

While I moved through the many positions, I saw flashes of penises in my mind. I couldn’t see who the phalluses belonged to, just that they were always attempting to penetrate me in the vulnerable positions that the yoga asanas made of my body. Simultaneously, I began to feel an intense pressure in my pelvis. A weightedness. A heaviness. It felt as if I neglected to pull out a tampon, like something was stuck up inside my vaginal canal that shouldn’t be.

The academic year concluded, so most of my family flew out for my graduation. From all around the United States, aunts, uncles, and cousins boarded planes to watch me walk across the stage to claim my Bachelors in Theology. Afterward, I envisioned a simple dinner celebration in my family’s beautiful backyard with a long, linear table on the lawn. We’d order pupusas from a Salvadoran restaurant, so that I could share a little bit of the joy of stretching cheese and black beans stuffed into grilled masa dough with my extended family. Breaking a different kind of bread. Inviting them into remembering. We could watch the Disneyland fireworks after dinner.

Naturally, my father had other plans. Instead, my simple dinner was turned into a formal meal on the patio of a fancy Italian restaurant where we all sat facing him in a square, leaving a large space in the center where he stood and shared stories of my upbringing — the great toast that would make the evening. He planned to replace Pops, the patriarch leaning against a stool. The storyteller. Timothy Jr., the oldest son, now centered himself, casting the light toward him, passing down his tall tales to his children at an event that was supposed to celebrate me.

Thank you for your interest in the section of my memoir below. If your email server clips the message, then you can read the full post on Substack. You can also listen to the post by clicking the audio button at the top of this page. When needed, visit the Bibliography and Support Resources. This post mentions incest abuse. If you’re seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.

My daydreams began to weave images of what it might be like to study abroad for a semester in the country called, “The Savior.” I could envision myself falling in love with a fellow classmate from the United States, growing intellectually in class, and intimately connecting with local communities through service opportunities. I could imagine myself feeling better, establishing a life, and actually living in this country I had just learned to locate on the map.
I could imagine myself healthy, happy, and whole.

Where’s my seat?

I squeezed my body and carry-on bags through the airplane aisle until I found my assigned row. Adam awaited me, he being another student who chose to study abroad in El Salvador his second semester of Junior year. His plane stopped through LA on the way from Wisconsin to the Central American country that hugged the Pacific Ocean.

“Hi, I’m Anne.” I extended my hand.
“Hi, I’m Adam. It’s nice to meet you.”

The red eye flight between LA and San Salvador took to the skies late at night. At first, Adam and I discussed our trepidations and anticipations for the next four months. Together, with 22 other college students from the United States, we committed to spending a semester in El Salvador and learning its history, listening to the stories of its people, and singing their litanies for healing and hope.

Adam’s shoulder sat at the perfect pillow height for my head, so as I grew tired I asked if I could rest on him. He said yes and the time progressed more quickly. When the plane landed early the next day, Adam gently shook me awake. We hustled off the plane, walked to the baggage claim, scooped up our luggage, passed through customs and received “El Salvador” stamps on our passports, then found the bus filled with other students.

On our way, I peered out the windows and couldn’t help but marvel at the beautiful fullness of the clouds, the sun streaking through the bright sky, the mountains flowing like waves as the views passed by. While our eyes took in the sites, the students and I introduced ourselves and shared our mutual excitement of this next stage of life. Suddenly, the scene shifted from the countryside to a city composed of simple square cement buildings with tin roofs. On the streets, people peddled sweets, while others tried to wash the windows of vehicles to acquire a few extra cents.

The bus dropped us all off at the entrance of Casa Romero, a former convent. A man named William awaited us there. William means, “Protector,” and he was to be ours. He stood outside the black iron gate of the house all night to keep us safe. William swung open the large garage door and welcomed us in. Immediately, the scents of boiling beans, roasting rice, and frying plantains overwhelmed my senses with delight. We made our way through the house and into the courtyard. Between two tall avocado trees rested a hammock woven in dyed materials of red and purple, blue and green. A few iron bistro tables dotted the margins of the common area, so that all of the students who had just arrived could form a circle in between.

The US family who ran the program invited us to gather and hold hands. Adam stood by my side and reached for the hand on my right. Then the kids of the family guided us in a Spanish song1 that we would all come to sing together as a prayer before every meal:

After dinner, tired from jet lag and full of food and excitement, we headed to our assigned houses all located near the same street. I remained in Casa Romero and found the small room that would be mine for the next few months. A twin bed sat to my right covered in two colorful blankets, a narrow closet stood upright near the back, and a desk and chair rested against the front wall with a window over both that stayed open to the elements. The day ended with my usual recitation of nightly prayers, while the gratitude exercise felt nothing but authentic in this new way of life in a place called, “The Savior.”

The next morning I arose ready to explore. My head lifted from the pillow, my body jumped off the mattress, and I threw on a pair of long shorts and a t-shirt. My feet felt for the flip-flops that I had slipped under the bed the night before. I opened the door, walked to the iron gate, slid it open, greeted William, then headed to the University of Central America (UCA).

Churches, stores, and pupuserias surrounded me in this city, as I strode to the bottom of the steep hill where the university awaited me. People shuffled through the sidewalks, as cars drove a bit more wildly than I was accustomed to down the two lane streets. I made my way carefully to the front gates of the UCA that were also guarded by a vigilante.

As I walked onto campus, I felt immediately as if I were in Eden. The university’s buildings sprinkled throughout the grounds with openings for windows without screens so the air could flow through the buildings naturally and cool the students from the tropical heat. Resplendent flora with white and pink flowers arose from the land to transform the very urban environment into a gardened sanctuary.

My soul felt satiated like this place was the paradise I had been longing for, guarded by humans instead of angels, who let some people in. Signs that said, “Capilla,” directed my steps toward the chapel to the right until it stood erect before me with an A-framed roof made of reddish-brown clay tiles. My hand reached toward the glass front doors.

Not unlike the parish at the bottom of the hill of my childhood home, or the Sacred Heart Chapel that I sat in alone so many nights at LMU, this church too had a number of wooden pews, organized in rows, with an aisle through the center that led to the altar, above which a cross rested on the back white wall. But otherwise, this place of worship looked different.

The shape of the building opened more like a half circle than the traditional rectangle. The altar, shaped simply of wood, sat in the center, while the cross hung without Jesus’s body. The wood bore colorful paintings that told of the history of the Salvadoran community sketched by the famous artist, Fernando Llort.2 To the right and the left of the cross on the walls hung more symbols of the stories of the country’s people, as well as two angels: the guardians of the chapel.

I turned around to view the rest of the building before me and immediately lost my breath. On the back brick wall rose what should have been the 14 Stations of the Cross. But instead of the traditional images that told the tale of Jesus’s condemnation to death, his walk up the mountain, and his last breath, these pictures depicted the torture of 14 Salvadorans during the Civil War.

Fought between 1979-1992, the war arose from the struggle to end the manufactured starvation waged on the poor by the Salvadoran Government and 14 families, known as “Las Catorce”, who owned most of the country’s wealth.3 A local artist Roberto Huezoof found tortured civilians and sketched them in black charcoal on white paper to memorialize the horrors perpetrated against the bodies of so many Salvadoran people by a U.S.-backed government in a flawed effort to fight communism.4 During the Civil War, Salvadoran soldiers murdered 75,000 civilians, many often raped and tortured beforehand.5 Then I saw her.

One woman on her knees, topless with her breasts exposed, her hands tied with barbed wires at the wrist, her mouth open in a desperate and silent scream. I heard her, I felt her deeply resonant in my body. As if somewhere, somehow she belonged to me, and I belonged to her.

What is her story? I wondered, as a deep recognition shook beneath my skin.

It was as if a part of me awakened and began to tremble: my own inner silent screamer. This intense energy that kept me in bed in a deep depression, or pressured me to pick and scratch at my skin, or made me shake with anxiety while simply managing day to day activities, or isolated me from college parties. It was as if the charcoal drawing of this nameless woman wailing on the wall introduced me to a mirrored image nailed to my interior. But this secret solidarity between the silent screamer and me felt perplexing, as I could not see any similarities between her story and mine.

I walked back to Casa Romero feeling the secondary weight of these wounds and a new wonder about my first encounter with my inner silent screamer. My feet shuffled beneath me seemingly without my agency, tracking my own footsteps back past the glass doors of the chapel, through the flowers, to the iron gates with the guard. I slipped through them then slowly made my way back up the hill, where I found Adam awaiting me. As soon as I saw him, my inner screamer settled.

It only took a few weeks for the shoulder I rested my head on during the flight to become the chest I leaned against throughout the day and kissed sweetly before bed each night. Adam and I began dating quickly. It all felt too good to be true. He, whose name matched the first man created in Eden, held my hand to join me for what felt like the Eve of my life: a new beginning in this strange paradise, with a community devoted to collective healing, with peers who sang together in prayer before shared meals, where the love of this man held my hand and told me boring stories before bed to help me rest. This temporary lift from the depressiveness gave me hope and helped me cope.

Quickly, all of us students fell into our weekly routines. Together every Tuesday and Thursday, my praxis partner, James, and I traveled from Casa Romero to La Chacra: a cement city on the outskirts of San Salvador. As soon as we arrived, we could see the tiny houses built side-by-side made of four walls and wavy tin roofs, small pools and pipes that pulled water through the community, and laundry basins that disposed right into the river with the rest of the trash. The town stank like a neglected garbage can, especially on hot days, and I came to quickly love that place.

James and I taught English in the Kindergarten and the primary schools. Then we joined a priest for lunch and followed him around town to listen to parishioners’ stories of suffering and resilience. Presently, the country managed gang violence that began back in the US. When many asylum seekers returned to El Salvador after the Civil War, they brought the same gangs so prominent in LA back to the streets of San Salvador, introducing a new kind of decentralized violence. Much of what the priest could offer the community was accompaniment: to be with them in their suffering. And so James and I were learning how to accompany those with very different stories than our own.

Some of our most intimate moments in this community were late in the afternoon with the elders who gathered at the church to learn embroidery that they could sell for a little extra money. They sat around a long white, plastic pull out table and chatted through their mostly toothless smiles. I tried to comprehend the power of what they were saying with my broken Spanish, but mostly we all enjoyed just gathering. This proved to be a different way of being than I felt accustomed to. Without the constant need to achieve or consume, I could simply receive the presence and beauty of their company. Create. Be. I felt relieved by this simplicity, but reality was much more complex than I perceived it to be.

Between the taxi rides, the teaching, the meals, and the sitting with the elders, James and I would talk, often argue. He shared his story with me as a first generation Vietnamese immigrant born and raised in the United States: how he overcame so much to land in the place where we both stood now; how he labored to help me comprehend the power I had in my social privilege as a white woman from a wealthy family. Of course, I didn’t understand.

How could I be this depressed and still be privileged?

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to take responsibility and do what I could to make the world a more just place for everybody. Instead, even though this pedagogy taught me that I had more power than others in society, I felt void of it. Entirely empty and powerless.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, my peers and I all attended classes at the UCA. In them, I learned more about the history of white supremacy — spread globally through imperialism and colonialism — as well as the various exploitative economic structures that created systems to care for those on top of the social hierarchy, while taking advantage or directly oppressing those born below.

The power of privilege that US citizens had in El Salvador — especially those who were or presented as white — could be seen in the US dollars we used to pay for everything and the American flags flown all over the country. Most importantly, North Americans were rarely the victims of physical violence in El Salvador, which then was the most dangerous peace-time country in the world. While I was frequently catcalled on the streets by boys and men who saw me as a beautiful woman from the US, James was named either ignorantly or derogatorily, “Chino.”

I returned to Casa Romero after class that day feeling sick to my stomach. I went to the bathroom and looked at my white face in the mirror. A skin I had always struggled to believe in its beauty. With its high and wide forehead, its paleness, its freckles, its developing fine lines, its acne, I always saw myself as a problem. As if my face had no right nor reason to exist, a body forever sick.

The idealism of my days continued to be met with a mysterious duplicity at night. The rape dreams that haunted me back at Loyola Marymount University began to include stories of state-based wars that ravaged communities. I frequently woke up in a sweat or entirely frozen, shaking myself to remind my brain that what happened in the last few hours was only a terrifying dream…at least for me. My inner screamer, now ever present, wanted to live outside my body.

One morning, the other students and I arrived just outside the gate of Casa Romero to board the bus that headed toward the heart of the capital. The Metropolitan Cathedral of the Holy Savior in downtown San Salvador awaited us. The front reflected those same symbols on the back wall of the UCA chapel, art by the famous artist Fernando Llort, that gave homage to the peace accords signed in 1992 to end the Civil War. The dove, the corn, the Campesinos, all pieced together in a mosaic that told the story of the Salvadoran people. The inside though, reflected the faith of the Conquistadors.

Roman Catholicism arrived to El Salvador in the 16th century through the violence of the Spanish, robbing the land from Native communities. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, rural uprisings were met with brutal resistance leading to “La Matanza” (The Slaughter) in 1932, when 10,000-40,000 Native people were murdered, imprisoned, or exiled. All of this compounded to cause the Salvadoran Civil War.6

In the church, I approached a portrait of the face of a familiar man: Saint Msgr. Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, a Spanish priest and the founder of Opus Dei. I immediately recognized the saint’s face from the holy cards sprinkled across Grandma Joan’s house. Opus Dei is a Latin phrase that means, “The Work of God.” It is the only Catholic Personal Prelature, an institution including clergy and lay members that carry out specific pastoral activities.7

Opus Dei is controversial in the church, often being accused of recruiting the wealthy, preferring right-wing politics, and acting on a cult-like agenda. Escrivá’s own writings in his publication, The Way, focused on subjugation and suffering as the means to salvation:

“Obedience, the sure way. Blind obedience to your superior, the way of sanctity. Obedience in your apostolate the only way, for in a work of God, the spirit must be to obey or to leave.”8

Opus Dei asks the faithful to wear shirts made from coarse animal hair to irritate the skin, or a cilice — a light metal chain with prongs — around the thigh, or to whip themselves until they cry. Less extreme tasks include taking cold showers, sleeping without a pillow, or fasting before receiving the Eucharist to remember the importance of hungering for God. The goal was to achieve holiness by aligning oneself to the suffering of Christ — to carry the crosses of one’s life without complaint.9 A glorification of suffering as a means of sanctity.

Joan and Pops were Opus Dei, as well as a few aunts and uncles. It was at an Opus Dei Girl’s camp that I signed that Abstinence ‘Til Marriage (ATM) card I stored in the wallet in my back pocket. Grandma Joan dressed modestly in moo-moo like outfits and demanded her granddaughters do the same. She tried to use shame to encourage us to cover our bodies bearing bikinis on the pool deck, or our shoulders with the spaghetti straps that sat directly next to our bra lines.

“You are responsible for the sexual sins of men when you dress like that!” She scolded us repeatedly.

Growing up, I heard my father echo this same profession of beliefs in statements like, “I can’t believe a woman would tempt me like that, wearing a shirt that draped so far below her cleavage.” By women he often meant girls under the age of 18, including my friends who came over to visit. Whenever I tried to discuss challenges I confronted, he would say, “Take your cross and carry it like Jesus!”

Escrivá’s face in the Metropolitan Cathedral of San Salvador filled me with rage.

What’s he doing here on the top floor of the Cathedral? Where’s the body of Archbishop Oscar Romero?

Oscar Romero was murdered in 1980 by the Salvadoran Government for defending the rights of the poor at the start of the Civil War.10 Romero and Escrivá had been friends, both deeply committed to a life of sacrifice, but for different reasons. The Archbishop’s body laid in the basement downstairs. Justice in the homilies of Romero sought to break the cycle of violence and injustice by dismantling exploitative systems. It disempowered the oppressor and empowered the oppressed. His faith desired to initiate a new cycle of safety where the dignity of all people was upheld in equity. Romero preached:

“A church that doesn’t provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn’t touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed — ​what gospel is that?”11

In religion class at the UCA, I learned there was a term for Romero’s interpretation of the gospel: Liberation Theology. The Jesuits of El Salvador had written a new theology with others like Gustavo Gutiérrez, who believed deeply in God’s “preferential option for the poor.”12

In this framework, Jesus was murdered unjustly for being a political subversive, not intentionally by God the Father to save us from our sins. Humanity needed not to bear our burdens like Jesus carried his cross, but instead be relieved from our crosses caused by individual and systemic injustices. God desired to protect us from unnecessary suffering through justice and accompany us in the process of liberation. But this version of the story was not present on the top floor of the cathedral.

El Salvador’s Catholicism was as split as mine. Divided down the lines of white, European paradigms and the preferential option for the poor. One side devoted to Opus Dei, that sought to give charity to those in need in El Salvador since 1958,13 without any social or structural change; and the other to Oscar Romero, a martyr for the freedom from oppression through justice to peace. The former held the upstairs, living in plain sight at the level of my eyes, while the latter remained buried in the basement beneath. Both pedagogies now took up space in my body alongside my inner screamer who craved unity. This internal trinity created a new pressure that sought to be relieved. They could not co-exist within me. Soon, I knew that I would have to choose.

Thank you for your interest in the section of my memoir below. If your email server clips the message, then you can read the full post on Substack. You can also listen to the post by clicking the audio button at the top of this page. When needed, visit the Bibliography and Support Resources. This post mentions incest abuse. If you’re seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.

The sea lapped against the shoreline just a few miles away from my university. I still had my Hyundai Santa Fe, which my youngest brother aptly named “Green Bean.” When I felt tired, or sad, or mad, I forced myself to walk to the parking lot, get in the car, turn on the engine, and drive down the bluff to the shoreline. I stopped, stepped out of the vehicle, pulled my shoes off, then felt the sun-soaked sand quickly heat the bottom of my feet. The edge of the water awaited me, as it always did, and instantly I felt soothed by the endless blue horizon.

The summer passed both too slowly and too fast, as I laid most days depressed in my childhood bed and stared at that white statue of Mother Mary that still stood constantly on my windowsill. I had one thing to look forward to: an upcoming trip to Lourdes, France, where Mary once appeared to a 14-year-old named Bernadette. Pilgrims of a variety of faith traditions who revere Mary visit the city every year to pray in the basilica, to view the grotto, to walk the life-sized stations of the cross, and to bathe in the waters known for healing miracles.

Hospices have been built right across the river to care for the travelers who may need medical support during their holy journeys. The community depends on volunteers to run the baths, to accompany the sick from the hospices to the various activities, and to lead the pilgrims pacing in candlelight processions and singing songs every evening.

My father had recently become a Knight of Malta after receiving an invitation from the Catholic organization known for recruiting the conservative and wealthy. Every summer, the Order of Malta traveled to Lourdes to volunteer with the sick, as well as planned a pilgrimage for high school and college students to attend. My father and mother went, then sent me on the next youth pilgrimage.

As soon as I arrived, my feet guided me as if they were not mine. Every morning, I arose, quickly ate some bread and butter, jam and ham, then headed out to be with those in need. Sometimes, I folded blankets for the buggies that carried those who needed assistance with mobility around. Other times, I led the congregation in song during the candlelight vigil at night. Then finally the planning team asked me to work in the baths, the most trusted and coveted position for volunteer pilgrims.

Early in the morning, I walked along the basilica and through the grotto where Mary had appeared to Bernadette. My hands dragged across the once rough rock like so many pilgrims had done before me, eventually polishing the stones into a sleek and smooth marble. I passed the candles that continued prayers in small iron cages next to the river that flowed through the holy city. When I arrived at the sacred site, pilgrims had yet to form the line so long that they may need to wait all day to be bathed. The leadership team unlocked the door for me and the one who spoke English provided instructions.

Dressed in the youth Knights of Malta uniform with long khaki shorts to my knees and a white, loose crewneck T-shirt with the logo of the organization on the front and back, my attire matched what their team expected. They handed me a navy blue apron to pull around my body then introduced me to the rest of the volunteers: five other women from around the world, none of whom spoke the same language as me. We gathered in the baths, divided between women and men, where we practiced what exactly to do with the pilgrims.

Two of us assisted the believer in undressing with the help of a white sheet to ensure modesty. Once naked, we wrapped the cloth around the pilgrim and walked her to the entrance of the bath, where the four other volunteers awaited her. In the bathing area sat a long stone opening filled with ice cold water. A small white statue of Our Lady of Lourdes rested at the far end.

The pilgrim entered the tub and slowly shuffled forward to the Mary awaiting her, offered a prayer, then the volunteers dipped her back until the white sheet and her bare skin soaked in holy water. Then the same process continued just backwards: the pilgrim returned to the entrance of the bath, and with help of the volunteers, dried and dressed. She departed from the sacred place that she had waited all day to bathe in, ideally having received some sort of miracle from Mary. I couldn’t help but wonder:

If the power of prayer, or a simple dip in a bath, could heal people in an instant, why did Jesus and Mary stay so silent in response to my pleas for healing?

The pilgrims entered the bathing chamber one by one. All day, the other volunteers and I supported the believers by disrobing, dipping, then dressing them. Eventually, my team invited me to hold the weight of the women as they leaned back into the water. I witnessed in honor, as the pilgrims of so many faith traditions wept, feeling close to Mary for this moment in the bath. Moved by their belief in the power of healing, I wondered what might happen to my young body slowly struggling to function when I took a dip in those holy waters.

At the end of the day, my time finally came to find out. Each volunteer who wanted to bathe followed the same steps as the pilgrims. I got undressed with the help of the women who I had volunteered with, wrapped the white linens around my flat chest and narrow hips, then entered into the back of the bath. My feet felt the fluid first: ice cold, but light; less like water and more like barely there frozen air. I swept my body wrapped in the sheet through the cold fluid until I arrived where the statue of Mary awaited me.

I touched her gently, while tears began to flow from my eyes. Suddenly, I felt in my body the potential for the power of healing. I knew I was not better right away like so many miracle stories of Lourdes. Instead, healing felt possible, and I was clear that it was my job to pursue it.

While I changed back into my modest uniform, I felt both disillusioned and determined: disappointed that I had not received the healing-in-a-moment experience I had hoped for. However, my spirit knew a new energy that drove me to keep seeking other ways of healing. With a light pep in my step, I walked past the long candles in the iron cages that had stamped on the backs, “This flame continues my prayer.” I approached the burning wicks, found one that had yet to be lit, struck a match, and watched the flame ignite. The wax began to slowly drip, keeping my prayer for healing alive.

Sophomore year of college began, so I returned to LMU to be with my roommate in an apartment atop that beautiful bluff that overlooked the sea. In the space between classes, papers, and reading, I was now free to do just about anything having canceled my commitment to passing balls and chasing walls in the confinements of an olympic-sized pool. So I explored all the activities the campus had to offer to second year students like me: a community service club, campus ministry, a sorority.

My schedule filled quickly and I felt busy, but in a different way than before. With less time exercising and without the daily soak in the sun and water, I began to feel sluggish and tired. My hair and pleasant personality both turned darker, as my moods continued to oscillate in ways I still could not explain. My relationship with my roommate became strained, as I couldn’t take care of my responsibilities in our shared apartment on campus. Clothing covered the floor of our small room, the trash filled up and over the top of the bin, gnats flew around the kitchen sink from the pile of dirty dishes. She asked me time and time again to respect her wishes by simply cleaning up, but I couldn’t find the energy.

Instead, I spent time journaling. In my mind, I began to travel back and forth in time throughout my story to try to uncover any painful memories that might have been the cause of what I came to understand to be psychosomatic symptoms: or body strains from the brain that can often be due to emotional and psychological pain. But I couldn’t think of anything particularly traumatizing. The only obvious moments of trauma from my childhood were the times I couldn’t remember before the age of five: the surgeries and the seizures. But physicians I met with expressed no concern that a temporary childhood illness could cause such debilitating depression and anxiety as an adult.

On the outside, my life in college was progressing as it should be. But my body was telling me a very different story. Finally, I reconsidered the recommendation of the doctor, my father’s cousin. I turned to therapy and medication. The sick and the crazy had consumed me, and I wanted to return to some sort of recognizable normalcy. First, I tried therapy, but the college counselors lacked both the expertise to treat the severity of my symptoms and the space in their schedules to fit me in. Treatment outside of school was not covered by insurance. Then I pursued psychiatric medications, which I hoped would just fix me without having to talk about the chaotic currents flowing within my brain and body. So I went to a new doctor who performed some tests.

“You’re too young to be feeling like this,” he said.
Am I being punished?
“There’s nothing structurally wrong with you,” he continued.
So, you’re saying it’s all in my head?
“Are you dating?” He inquired.
“No!” I responded angrily now, wondering what dating had to do with healing.
“Why not? You’re beautiful, it may make you feel better.”

I certainly hoped to meet someone in college and had tried dating a few guys in my class, but none of the relationships lasted. Managing the severity of my symptoms alongside my studies and increasing activities didn’t leave much free time for fun. I redirected the physician.

“Dating isn’t my priority at the moment. Do you have any other ideas to help me feel better?”

He then went on to tell me that he too managed anxiety, and that the best medicine for him had been distraction: to stay busy during the day and to practice a gratitude exercise before bed. I had already tried busyness as a solution, but the symptoms on my insides took over me, as did the terrors of being raped at night. Now, it felt necessary to try anything that might make me feel better, so I could once more become the bubbly, happy, high achiever who I was so accustomed to being, who I was expected to be. So I suggested:

“How about medication?”

The physician wrote me two prescriptions: the first for Zoloft, and the second, a gratitude exercise. I was to write down five things I felt grateful for before bed each night. I returned back to school, popped the pill in my mouth, and pulled out my journal to write down my list of five gifts. But anger answered within my soul and body, as gratitude felt so unusual to me with the weight of this heavy suffering.

My system felt agitated by this exercise meant to be medicine, and the pills made me so tired I didn’t want to get out of bed. Instead, I felt trapped between a new trinity of journaling, praying, and incessant visits to the sea to relieve the messages spinning in my head, trying desperately to feel better, to get better, to do better, to be better. But my days passed with no relief.

By the end of Sophomore year, I walked to my student mail box and pulled out a letter addressed to me from the university. Surprised, I ripped the seal with my index finger, pulled out the folded white paper, and read the invitation to an awards ceremony at the Sacred Heart Chapel.

I arrived to the church the day of the celebration dressed in a white, flowing skirt past my knees, and a coral wrap around top, with high heeled flip-flops. The emcee began to read the agenda for the ceremony. One person from each class was to be honored for their academic excellence, commitment to social justice, and care for the community. The emcee called the Freshman honorary to the stage. Then, when it was time to name the Sophomore, he spoke: “Anne Marie,” then the surname of my father, and his father, and his father before that.

In shock, I stood and walked down the aisle to the altar. The wooden pews that sat in long, linear rows passed next to me, while I approached the Christ hanging from the cross. I watched as my peers cheered me on, then I saw them. In the very front row, where they always sat as if the pew had been reserved for them, waited my family. My grandparents — Pops and Joan, Jay and Magdalene — my father, mother, and my younger brothers, all gathered to celebrate me. The school had called and invited them to attend.

At the end of the celebration when the sun began to dim, I kissed my family goodbye, then walked hastily back to my apartment before it grew too dark. I unzipped my skirt and let it fall to the floor. Then I untied the coral pink sweater, pulled on pajamas, picked and washed my skin, brushed my teeth, then rested my head in bed wondering:

How could I be this honored and still feel this horrible?

Thank you for your interest in the section of my memoir below. If your email server clips the message, then you can read the full post on Substack. You can also listen to the post by clicking the audio button at the top of this page. When needed, visit the Bibliography and Support Resources. This post mentions incest abuse. If you’re seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.

Chapter 6: Anxiety

I could feel his arms around me, the pressure of his body pushing against my body. He, tall and broad and strong, and me, small and narrow and weak. Voiceless, I had no power. It was as if even my fists, fighting for space from him, just a bit of distance, melted when they met his skin. I wanted it to end, but I couldn’t stop it. And he wouldn’t stop.

Then I woke up.

Life at LMU began swimmingly, literally. On the outside anyway. Most mornings, I arose with the sun then gobbled down microwavable oatmeal to ingest just enough carbohydrates to get my body through practice without throwing up. I walked to the pool, jumped in and swam, passed balls and scrimmaged. As I grew weary of this work, I recalled my commitment to my father six months or so before by my bedside. He had pulled up a chair near those four darkly stained wooden posts and the floral comforter in my childhood bedroom and leaned in to listen.

“I would like college to be a fresh start,” I expressed. “To get to know the activities that the university offers instead of committing so much time and energy to water polo. So, I’d like to quit,” I finished.

“What will I do if I don’t have your games to go to?” He replied immediately. “If I don’t get to meet the other parents, how will I make friends? Besides, you owe the coach one year after he invited you to play on the team.” He concluded, “This isn’t just about you, Annie.”

So I just kept going: waking up, eating oatmeal, dragging myself across campus, diving into swim, attending classes, returning to the gym to lift, then finally heading back to bed to rest. The perks and privileges of being a student athlete benefited me, as the administrators invited us to choose our classes before others to ensure our schedules remained free around practice and game times. I could cut class if necessary to travel with my team to compete far away, or be released early to play against an opposing school in our campus pool.

But more importantly than both of these things, I was cool. Popular. My peers recognized me as a unique beauty with strong shoulders, sun kissed cheeks, and auburn hair that wisped into bangs at my brow and waved gently by my breasts. Every Sunday, I attended mass at the Sacred Heart Chapel and bonded with other Catholics on campus. My teachers, too, celebrated me in the classroom. My eagerness to earn good grades and my curiosity to learn inspired them to call on me with questions. Suddenly, I felt smart effortlessly.

Surprisingly, this new-found popularity brought a level of attention my direction that I wasn’t quite accustomed to. Guys eyed me on the street, others asked me out in class or cornered me at social events. College parties filled me with stress in a way that I could not express nor tolerate: the smell of beer on breath, smoke filling the air, sexuality seeping through the room like heat. While everyone else seemed to be having fun flirting and drinking and being free, I felt an outside-of-my-body sensation. As if I needed to be alert, needed to hover over my own head, so I could observe absolutely everything.

My deepening depression and anxiety manifested in near constant picking and scratching at my skin. My body started lightly shaking from the inside out during the day, while my dreams filled with violent scenes when I slept at night. Terrors haunted me repeatedly of a man trying to rape me. I attempted to push him away, but never had the power to do so. Nearly every morning, I woke up debilitated. As if my brain were ready to arise, but my body stayed stuck and still from the memory of the night. When my mind finally became aware I was awake, I shook my body in place until it joined me in its arisen state.

I would rather be murdered than raped. I thought.

More and more, the symptoms that I could mostly keep a secret began to sweep into my public life. This sense that something was taking over my body terrified me. Tears poured down my cheeks in the middle of class. I locked myself in closets or behind bathroom doors to hide my spontaneous meltdowns. As soon as the sunset, I ran across campus in fear I might be snatched and raped. Practice and classes, meals and masses kept me distracted, but these conditions that I had less and less control over felt overwhelming.

What is wrong with me?

My father’s cousin worked at a medical center nearby. So I went to him to discuss the sudden severity of my mental decline. He sat across from me and shared more hidden histories of the health of our family.

“You know, Annie,” he began mournfully. “Many of my uncles died from substance use issues, and one by suicide. Most of our family members use psychiatric medications to manage symptoms like anxiety, depression, and paranoia. You may consider asking the family about it.”

I absorbed this information with a heavy curiosity. My father had mentioned the deaths of his uncles when I was younger, so I had stayed away from alcohol and drugs, but also had never been encouraged to seek therapy or consider medication. But now that I was in college and miles away from home, these issues became unmanageable and hindered my success as a student, my social life, and my self-perception.

“Why don’t you consider counseling and medication to treat your symptoms?” The doctor asked.
“No, of course not!” I replied defensively.

Therapy is for crazy people, and I am NOT crazy. I thought. Medication is for sick people, and I am NOT sick. What would my neighbors think of me back in Newport Beach where I was expected to present so perfectly? How would I tell them that while my college years thus far had been such a success in some ways, in others I felt as if I were losing myself, my mind, my body?

The only thing that seemed to settle my anxiety was returning to the Sacred Heart Chapel. The student mass held late Sunday evenings reminded me most of home. While my living situation, teachers, and campus slowly became more and more familiar, the smells of incense inside the church, the rows of oiled wooden pews, and the Christ hanging from the cross above the altar soothed me with their consistency. I recognized the ritual and the melodies to the music. I knew when to stand up, to sit down, to kneel. I said just what I needed to say when I needed to say it.

A priest on campus gave me a key to the various chapels, so that I could pray during all hours of the day. Regardless which church I chose, I found myself alone late into the evening entering those big wooden doors, blessing my body with water, then laying on the floor near the altar so I could stare directly at the man hanging from the cross.

“What is wrong with me?” I asked him desperately.

With my health becoming more debilitating, my childhood craving for salvation returned urgently. I needed to learn more about this Christ who could save me, so I committed to pursuing a degree in Theology, “The study of God.” My life felt so much bigger than me, and I needed to know exactly what God the Father wanted for me. Surely, God didn’t save me from seizures all those years ago, so I could become so sick again at the nascency of my adult life.

The end of my freshman year came near, and I received an invitation to play water polo at NCAA championships at the University of Michigan. I called my parents to share the good news: I was only one of a few other freshmen who would travel with the team. My father answered.

“You never call. You never write. After all I’ve done for you! I’ve kept a roof over your head and food on your table. You don’t have to work through college because of the trust fund I gave you.”

I froze, as I wondered why he met me with this instant critique. I was everything he expected me to be: an A student, a Division I collegiate athlete, a natural beauty, a devoted Catholic. Quickly, I reminded him that relationships are two-sided. He never called, he never wrote to me either. I tried to communicate with him how disconnected I had always felt from him.

“Well, you know,” he defended. “You don’t make millions by getting to know your children.”
I changed the subject, “So I was invited to travel with the team for NCAA championships.”
“Oh,” his tone changed to excitement, “Should we fly out, Annie?” I was surprised he gave me a choice.
“No, I probably won’t play and there’s always next year.”

Without my parents and with my team, I flew to Michigan. Before the game began, the referees lined up my teammates in order of number, then introduced us. Pride filled me when I heard my name, “Anne Marie,” sound like a refrain against the indoor pool walls and rafters, as I represented a university I came to know as home. I did, indeed, sit the bench most games of the tournament. Until the very last game, when my coach called me:

“Annie, get in!”

Surprised to be granted this opportunity as a Freshman, I dove into the pool, felt the water drench my skin, and lined up in the middle with my teammates. The referee blew the whistle, and we swam. Starting on offense, we shaped ourselves into two lines of three close to the cage. Someone threw the ball to me, and I quickly shot it right past the goalie and into the net. The crowd went wild in celebration. I knew in this instant that I was ready to end my water polo career.

When I returned to the bluff by the sea at Loyola Marymount University, I headed into my coach’s office to tell him I would be on deck for the very last time. He tried to convince me to stay, promising me significantly more game time in the upcoming season. But I was ready to choose a future beyond the dreams of my father. So I walked away from my daily visits to the pool deck, the microwaved morning oatmeal, the weight lifting, and the home and away games. For the first time, I was free to pursue my own destiny. Free to sever the obligations of the endless striving just to keep my head above water.

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Often on the weekends, my family and I visited my dad’s parents, Pops and Joan, at their home in Escondido that sat on the edge of a country club. As the sun began to set over the now-closed golf course that doubled as my grandparents’ backyard, my cousins, siblings, and I played on the green. When the nighttime sprinklers turned on, we ran through them wildly in our clothes and bathing suits. Usually, Pops just watched. Then, one day he stood up, suddenly appearing into the mist like the peak of a mountain, placed his hands on my hips, picked me up, and flipped me in the air, then gently set me back down on the ground.

“Again, Pops, again!” I cried, craving more of his attention.

Many of the members of my extended family lived within an hour or so driving distance from Newport Beach: some to the South, others to the East, the North, and the Northeast. Often both sides of my family gathered together at my house on Bunya St. because it was big enough to accommodate everybody with its open backyard. Together, we could all watch the fireworks from Disneyland glitter the sky nearly every summer night. Otherwise, we spent time at our families’ houses as well, mostly with Jay and Magdalene — my mother’s parents, in Huntington Beach — or Pops and Joan, who lived just North of San Diego.

Jay’s father and mother raised him at the base of the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia in a one room house with their 11 other children. His father was a coal miner in the same place that Mother Mary Jones came around the mountain to inspire the miners to unionize so together they could improve their lives. During the Second World War, the military drafted Jay into the military, where he served as an Air Traffic Controller. He met my grandmother, Magdalene, who was raised in Spokane, WA. They married and had four children including my mother, Elaine.

Together the military family lived around the world: from Japan, to the Philippines, to Germany. Once Grandpa Jay retired from the Air Force, he moved to Huntington Beach into a one-story, four bedroom house and worked as a mailman to provide for his family. Quickly, he became a respected member of his community, as he walked around town in his blue collared shirt, navy shorts, and high socks to deliver letters and packages to his neighbors.

“What’s cookin’ good lookin’?” Jay greeted me as soon as I walked into his house.
“Chicken, you wanna neck?” I replied, knowing the response he expected.
“You knows, I sent money back to my family in West Virginia, Annie?” He began. “And with it, they were able to build a house. They calls it, ‘The house that Jay built.’ Ain’t that neat?”

Grandpa Jay drove miles to find the cheapest gas station in the city and walked around while shaking the change in his pockets incessantly. A ham radio rested in his garage. So whenever we visited, he took me there, closed the door, sat me on his lap, and flipped the switch. Then together we explored the channels and listened. When we spent the night at Jay’s house, we ate microwavable TV dinners. Then the next morning Grandma Magdalene prepared us pancakes fried in Crisco oil, and grapefruits that she cut in half then microwaved with just a bit of brown sugar. When Jay came to our house, he brought with him recorded television shows on VHS, so we could watch cable channels like Nickelodeon that we didn’t have at home.

My father’s father, Pops or Timothy Sr., was born in Omaha, NB, to a wealthy family. Apparently, at some point his family lost everything, but the reason why was never explained to me. The military also drafted Pops during World War II, but as a Civil Engineer. When he returned back to civilian life, he met Joan. They married and had five children, whom they raised near Denver, CO. Eventually, they moved to Escondido, CA into a one-story, three bedroom house on the golf course, which my family and me frequented.

At night after dinner was done, Pops — who was pale, bald, six feet four inches tall, and looked an awful lot like Colonel Sanders from KFC — leaned against a stool, while we — his children and grandchildren — all sat at his feet. He shared stories. One of his favorites was when the military assigned him to guard the water tower. He sat atop the structure with a gun over his shoulder. Two large lights pointed to the field, so that if the enemy were to come, he could see them. Instead, he pointed the lights toward him, believing wholeheartedly that if his enemy cast their eyes in his direction they would run. Every time he entered a room he proclaimed:

“Shout from the rooftops, ring the bells from the steeple, because I’m back again you lucky people!”

But as big and boisterous as Pops could be, he also often sat back with a certain stillness and observed his family closely and curiously. When my body began to change its shape in my tweens, my other female cousins and I sat in a circle and talked about our developing bodies and boys. They shared stories of their boyfriends, of their first kisses, and of the hands that stroked their bras and breasts, while I listened in longingly and lonely, craving that same male affection. Pops noticed me. He called me over to his huge lap, asked me to sit, and drew me into his barrel of a chest.

“Annie,” he began. “I know you’re lonely now, but just wait until it’s time to get married. The boys will be waiting in a line out the door for you.”

As I grew older, my mother began to share with me the inconsistencies of my family‘s histories. Her mother, Magdalene, beat her incessantly. The wedding ring on my grandmother’s left hand caused boils to erupt on my mother’s skin. My grandfather Jay remained passive when he was around. Otherwise, he shared his insatiable sexual desires in constant conversation around children. He groped female-appearing mannequins in window fronts out in public. Grandma Magdalene’s step-father was hard of hearing. At dinner at a restaurant, he would loudly comment on women’s bodies.

“That one’s got a fat ass!” He screamed while pointing. We’d all laugh.

When my mother began breast feeding her baby covered under a blanket, one man in the family said, “I know what he’s doing under there.” While another relative complained of my cousin’s little girl, under the age of three, running around the pool deck naked.

“She should be clothed!” He screamed.
“Why? She’s just a child.” I asked.
“A vagina’s a vagina, Annie.”

My father used to hide in the closet of his bedroom to avoid the beatings by his father, Pops. While his mother, Joan, believed my father could do no wrong and defended him tirelessly. Once, he killed the neighbor’s cat because he was annoyed. When accused, Joan screamed:

“My Timothy would never do that!”

Secrets began to surface about early marriages to get out of abusive homes, then divorces. Stories of drugs and alcohol abuse, of accidental pregnancies and shotgun weddings, of affairs and abortions, of estranged half-relatives conceived when my family members were teens. By the time I was 15, I could talk to anyone about the sexual frustrations of Joan with Pops, and Jay with Magdalene. The scheduled sex of relatives’ routines. The later divorces due to infidelities. Apparently, the couples in my family didn’t follow the rules of the church as closely as their accounts originally suggested. Instead, my family, like all families, was flawed…just secretly.

My parents met and married in their late twenties and started having babies almost immediately. First there was Timmy, who had enough energy to attract and distract all of the adults in his company. He grew to be tall and handsome, athletic and angry. I arrived just 18 months later with my surgery and seizures and something to prove. I wanted (and still do) to be a little bit of everything. Josiah came 18 months after me a bit blue with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. He grew up to be brilliantly creative and slap-your-knee kind of funny. My parents thought they were done, until another baby surprised us all five years later. My mother and I, outnumbered by penises, wished for a girl. So when Patrick arrived and added to our testosterone-filled house, I sweetly said:

“But he sure is a cute baby brother, mommy.”

My siblings and I all helped raise him, but he bonded to me uniquely as a second mother. Up until I moved out of the house at 18, he slept in my bed with me nearly every night. Afraid I would leave, he held my face with his hands and placed his mouth so close to mine that I could feel the warmth of his breath on my skin. It made him feel safe and me, suffocated. So together we would lay like that until he fell asleep, then I would ever-so-slowly distance myself so I could breathe.

As soon as I was old enough and allowed to do so, I walked to the garage, jumped on my bike, and peddled away from home. The wind whipped through my hair as I flew down Bunya St., then rounded Bamboo and Bixia, then Eastbluff. I sped along the Back Bay all the way to Jamboree until I arrived at the sea. A friend of mine lived in a cliff-side house overlooking the crescent shoreline of Corona Del Mar. We’d meet in the alley behind his house. My bike stayed in the garage, while he and I walked to the shoreline.

The waves gently tickled our feet, while our footprints pressed into the wet sand and we talked about everything. When the beach ended, we kicked off our flip flops, set them by the cement steps, then climbed the jagged, black, stacked rocks that stretched into the water forming a boundary between the harbor and the beach. The waves crashed against the jetty, white wash splashing into the air, forcing us to choose our path carefully so we didn’t get drenched.

My friend reached for my hand and pulled me closer to his body, as our skin felt the slippery and scratchy surfaces of the moss and barnacle-studded boulders. We jumped stone to stone until we got to the end of the jetty, where we found two flat rocks that formed a seat. We sat down, cuddled into each other’s arms and rested. Eventually, our lips met. We kissed mostly privately for a long time, only stopping when a boat passed us by. And so, I fell in love for the first time by the seaside.

At dinner, I announced to my family the good news: “I have a boyfriend.” They knew him as the friend who came to the front door with flowers, who wrote a love poem about me and read it in English class, who walked with me platonically on the beach for almost two years before I was ready to be his girlfriend.

“I would rather you date one of those jerk jocks on the water polo team,” my father said. “I don’t understand these good guys, Annie. All guys are supposed to be like me.”

My father tried to keep us from dating by saying I couldn’t have a boyfriend until I was 16, but when I turned 16, he changed the rule again. Either way, my boyfriend and I stayed together against my father’s wishes. Of course, we weren’t allowed to spend time one-on-one, so instead we snuck into empty parks, or jumped into the back of his car, or pretended to meet up to do homework with a group of friends, and instead explored each other’s bodies.

“We can do everything, but…” I said. He knew I was saving my virginity until marriage.

I envisioned our future together. The day we would celebrate our shared sacrament: Marriage. He in the pressed tuxedo and me in the white ball gown. The moment God the Father, through the priest’s hands, would bless us as beloveds witnessed by all those who loved us. We would celebrate our nuptials by the sea, I would take his last name, and when evening finally came after a great party, I would hand him a small box with my ATM (Abstinence ‘Till Marriage) card and give him my virginity. Soon after, babies would join our family, and we would buy a perfect home in our already perfect neighborhoods down the street from our families. But a few years later, everything suddenly changed.

“Why are you crying?” My brother, Patrick, asked sweetly while laying next to me before bed.
“My boyfriend and I broke up,” I replied with a mouthful of salty tears.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, Annie,” he hugged me close then fell asleep.

Most mornings, I couldn’t get out of bed, but I had no choice. So I dragged myself from my room to the shower, from my car to the classroom, from my school to the pool, on repeat over and over again. Now the captain of the swim and water polo teams, as well as a lead in a school play, while also completing course work and applying for colleges, I struggled to manage my many responsibilities. Most days, I left the house without makeup, my hair pulled back with a tight headband revealing my high and freckled forehead, dressed in my wrinkled uniform looking like crap.

“It’s like you don’t even want to be pretty,” my mother began to scold me. “You should be using your beauty to attract people to Christ, Annie.”

Ashamed and alone, I biked to the seaside and walked along the shoreline, begging the ocean to hold the weight of my grief. Without my first and I hoped-would-be-my-last love, my identity and all my dreams crumbled at my feet. Within the vacancy of my heart, I turned to God the Father in prayer, while my father celebrated that his only daughter was once again free from the hands of a young man. Frankly, he didn’t like me getting too close to girls either, as he felt threatened by any form of intimacy.

“This is no big deal, Annie. There are plenty of other fish in the sea,” he attempted to console me. “Besides you’re only seventeen, you don’t even know what love is. I didn’t know anything about real love until I was at least forty.”

“What is real love, dad?” I questioned cautiously.
“To love is to sacrifice, Annie,” he replied. “To suffer.”

High school graduation approached. A year before, my older brother Timmy celebrated his own commencement. He sat in a dining chair with a big tall back and looked like a King while friends and family complimented him, condoned him, coddled him. All year, I looked forward to hearing my community’s reflections of me. Then, when my time finally came to graduate a year later, I sat there in that same big chair, ready to receive the love of my community. Instead, they roasted me. Shame crept into my body, as I tried to disappear, then the party continued. A male nanny from childhood approached me.

“Well aren’t you just the ugly duckling who’s become the beautiful swan?” He stood a touch too close for my comfort. And then another dad from the neighborhood addressed me. “What does your name tag say, Annie?” As he ran his hand over the sticker that stuck to the outside of my breast, right to left.

I couldn’t help but wonder, Are these men hitting on me?

I prepared to attend Loyola Marymount University as an undecided major and a team member of the Division I water polo team. While most of my friends expressed fear when leaving the place we all grew up, I felt surprisingly at ease as I left the only home I had ever known at 18.

Thank you for your interest in the section of my memoir below. If your email server clips the message, then you can read the full post on Substack. You can also listen to the post by clicking the audio button at the top of this page. When needed, visit the Bibliography and Support Resources.

According to stories passed down to me, my parents prepared me for my Baptism by adorning my one-year-old body in a long, white dress and placed an elastic headband around my still bald head. The priest invited my family to stand on the steps near the altar beside a transparent bowl filled with water that rested on a small table. One of my parents held me over the glass, while the man touched my head with one hand. His other hand poured holy water over my skin: one, two, three times. The Catholic congregation watched and clapped as I — the already famous baby in the church community — had survived long enough to be formally baptized.

Every Sunday my parents awoke my brothers and me, quickly dressed us in suitable church clothing, buckled us into car seats, and set off for the parish down the street. Always a few minutes late, we parked and hustled toward the Catholic Church. Just behind the large, brown wooden doors, the water awaited me in small bowls that were attached to the inside wall, so I could bless my body and make it holy. I prayed:

In the name of:
The Father, as I raised the fingers of my right hand to my head;
The Son, my hand found the middle of my chest;
And the Holy, then traveled to my left shoulder;
Spirit, and finally finished at my right.

These words honored the Holy Trinity. The church floor, first carpeted in velvety maroon then stripped into a hard, tiled floor, held a number of oiled wooden pews organized neatly into long linear rows. To the left and right rested confessionals. Just above those, the 14 Stations of the Cross — framed pictures that told the story of the last moments of Jesus — hung on the walls. His body suspended nearly naked from a wooden cross on top of blue mosaic tiles, while an altar and tabernacle rested underneath his feet, right behind the priest.

Quickly, my family rushed down the aisle until we reached the very front row. The pew was always empty, as if it had been reserved just for us. We shuffled in, sat down, and listened to the priest perform the liturgy. At six, I was too short to see above the low wooden railing that formed a wall of sorts between the altar and me. So my father lifted my body up until my feet could find the narrow, flat, wooden ledge of the pew. Suddenly, I could view the magic of the ritual before me, while parishioners and the priest read stories from the pulpit that began to shape my understanding of reality. The first reading came from the Old Testament.

The tale began of a God who created earth, then out of the dirt breathed life into a man named Adam and a woman — born of his rib — called Eve, in a garden: Eden, or “Paradise.” Adam and Eve were free to do as they pleased within the garden, as well as to subdue the land, the plants, and the animals. The creator God gave them but one restriction: do not eat from the Tree of Knowledge. But due to the persuasion of a cunning snake, Eve ate one of the apples of the tree anyway. In consequence, God banished the couple from paradise, set angels to guard the gates of the garden, and introduced pain and suffering into the bodies and brains of the first human beings. “Sin” came to be the word for mistakes like this that caused breaks in the relationship with God, the land, and each other.

The second reading and Gospel both came from the New Testament. Jesus the Christ arrived and lived to teach others how to return to paradise. According to the stories, he gathered his family and friends for their last communion before his death. Together they broke bread and drank wine to celebrate their faith in a time and place of pain. Now, every Sunday the Catholic community continues to gather to break bread and drink wine after it has been transubstantiated into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. So together believers can remember the sacrifice of His life that saved humanity from their sins — from that very first time Eve ate the apple from the Tree of Knowledge in Eden.

I watched longingly as the parishioners lined up to accept the Body and Blood of Christ into their own bodies and blood. I yearned to feel the sensation of Christ in my own body: to taste the bread on my tongue, and touch my lips to the wine. To know what salvation felt like in this broken body of mine. But I was still too young.

Before I could receive my First Holy Communion at the age of seven, I had to complete the Sacrament of Reconciliation. My body needed to be cleansed of sin in order to hold the purity of Christ. Shyness filled me as I entered the small box in the corner of the church that sat just below the Stations of the Cross. It felt cowardly to choose to kneel and hide behind the priest, so in an act of uncomfortable courage, I walked past the minister and sat in the chair right across from him. He greeted me, and I tried to begin stating my list of sins, but quickly felt confused. I remained silent.

“Have you honored your father and mother like the fifth commandment requires?” The priest inquired.
“I’ve tried,” I replied.

The morning the day finally came to celebrate my First Holy Communion, I jumped out of bed in excitement. My mother pulled my gown out of the closet and over my head then helped me to put on socks and white Mary Jane shoes. She completed my look by pulling my straight, brown hair half back, then brushing my bangs down to cover my high forehead, and pinning a crown with a small veil to the top. I looked just like a child bride.

Together, my father, mother, brothers, and I rushed to church, parked, and strolled down to an aisle big enough to seat everyone in my extended family who wanted to attend the celebration: my father’s three sisters and brother and their children, my mother’s two sisters and brother and their children, my paternal grandparents: Pops and Joan; as well as my maternal grandparents: Jay and Magdalene. The liturgy continued as it always did: the priest processed down the aisle, congregation members read a few verses from the bible, and the minister spoke to the stories’ meanings. Then together we prayed for members of our community.

Anticipation began to tickle my body, as parishioners walked the bowls of bread and cups of wine to the altar. With the aid of a few servers, the priest received the gifts and began the prayers of transubstantiation. I watched eagerly as the holy man in robes organized the Body into a number of bowls, while a parishioner poured the Blood into long stemmed glasses. Then the Eucharistic Ministers all swarmed the altar, grabbed a bowl or a cup, and took to their places around the front of the church.

The congregation began lining up, but this time the children who had prepared to receive their first Eucharist led the way. My peers and I walked down the aisle in our suits and dresses. I felt nervous to experience this Sacrament that I had yearned so many years to receive as I approached the priest. Then my turn finally came. I faced the man before me and held out my hands, one gently placed atop the other.

“The Body of Christ,” he said, while he held up the wafer in front of my eyes.
“Amen,” I replied.

He slipped Jesus’s Body into my hands. Slowly, I pulled the bread up to my mouth and placed it on my tongue, quickly noticing that it tasted just like cardboard. I felt nothing but the same old discomfort of belonging to my burdened body. So I returned home, still seeking a sense of salvation.

I laid on the soft sofa in the family room and watched 2D drawn images of princes and princesses. Most of their narratives included a great love story, a “happily-ever-after” ending. In the sacred moments of solitude in between my activities, I laid in the secret garden of my bedroom and daydreamed about a future love who would come to save me. I imagined the time Peter Pan might show up at my window to take me to Neverland, or Prince Charming might wake me with a kiss and invite me to live in his promised paradise.

As soon as my body began to experience the stirrings of sexual curiosity, my family sent two other girl cousins my age and me to an Opus Dei Catholic Girl’s sleep away camp. My paternal grandparents belonged to the small organization within the Catholic Church, so felt it necessary for our upbringing as girls to be introduced to Opus Dei’s community and values. We were to follow the perfect examples of our parents: remain virgins until our wedding days, give our lives away to our husbands, then bear children. A few of the marriages in my family had ended with sad and stigmatized divorces, but for the most part, everyone stayed together.

At the conservative Catholic camp, my cousins and I participated in a number of activities including a talk on chastity. The girls gathered and took their seats in the large room, while the camp counselor at the front spoke to the importance of female virginity to maintain our purity before marriage. The speaker held up a small plastic rectangle designed after a debit card that committed each girl who signed it to Abstinence ‘Til Marriage (ATM). The counselors invited us to place the cards in our wallets and carry them until our wedding day. Then we were to give them to our husbands with our virginal bodies. Inspired by the message of these mentors and the creativity of this cause, I quickly signed one and placed that plastic card in my velcro wallet, then slipped it into my back pocket.

As I grew older, I couldn’t help but notice that my brothers never received any education on chastity. That the priests that performed the Sacraments could only be men. That perfectionism in the Catholic Church translated to strong gender roles that assigned each follower’s future: men were leaders, women were followers; men were husbands or priests, women were wives or nuns; men could be called fathers, while women could be called mothers or sisters.

Everyone had a role, a box, and were expected to participate without question or critique. Critical thinking was always discouraged. Women, like Eve, were blamed for any revelry. I could be one of two things: a wife and a mother, or a bride of Christ. This didn’t sit quite right with me, so by the time Confirmation came at 14, I felt deeply that I needed more time. The choice to commit to the Catholic Church for life felt far too big a decision to make as a teenager. As if once I was blessed by the hands of a man with a white collar around his neck, I could never take it back.

I cuddled with my mother, as we often did, on the couch or in her bed or mine. I studied her so closely in our embrace, especially how differently we looked. Her skin was brown and consistent, mine pale and freckled. Her dark hair fell to her shoulders, while mine, auburn and straight, rested on my chest. Crows’ feet crowded around her eyes, fine lines surrounded her lips, while deep crevices carved within the skin between her breasts.

“Mom, I don’t want to get confirmed. I’m not ready,” I communicated hesitantly.
“The Sacrament will give you the grace you need. You’ll be ready then,” she insisted.

I knew I would not win this fight, so I threw myself into preparations. I had to choose a saint whose name would be added to my name in between my middle and last. This holy figure would accompany me throughout my life’s journey. In this decision, I had complete autonomy. So I bought a book that described the various female Saints: their names to from where they came, their stories to what made them particularly holy.

In my studies, I learned of the heroines of my Catholic community. I loved knowing that this abundance of ancestors accompanied me in my life and offered more souls who I could turn to in times of strife for spiritual accompaniment and care. Intimacy grew between those Saints and me, as I learned their histories and what prayers specifically I could bring to them for their intercessions.

Every once in a while on Saturdays, my father and I rode to The Galley Cafe. We biked to the Back Bay, speeding down the hillside, while the wind whipped past our faces. Eventually, we arrived at the breakfast place tucked away near the Marina and ate pancakes, eggs, and sausages. He sipped coffee, while I drank OJ.

On the way, he told me the story of a certain saint whose father tried to offer her body to the King at the age of 13 for marriage. She felt called to chastity in a commitment to Christ, so refused to be the property of the patriarch. As a consequence, the monarch sentenced her to death. Her name was Philomena, “Daughter of the light.” She is the patron saint of children.1 Besides, adding a “P” to my initials would make them “AMPM”, which went so well with my birthday, 7/11. Clearly, God’s plan for me was to work in a Kwik-E-Mart.

I took her name, prepared for the ceremony, walked down the long church aisle once again with all of my peers, felt the heat of the hands of the man hovering over my head to bless me, then committed my adulthood to the Catholic church at 14 because my mother made me.

In high school, my mother started a Life Teen program at the local parish, which focused on faith development for teenagers. The priest celebrated mass on Sundays in the evenings with musical accompaniment written by Christian and Catholic pop artists. Worship included hand signs and dancing and fun. After the liturgy, my friends and I gathered in a group led by a youth minister. We played games, ate snacks, and found communion in each other’s company. My confidence grew as this community centered me, and I bonded with adult mentors outside of my family: the youth minister my mother hired to run the program and other young adult volunteers.

I turned 18. Before I packed up my car to move to college, I visited the church down the street to say goodbye to my youth minister and his team that had become my faith family. My mentor wrapped his arms around my shoulders, then pulled away and asked me out on a date. My mind went blank. Not knowing what to say, I simply walked away.

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Often after a meal of messy spaghetti, my parents dragged our tomato-sauce-splattered bodies to the pool at the local tennis club. My father threw my brothers and me into the deep end, while screaming:

“Sink or swim!”

In a panic, we doggy paddled to the shallow side where my father jumped in and invited us all to cling to him. Then he spun rapidly like a washing machine — back and forth, back and forth — making the peaceful water into whitewashed chaos, requiring an exhausting amount of effort as we flailed and failed to keep hold of him. The last kid to hang on won, while the rest of us made our way to the wall to take a breath and a break, feeling defeated. It was just a game.

As a child, I ached to learn how to read the words I saw printed on pages and stuffed between bindings stored on the few bookshelves around the house. But my parents kept me from learning how until my older brother became confident in the skill. When I could finally see the letters as sounds, and the sounds as words, and the words as sentences, and the sentences as stories, learning became my highest priority.

Naturally, my father had other plans for me. Once I sat at the kitchen table for hours, while my mind focused so intensely on school work that I lost track of time. My father burst into the kitchen, pulled the chair out from the table, pushed the books aside, picked me up, threw me over his shoulder, and put me down on the lawn outside.

“Play!” He demanded.

But my dreams still called to me through stories. One book especially captivated me: The Giver, by Lois Lowry. In this chronicle, Jonas’s world had been in such perfect order that it had no color and no conflict, no feelings and no memories of the world before. But his life began to change when he noticed the side of an apple shine red, when he felt attracted to his childhood friend, when he realized that maybe the world that was built for him didn’t actually make a lot of sense. His community recognized his captivation with these questions and his premonition towards the importance of the fullness of the human experience. So they introduced Jonas to the Giver, the man in charge of holding the community’s memories. Slowly, the Giver gives Jonas back the history of humanity, then he sets himself free.

Somehow, my little world felt similarly. Newport flirted with perfection in a way that only other cities that attract the rich and famous do. The season was singular: endless summer. Perfectly manicured lawns nestled against coordinated homes with glowing sidewalks and evergreen pavement. Outdoor malls glistened with storefronts and restaurant patios that sported the sprinkling view of sunlight reflected upon ocean water. People vacationed here, but for my family and me, my neighbors and friends, it was just our everyday reality.

Growing up in a place polluted with perfection meant those living there had to gleam just as exquisitely. My neighbors were to act consistently happy, suppressing any internal complexities, while flaunting what looked good externally. White, wealthy culture reigned supreme in this city where men made millions, while women clung to their arms to be flaunted like trophies. Authentic Louis Vuitton bags decorated women’s shoulders, expensive Tiffany’s diamonds adorned their necks, while inauthentic, even more expensive bulging breasts sat on their augmented chests. Girls and boys got nose and boob jobs for their sixteenth birthdays.

Attending Church on Sundays felt like a spiritual ritual combined with the neighborhood’s weekly fashion show, as congregants walked the aisle turned catwalk in their newest and truest designer styles. Eastbluff tried to keep up with the wealth of our neighbors in the coastal mansions, but failed. So, due to the proximity of the parish, our side of town earned the term, “The Catholic Ghetto.”

“There’s no love in poor homes,” my father once spouted while reading the morning paper.

He had chosen Newport Beach as the place to raise his family. As a teenager, he sold Kirby vacuums door-to-door, finetuning his sales skills. Then after a brief time in college, he dropped out, hopped trains to concerts like Woodstock, then eventually moved to New York City to work as a trader on Wall Street. From there, he became a Venture Capitalist and an entrepreneur. The glitz and glam of Newport Beach’s new-money culture appealed to him as a young professional, so he transferred his life to the Southern California coastline where he started dating.

“I wanted a blonde, big-breasted USC girl,” my father told me. “I settled for your mother based on the advice of a church parishioner: ‘She’s such a good person, she’ll make a great partner and an even better mother.’”

He laughed when he admitted the instances of lying to women so he could sleep with them, totaling his first car because he was checking a woman out in hot shorts, dragging a woman he had been engaged to down the street with another car. Frequently, my father groped my mother in front of my three brothers and me.

“Tim, not in front of the children!” She’d scream.

When we made my father angry, he called us into my parents’ walk-in closet. Before we went, we all ran together to the accused’s bedroom and helped them pull on as many pairs of pants as possible. Then, one of my brothers or I would walk hesitantly across the hallway, through my parents’ bedroom and attached bath, and into the closet, where our father awaited us.

“Pick a belt!” He yelled angrily.

I could always count on my father for one thing: to use his big hands to untangle the chains of my necklaces. I never had the patience to do it myself. For whatever reason this simple task set his being to rest and he was always happy to help. So, whenever I pulled a necklace out of my jewelry box tangled from the disorganization that reflected my entire life, I called to him. He came to me, sat down, and slowly fixed the chain. It seemed to settle him. For as long as it took, he worked to untangle the unintentional mess between the metal of my necklace and its place around my neck.

My mother, on the other hand, involved herself in the day to day lives of her four children sometimes with help from nannies. From making us lunches with a lipstick kiss on the brown paper bags to volunteering in our classrooms, keeping score at our sports games to creating church activities to suit the needs of our ages, my mother’s presence was a constant for me.

Elaine played the saint of the family and the community. To me, she was a natural beauty. Usually kind and calm, always well dressed, simple and elegant, she kept my father’s boisterous personality and the superficiality of Newport in check. While my dad dreamed of bigger houses and luxury vehicles, Rolex watches and vacation homes, my mother cut coupons for groceries at the kitchen table. She tried her best to resist the materialistic pressures of our neighborhood.

Often after school, I ran up to my mom’s room and laid on her bed while she played digital Solitaire, or I sat on the steps of the jacuzzi bath in her bathroom to discuss the day. Often, I needed advice on how to manage the next social issue between my classmates and me.

“Mom, this boy in class is being really mean,” I began. “What should I do?”
“Kill him with kindness, Annie,” she advised.

In high school, the circles of my life expanded beyond the familiarity of Bunya St. I now drove the 30-minute stretch from home to school early every weekday morning, then 20-minutes to the pool for water polo practice, then 20-minutes home for dinner, then 20-minutes to Huntington Beach for water polo club practice, then 20-minutes home once more for homework. On the weekends, my team and I traveled to play games against other schools in the county and the state.

Once we had a tournament nearby our house with early games beginning the next day. so my parents invited all twenty girls over to Bunya St. to stay the night. We worked hard, played hard, and ate a lot. My father knew this about us, so drove to the Kentucky Fried Chicken nearby right before they closed.

“I’m sorry sir, can you repeat that? What would you like?” The cashier asked him.
“I want ALL of your chicken,” he said again.

Boxes and boxes of fried chicken arrived to the girls gathered with sleeping bags in the den, furniture pushed up against the walls so that we could all fit. Like my father had anticipated, we ate every single bit of it. The oil from the fryer dripped off of our fingers, which we cleansed with our tongues, and the smack of our lips. We slept the best we could all cuddled on the ground with various heads of taxidermied animals staring us down from the walls: the bounty of my parents’ African safari years before.

As my father’s wealth grew, so did the expense of our family activities. He and I frequently strapped boots on our feet, clicked into skis, and headed to the peaks to go skiing. Most often it was Whistler, CA, where my father had bought a two-bedroom condo for my family to spend the holidays. On our way up to the mountaintop, he took up more space than the metal chair that hung from the ski lift offered us, bragging:

“You know Annie, I never fall! You watch all these men my age wipe out time and time again, while my legs have stayed strong. I still ski just like I did when I was young, racing down the Rocky Mountains in Colorado as fast as I could! I nearly made the Olympics, you know?”
“Oh, I know dad,” I said in a tone that suggested I was once impressed but now annoyed by the repetition of this tall tale.

When we arrived at the top of the mountain, my father pushed off the chair first and I followed. Then suddenly, he fell deep into a ditch covered with lightly packed powder. Both of his skis popped off immediately, while his poles dug into the depths, and his face planted right into the snow.

“You never fall, huh dad?!” I chortled between belly aching laughs.

“Consider me humbled,” he replied as he pulled himself up, gazing to his right and left to check out who had witnessed his fall. “Owie, owie, owie, owie!” He shook the snow off of his clothes, wrapped his poles around his wrists, beat his boots with those large sticks to clear them of packed powder, and clicked back into his skis.

“Okay, follow me!” he continued, as he pushed himself forward sliding across the slick surface passing below our feet.

He led me like usual to a slope too steep for my skill set. At 6’3” tall with legs like trees, Timothy Jr. grounded into the snow easily and bounced back up shifting quickly down the hillside, while my light frame barely broke the surface. Terror flooded me as familiar jitters crept up from their deep hiding place within my body.

“Take your brain out and leave it on the couch!” My dad yelled from the bottom of the powdered slope, now tracked with the shape of his skis in graceful curves, while I feared I might freeze to death.

“Come on, girly, bloom where you’re planted!” I stayed stuck at the top of the mountain.

“There’s only one way down, Annie!” He called up to me sympathetically.

As high school graduation neared, my father made it very clear that he wanted me to get into one of the top four water polo schools in California or an Ivy League. Then he could wear one of those “Stanford Dad,” or “Harvard Dad,” or “Princeton Dad” sweatshirts. So I followed my father up and down the East Coast on a college tour, not feeling at home at any one of those institutions. But when I arrived at the bluff of LMU in LA, I instantly knew this was the school for me. Like my bones wanted to be there, my soul to belong there.

So, I left a few pages out of my mail-in Ivy League applications “accidentally.” A few universities sent letters stating my applications needed to be completed. I hid them away quickly. Then, when the big white envelope came inviting me to LMU, I knew this was the first opportunity I could say yes to my body, and no to the future my father had planned for me.

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Chapter 2: Anatomy

For nine months, I grew in the suspended fluid of my mother’s womb. Then, one week past my due date, on July 11th an OB/GYN named Abraham caught me between my mother’s legs and placed me on her skin. Then he kissed her on the lips and said:

“She is the most beautiful baby girl I have ever seen.”

Instantly, I became part of a family. My father’s first name was Timothy Jr., as his father was Timothy Sr. My oldest brother’s name was Timothy III, but he came to be known as “Timmy.” The surname of my grandfather, then my father — which nodded to Mars, the Roman God of War — was passed down to me.

My mother’s name was Elaine. With her second child and first girl, her growing family became a closer reflection of her biggest dream. As she held me to her breast for my first feeding, she called me by name: “Anne Marie.” Anne means “Favored One,” while Marie means “Rebellion.” Seemingly healthy and whole, my parents drove me — the Favored Rebellion to the God of War — home to their property on Bunya St., while my father groaned:

“What am I going to do with a girl?”

I quickly took to my mother’s breast and grew to be quite chunky, but soon developed a dangerous pooping peril. I ate plenty, but could barely pass the stool through my tiny body. So my belly bloated as it filled with food-trash and gas. My frequent flatulence smelt so bad that I would often be handed back and forth between family members, so the last carrier could literally take a breather.

After six months of my parents passing me between priests and physicians for healing, as well as a few bouts of starvation and biopsies of my large intestine, doctors finally diagnosed me with Hirschbrung’s Disease: a condition of the large colon where the cells meant to move waste through do not function. Instead, the stool gets stuck and can possibly lead to a blow out, which would make quite the mess at best, or a blow up of the large colon, which would end in death.

So at six months old, surgeons cut open my tiny belly with a slit from my left hip to my navel. They snipped out the section of my large colon that refused to function, attached the operating end to my rectum, and sewed me back up. Before they were done, the physicians noticed the fusion of the lips of my labia, so they sliced the skin from one piece into two. Then they passed me back to my father and shared the news.

“What? I didn’t tell you to fix that!” He screamed angrily. “I had prayed for her labia to be fused!”

The doctors gazed at him confused, then walked away to attend to the other patients of the day. A few weeks after I returned home from the surgery, my father sat with a friend in the living room downstairs when he felt a strange intuitive nudge that he needed to check on me. He found my body shaking violently in the crib, so he immediately rushed me to the hospital. There, the doctor’s hands held me once more, as I calmed after my first brain storm: a grand mal seizure.

Then over and over again, every six months or so for the next five years, my body trembled and my mouth foamed. Sometimes at home, but often in the car, my limbs shook while my chest pushed against the tight straps of the seat. In terror, my mother cried while honking the horn vigorously, then quickly drove me to the nearest emergency room and handed me back to the doctors who labored to figure out what was wrong with me. Eventually, they called it Idiopathic Epilepsy.

The local pediatrician Dr. David took a special interest in my mother and me. As medicine for a six month old seizing was still experimental in the medical community, Dr. David tried to treat me using a number of methods including shots of Valium right into the rear end. He taught my mother how to administer the medicine herself.

My first birthday passed, then a half a year later my mother birthed my second brother, Josiah. Eventually, in order to help my mother manage my siblings, my disease, and me, my father hired a live-in German nanny. Quickly at just 18, Gertrude became another member of our family. She, tall and blond with sun-kissed skin, arrived when I was just two and a half or so. Her stuff filled the guest room downstairs, and her daytimes with childcare. But in the evenings, she was free to party. So she did. With wildness and whimsy, she returned late into the nights and on the weekends after spending time with dates and friends. Daily, I watched her shyly and curiously from behind the knees of my mother.

Gertrude, too, kept watch over me in case I began to seize. After I learned to speak and became more aware of my body, I could anticipate what was happening.

“Mommy?…Gertrude?” I began, “I don’t feel good. I need to lay down.”

This was their cue. Gertrude gathered my brothers, while my mother ran to the medicine cabinet, grabbed the Valium out of the cupboard, pulled the fluid into the syringe, asked me to lay on my belly, pulled down my pants, then poked the needle into my rear end. But often, her shaking hand, weary mind, and hurting heart restricted her from using enough force to actually puncture the skin.

“It’s okay, mommy,” I soothed her. “You won’t hurt me.”

She tried again and found success the second time. Sometimes the medicine settled my system enough to avoid the seizure, while other times she and I continued our usual ritual by driving to the nearest hospital, passing my body back to the physicians, and asking the priests for prayers. Word of my illness spread around our Catholic congregation. So every time I seized and threw my family into another state of emergency, the church community left food on the doorstep, mailed cards wishing me well, or called to offer babysitting help for my older and eventually younger brothers.

At home, everyone’s eyes always followed me, watching for the next episode. There were no locks on the doors inside the house, even the bathrooms. I couldn’t wear underwear to bed because I had frequent vaginal infections. Someone was always with me, someone was always watching, someone could barge into a room whenever they wanted all for the purpose of safety. Then, a particularly extreme grand mal seizure took hold of my brain and shook my body for hours. My mother, understandably worn from the work to sustain my life, rushed me to the hospital and prayed to the Mother of Jesus for help.

“Mary, please, heal her here or take her from me. I can’t do this anymore.”

I recovered and finally the seizures stopped. By five, I was still alive due to the creative exploration of doctors, prayers at the pulpit, the generosity of a congregation, and the fortification of family. The only memories I retained from these early years of my life marked my body.

During group showers when we were all still young, my father, mother, brothers, and I piled into my parent’s large bathroom, stripped to our birthday suits, and showered as efficiently as a young family could. I stared at their bodies then back at mine and could see the subtleties. When I asked my mother questions about the permanent lines that stretched within the insides of my arms and ankle, my bruised front tooth, and the scar between my navel and my left hip, she answered with my own forgotten stories: the surgery, the seizures, and the breathing and feeding tubes.

“You are a miracle,” she said. “God saved you for a reason. He has great plans for you.”

But there were other differences between our bodies too. Although my brothers’ shapes and mine matched mostly from the waist up, for some reason I had to keep my top covered when not showering, while they could go nipple-free around the house or by the beach and pool. Also, my brothers had these body parts called penises. With them, they could do so many cool things: stand up while they peed, or pee in public behind a tree, or bend over without being scolded, or wear shorts and pants constantly to climb trees without worrying about revealing their undies. Their skin sticks seemed to offer them freedoms that my private part did not.

“Mommy,” I asked. Why don’t I have a penis?”
“You do, Annie,” she explained. “It’s just up inside of you.”

My body grew. Eventually, an animated film taught my sixth grade peers and me about basic sexual anatomy and body odor. I learned the anatomically correct language of my sex organs: labia, vulva, vagina, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries. In conversations with cousins and friends, we explored themes of menstruation and baby-making. But none of these lessons taught in locker rooms or at the lunch table, through cartoons or car rides, adequately prepared me for the realities of teenage life.

“Mom, something brown is in my underwear,” I walked into her bedroom concerned at 14.
“Oh, that’s your period, Annie,” she began to cry.
“Why are you crying?” I asked her confused.
“My baby’s growing up,” she wept. “You can have babies now.”

My body continued to change, to reshape itself as my breasts barely swelled and suddenly I became very aware that I had hip bones. My once flawless skin now erupted in acne, which I couldn’t help but pick at incessantly. The consistency of my mental state now pendulated depending on the time of the month. Worried thoughts about my appearance and other people’s perceptions of me became obsessions. My mood dropped drastically week to week, often manifesting in deep shame and self-blame. The simplicity of managing my prepubescent body changed, as I now carried pads with me all day. Swimming in the pool became complicated, as I needed to insert something inside of me to keep from bleeding through my swimsuit.

My mother stood on the other side of the bathroom door, while I played with the tampon by practicing pushing the stringed-cotton-cylinder out of the cardboard casing. It was time to enter myself for the very first time, and I felt flooded with fear.

“It’s not that big of a deal,” I heard my mother say. “You just stick it up there.”

So I pressed the casing to where I understood my vagina to be and pushed. Pain shot through my body, as the cotton separated from the cardboard. Tears fell from my eyes when, for the first time, I was all too aware of that feeling that something was up inside of me and stayed there.

Thank you for your interest in the section of my memoir below. If your email server clips the message, then you can read the full post on Substack. You can also listen to the post by clicking the audio button at the top of this page. When needed, visit the Bibliography and Support Resources. This post mentions incest abuse. If you’re seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.

Acknowledgments

The home I know now has been co-created by so many moments with earth, and bodies, and waters, and words. If I could write a litany of love to each and every one of these people or places in the pages that are to come in this book, I would. Instead, this will have to do.

First, I thank my family of origin for giving me life and sustaining it for my first 24 years. I thank the physicians who helped me and the priests who prayed for me, the community of friends who supported me and the mentors who believed in me, while I circled the streets of Newport Beach — especially Amy, Katie, and Alan.

During my undergraduate and graduate education, I thank the anarchists, and the feminists, and the friends who opened up entirely different worlds to me than the one shaped by my upbringing. Thank you for accompanying me through the hidden heaviness of my years before memory, when I managed symptoms without story and rage without realization. Your love prepared me to receive my history — especially Sarah, Mark, and Jane.

So many joined me in the exploratory mystery of decades of grief and growth, despair and design, and acceptance and hope that guided me to the home I know now. From the families who taught me how to raise children safely, to clinicians who held a safe space for me to process my memories, to friends who supported and celebrated me through so many milestones of my laborious journey — especially Meghan, Kelly, and Tiffany.

Thank you to those I owe the success and sustainability of my writing business: Amanda, Mahina, Angelina, Claire, and Lauren. Followed by those who became my constants: Robin, Owen, and H, Rachel, Alicia, and Faith. Thank you for teaching me of home and then letting me go, so I could continue to explore my soul. And to all those who received me in New York City.

To all the survivors before me and the Incest AWARE Alliance: for believing in yourselves first, then believing in all of me. I couldn’t, nor wouldn’t, do this work without you — especially Suzanne, Shirkydra, and Pennie for pushing me out of my hiding place; Maria and Ethan for keeping me out; and Nancy, Kesa, and Donna for reminding me that activism is first and foremost grounded in joy.

Finally, thank you to all those who helped me to complete this book. From late night calls for clarity to walks with worry, the funds to eat and the homes to sleep, the reviewing and the editing of drafts for craft — Brittany, Leslie, Andrea, Joe, Chris, and Emily. Thank you to my friend Sara for finding the narrative that came to be this precise book within so many of my stories. Our shared hours discussing this project have been the most meaningful of my creative life.

Lastly, thank you to the spirits who speak with me and the land under my feet, the trees who consistently inspire me and the moonlight that guides me through the night, the sunshine that welcomes my day and this city for being a little bit of everything with me. Most of all, thank you to the water for setting me free. And to my brain, body, and being for continuing to be, no matter how wobbly. To my child self, Annie, for surviving then healing with such urgency. Then finally to Josephine: for fighting for agency and giving me consent to share our story.

I am made of all of you. This book holds all of us. I love you.

The End

An Epilogue

I open the door of the home I know now and invite my constants in. There are three of them: Ruth, Oliver, and H. Ruth is my best friend, and her husband and toddler accompany her on their first family trip to New York City to be with me in the place I am currently living: the attic of a colorful, hand-painted Victorian row house in the Bronx.

This home rests between two rivers, a botanical garden, and a famous cemetery, just five miles or so from a bay that becomes a sound that stretches into the sea. Many of my neighbors in the community have arrived here after being pushed out of another home due to lack of basic safeties or pulled in by the privileges of this place, or both. I landed here a year or so ago because it was the next safest place for me to be.

Now, I stand with my beloveds at the bottom of the stone steps. Together, we bear the baby and the baggage into the sunroom. We pass through the second door that leads to the base of the wooden staircase and begin climbing. The railing recognizes the oil of my skin then supports Ruth, Oliver, and H. Step by step, we tread to the top floor, where a painted portrait of me — standing gleefully on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River with the skyline of NYC directly behind — hangs from the wall. Just to the right, I push open my front door, which I recently painted light pink, and welcome my constants home.

For the next few days or so, the four of us play. We adults, with stories and food and drinks and coffee, and the toddler, with parks and castles and the fort we call H’s House. A v-shaped cardboard cutout — pulled from the recycling bin — that sits centered in the living room decorated with twinkle lights. H’s favorite toy is trash, so for weeks I’ve been stacking and storing used, clean-as-possible paper, metal, and plastic items into the empty closet adjacent to our play space. Under this DIY creation, H — intentionally or not — shares their concept of home with me using their quickly growing vocabulary.

“H, it’s time for a new activity,” I announce.

“In this house?” They question me.

“This house” refers to any place H exists. So far, it has been used to describe their actual home in the Redwood Grove, their uncle’s house down the road, the car that takes them to preschool, my one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx, and now this dilapidated cardboard co-creation that fills up all the free space on my living room floor.

“Yes!” I reply to H, “In this house.” My answer offers them a sense of place.

The sun begins to set behind the high rises and single family homes that can be seen outside my window, so we all prepare for rest. Ruth and Oliver sleep in my bed. H has a pack-n-play that barely fits in the living room closet, while I lay my head on the daybed that’s pushed into an arched nook up against the white windowsill and fall asleep. A few hours in, I can hear H wiggle and wail behind the closet door, so I rise, hobble across the living room half asleep, place my hand on their back and begin to reassure them.

“You’re safe, H.” Slowly, they grow more familiar with sharing a new home with me.

Five days pass far too quickly, so my loved ones pack up to return home. With baby and the baggage, we walk through the pink door, past the portrait, down the three flights of stairs, through the sun room, to the bottom of the stone steps. I embrace Oliver, then bend down to ask H how they want to say goodbye. The tiny human stretches out their arms, wraps them around my neck, and holds me tight. Lastly, Ruth pulls me close, knowing that this is the last time we’ll see each other for the next six months or so. Their taxi drives away in the direction of JFK where they will board a plane to fly to their home in the Redwood Grove. As I wave goodbye, I sigh:

Somehow I feel whole, possibly for the very first time in my life.

I return to my third-story walk-up, then tidy the type of chaos that only a toddler can make by deconstructing the now dilapidated fort designed with colorful pens and plastered with dried playdough, breaking down the pack-n-play, and washing the dishes caked with whatever concoction H made with what was supposed-to-be their breakfast. The hand-me-down armchair and mismatched ottoman that sit in the corner invite me to rest for a bit, until I feel ready to write. And then I do.

This year, I celebrate the 20th anniversary of the day I moved away from the only home I had ever known before I was 18 years old. I am 38 now. Since then I have lived in so many different places that I have lost count. When I first stepped into this one-bedroom apartment in NYC above someone else’s family, I felt the most foreign of feelings: arrival. And with it the time and space to reflect, to breathe, to grieve, to receive.

So I rearrange my body into the new ergonomic chair and wheel it up to the standup desk donated to me by a fellow activist and continue to pen my story, both asking and answering so many questions along the way:

Do I share my birth name? Just the first and middle names, I decide.

Do I reveal my family’s names and make myself vulnerable to defamation? No.

Must I ask for consent to write about those who accompanied me? No, I changed their names too except for a few who asked to be represented by their real first and last names.

Is it safe to speak honestly of how institutions failed me? I will take the risk.

Can I trust my own memory? My memory is so much deeper than just my history.

Must I tell my story chronologically? No, I can craft a narrative of true stories in any order I wish.

Will it help me or hurt me to scale the history of my body to a public that has serially silenced those like me? Likely, both. Ready or not, I am willing.

This story is about me and all those who accompanied me on my liberation journey from the systems that were supposed to support me, especially my family. So naturally, it’s also about us: all of those who have been touched by the issue of incest. At times, this story may be difficult to read; I know because it was difficult to live. My hope is that no matter what brings you to this page or what stage of life you’re currently in, you will take your time being with this story from the conclusion to the beginning while accompanying me in my backwards-way-of-living.

Thank you for reading. In doing so, you are hearing me, but more importantly, you are listening to us. We, the witnesses of the history of incest. So that our children — especially my H — can be safe, can be free, in the first place.

Chapter 1: Property

In the beginning, no boundaries separated the sea and me. I ran in fearlessly to be with the salt water. My feet splashed through the tides, as they raised into waves that I threw my body into until I could float and rest upon the water’s wake. Then one day, a swell picked me up and before I could set my feet into the sand, it slammed me back against itself. Spinning, twisting, drowning, my eyes could not find a direction. Everything looked like whitewash, and blue, and brown stewed together like an ocean soup.

My lungs filled with water. I choked as I tumbled through the breaking wave, trying desperately to find my feet so I could catch my breath. Finally, the water shallowed as it reached the shoreline. I balanced on the sand then bent over with my hands on my knees, coughed out the fluid from my lungs, left the ocean behind me, and wept. I stayed away from the sea, as soon as I learned it could hurt me.

But being raised so close to the ocean, many parents sent their children to Junior Lifeguards to learn basic safety skills. One summer, my brothers and I joined other kids between ages nine and fifteen. We ran in the sand, studied the hand books, then inevitably swam in the ocean. To fulfill one of the final tests of the summer season, the lifeguards gathered us kids onto the wooden planks of the pier and asked us to jump off. I watched as my peers leapt fearlessly from the wooden railing into the crashers.

My body trembled as it approached that former love whose strength I had not known until it took my breath away in a way I had never wanted. My hands white knuckled the wooden railing, as I listened attentively to the seasoned lifeguard before me.

“As soon as you jump, press your legs and arms together as tightly as you can like a torpedo. When you land, swim to the surface to take a breath and catch a glimpse of the swell. If it’s safe, then head in diagonally against the current. If you’re in the middle of a wave break, then swim to the bottom of the sea and cling to the sand until the water calms again. Repeat this process over and over. Once the set has finally settled, continue swimming to shore.”

I pulled my scrawny body over the wooden railing, my hands shaking, my heart pounding in my chest. Then as soon as the instructor said go, I released my grip from the guardrails, jumped off the pier, shaped my body into a torpedo, and splashed into the waves. My eyes opened to see the whitewash made from my own weight mixed with salt water.

Quickly, I swam to the surface to take a breath and gazed at the swells to see where they were in that set. A large white cap raised above my head, so I swam deep beneath the sea and clung to the sand underneath me. My body felt the peace of this uninterrupted space beneath the wake, as my eyes caught a glimpse of the beautiful white and blue ribbons of water that danced just above my head. As long as I could see the currents, observe the shape of the waves, and ensure I had the strength to dive and stay near the sand while the water found its peace again, I could swim.

I left home for the first time years ago, and then again just yesterday, and I will once more tomorrow. For the first 18 years of my life, I resided in my parents’ property on a hill that plateaued a number of times up the steep side like large steps. On each flattened length of land, a street stretched with residences that sat one right next to the left. Signs marked the different names of each lane, all inspired by plants and animals. My home sat right in the middle of Bunya Street: a tree.

The house that raised me was painted off-white, with red brick high walls encircling it, and an open space into a garden that led to the green front door. It opened to the first floor, with a long dining table to the right and an entrance to the kitchen, a living room with a baby grand piano and an attached office to the front. On one wall, hung a huge painted portrait of my family: my father, my mother, my three brothers, and me. The other walls were adorned with iconography like Jesus hanging from the cross, the Virgin Mary, and so many saints.

The stairs stretched just to the left of the entrance, with three bedrooms on the second floor. The primary room for my parents rested to the right with an attached bath. Two smaller bedrooms for me, and eventually my three brothers, huddled to the left. As we grew older, construction teams blasted the walls downstairs between the office and the guest room to create two separate bedrooms, so that each of us siblings could have our own spaces. My room stayed at the top of the stairs to the left, just across the hall from where my parents slept. For most of my life, it also served as the guest bedroom. So when anyone else arrived, I was kicked out to sleep on the downstairs couch.

To impress our guests, my father filled my room with fancy furniture: a queen bed with four tall posts stained in dark, shining wood, as well as a dresser in the same tone with a number of drawers, brass handles, and a large mirror. My parents painted the walls a sage green and eventually purchased a floral comforter. The entire room looked like its very own secret garden. The floor was carpeted, while the closet cut through the entire wall to the left. The wall to the right held three windows and a large white sill too high to sit on, but deep enough to decorate.

On it, my parents placed a holy card of Jesus and his Sacred Heart, a small white statue of his mother Mary, and a painted glass sculpture of a white, blonde guardian angel protecting a young girl and boy as they walked across a bridge over perilous waters. A furry, cream-colored stuffy named “Bear-Bear” — who had been gifted to me at birth — always hid somewhere in between the rarely made bedsheets.

When I was 12 years old or so, I considered running away from home. I sprinted to my bedroom, burst through the door without a lock, threw open my closet doors, grabbed a duffle bag and stuffed it with shirts and shoes, shorts and swimsuits. Before the bag filled to the brim, or any practical ideas of where I might run to shaped in my little head, I heard a voice speak within. It gently said:

It’s going to be okay, Annie.

Immediately, my pounding heart settled and my rage relaxed. I unpacked the swimsuits and shorts, shoes and shirts from the duffle bag, threw myself under the floral comforter of my four post bed, and wept. All I wanted was to grow up and fast.

Finally, the day came. At 18 I moved away from the only home I had ever known to attend college in LA. I packed up everything that I had planned to take with me into my pine green Hyundai Santa Fe, the one that my father bought me for my sixteenth birthday. Printed papers sat on the dashboard to remind me of the directions to Marina Del Rey on the 405 freeway that stretched along the Pacific Ocean. Slowly, I watched the property of my upbringing disappear in the rearview mirror and said goodbye to the constancy of my childhood streets in Newport Beach.

I arrived at Loyola Marymount University: the school of my dreams that sat on a bluff with a view that stretched between the Hollywood sign in the hills to the sea. My life for the next four years would be lived on this campus between the olympic-sized outdoor swimming pool for water polo practice, the cafeteria for meals, the classrooms to learn, and my second home that I was yet to know: a dorm room. It was a tiny space with one closet, two twin beds and desks, a narrow back half wall with large windows, and a shared bathroom with another dorm.

My new roommate and I — her on the swim team and me on the water polo team — unpacked our suits, goggles, sunscreen, and caps: her stuff to the right and mine to the left, with an invisible line that separated the two sides of the room nearly half the size of my childhood bedroom back on Bunya St. After our clothes hung neatly in the closet, our toiletries stacked high in the bathroom cabinets, and our comforters spread neatly across the twin extra long beds, it was time to say goodbye.

We hugged, then left to go on our prospective Pawprints Trips: a weekend away offered to incoming freshmen whose parents could pay so that some students could get to know each other before the first day of school. I strapped my backpack — stuffed with everything I might need for the next three days in the mountains — around my shoulders and hips then walked to the center of campus. A large white van pulled up with the group of other students who I was to spend the weekend with. We threw our bags in the back and our bodies in the seats then began to chat.

After a few hours of circling through switchbacks, we arrived to the trailhead on the mountainside. Then my new friends and fellow first years and I carried our sacks and climbed. I hiked between Nate and Lily. While my feet traversed below me, kicking up the dirt that found its way beneath my nails, within my hair, and onto my freckled skin, my mind wrestled with one recurring question.

Where would I sleep?

Finally, tired and hungry, we arrived at the campsite. The group of us pulled out the few tents we were all to share together, and decided on roommate arrangements. Nate, Lily, and I set up our awkward fabric-and-pole-pulled-together home, grounded it into the mountain, then unrolled our sleeping bags. I froze. Nate stretched his sack against the back wall and Lily quickly followed, laying hers right next to his. My body relaxed, as I placed my mummy sack between Lily’s and the tent door. I felt relieved that my body would rest between a woman and the wall with the exit, so I could escape just in case.

One by one, we each crawled into the small space privately to change into our pajamas, then back out again. After rinsing our faces with water, brushing our teeth, and relieving ourselves behind trees, we each crawled into the tent: Nate first, then Lily. Restless, I crouched down, slipped my body between the tent’s crescent opening, then quickly squeezed into my night sack.

The next day, we shared meals and stories around the campfire. The intimacy between our group had grown so much that we began to share our deepest anxieties about the upcoming year.

“I’m afraid to be raped,” I said, while my new friends nodded their heads in understanding.

The night returned, so we repeated the ritual of rest and my body slept more soundly as trust grew between Nate, Lily, and me. The following morning, we cleaned the campsite as if we had never arrived. Then together, we hiked back down the mountainside, boarded back into the white van, and began the drive to the university awaiting us on that bluff overlooking the sea. By the time we arrived, I called Nate, “Brother,” and Lily, “Sister,” and for the first time felt the experience of friends quickly becoming my new family. My roommate and I met once more in our dorm, where we shared tales of her time with the water and mine with the mountain. Then for the rest of the weekend, I slowly settled into my new home away from the only one I had ever known.

If you’d like to join a virtual bookclub to discuss this story, please find the dates and details, as well as register here.

Thank you for your interest in my memoir. If your email server clips the message, then you can read the full post on Substack. You can also listen to the post by clicking the audio button at the top of this page. This post mentions incest abuse. If you’re seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.

 "I Want to Write Something So Simply"
~ Mary Oliver

I want to write something
so simply
about love
or about pain
that even
as you are reading
you feel it
and as you read
you keep feeling it
and though it be my story
it will be common,
though it be singular
it will be known to you
so that by the end
you will think—
no, you will realize—
that it was all the while
yourself arranging the words,
that it was all the time
words that you yourself,
out of your heart
had been saying.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Support Resources

The End: An Epilogue

PART I HIDE

Chapter 1: Property

Chapter 2: Anatomy

Chapter 3: Progeny

Chapter 4: Sanctity

Chapter 5: Heredity

PART II HURT

Chapter 6: Anxiety

Chapter 7: Fluidity

Chapter 8: Equity

Chapter 9: Duplicity

Chapter 10: Boundary

PART III HOLD

Chapter 11: Memory

Chapter 12: Liberty

Chapter 13: Honesty

Chapter 14: Ideology

Chapter 15: Testimony

PART IV HEAL

Chapter 16: Recovery

Chapter 17: Creativity

Chapter 18: Intimacy

Chapter 19: Economy

Chapter 20: Harmony

PART V HOME

Chapter 21: Identity

Chapter 22: Solidarity

Chapter 23: Constancy

Chapter 24: Sanctuary

The Beginning: A Prologue

Bibliography

Support Resources

Hotline

National Sexual Assault Hotline

Helplines

Stop It Now!

What’s OK?

Websites

Incest AWARE

Sibling Sexual Trauma by 5WAVES

me too. Movement

PDFs

Incest AWAREness Guide

Books

Incest AWARE’s Bookshop

Incest Survivor Memoirs

Bibliography

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Black Liberation

Angelou, M. 2010. All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes: An Autobiography. Vintage.

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Gómez, Jennifer M. 2023. The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women and Girls: A Black Feminist Approach to Healing from Sexual Abuse.

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hooks, bell, 2000. All about Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow.

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King, Martin Luther, Jr. 2010. Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Beacon Press.

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Career

Bolles, Richard N. 2021. What Color Is Your Parachute? 2022: Your Guide to a Lifetime of Meaningful Work and Career Success. Ten Speed Press.

Catholicism

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Comfort Women

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Complex Trauma Non-Fiction

Alliance for Safety and Justice, Seiji Carpenter, and David Kordus. “CRIME SURVIVORS SPEAK 2022: NATIONAL SURVEY OF VICTIMS’ VIEWS ON SAFETY AND JUSTICE.” Report, 2022. https://allianceforsafetyandjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Alliance-for-Safety-and-Justice-Crime-Survivors-Speak-September-2022.pdf.

Assini-Meytin, L. C., Thorne, E. J., Sanikommu, M., Green, K. M., & Letourneau, E. J. 2022. “Impact of Child Sexual Abuse on Socioeconomic Attainment in Adulthood.” The Journal of adolescent health : official publication of the Society for Adolescent Medicine, 71(5), 594–600. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2022.05.013.

Bass, Ellen and Laura Davis. 1988. The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse. New York, Perennial Library.

Bonde, Lynn. 2023. “Foreword to Second Edition: Shattering the Silence.” Not Child’s Play: An Anthology on Brother-Sister Incest.

Bryant R. A. 2019. Post-traumatic stress disorder: a state-of-the-art review of evidence and challenges. World psychiatry : official journal of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA), 18(3), 259–269. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20656.

Center for Institutional Courage. “Center for Institutional Courage,” n.d. https://www.institutionalcourage.org/

Crook, Lynn. 2022. False Memories: The Deception that Silenced Millions. New York: Lynn Crook.

Freyd, Jennifer J. 1998. Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Harvard University Press.

Freyd, Jennifer J. “Definition of Betrayal Trauma Theory,” n.d. https://dynamic.uoregon.edu/jjf/defineBT.html.

Freyd, Jennifer J. “Institutional Betrayal Research Home Page,” n.d. https://dynamic.uoregon.edu/jjf/institutionalbetrayal/.

Fugate, J. A. 2001. “Notes Who’s Failing Whom? A Critical Look At Failure-To-Protect Laws.” New York University Law Review, 76(1). https://nyulawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/NYULawReview-76-1-Fugate.pdf

Gillen, M. M., Lefkowitz, E. S., & Shearer, C. L. 2006. “Does body image play a role in risky sexual behavior and attitudes?” Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 35, 230-242.

Gómez, J. M. 2019. “What’s the harm? Internalized prejudice and cultural betrayal trauma in ethnic minorities.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 89(2), 237–247. https://doi.org/10.1037/ort0000367

González-López, Gloria. 2015. Family Secrets: Stories of Incest and Sexual Violence in Mexico. New York: New York University Press.

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“Incest fact sheet.” New York Alliance Against Sexual Assault. https://svfreenyc.org/resource-guide/

Levine, Ethan Czuy. 2021. Rape by the Numbers: Producing and Contesting Scientific Knowledge about Sexual Violence. Ithaca, NY: Rutgers University Press.

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Complex Trauma Non-Fiction Memoirs

Allison, Dorothy. 1992. Bastard Out of Carolina. New York, N.Y., U.S.A., Plume.

Allison, Dorothy. 1996. Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. New York: Penguin Books.

Angelou, Maya. 2009. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York, NY: Random House.

Cho, Grace M.. 2021. Tastes Like War: A Memoir. New York, NY, The Feminist Press at the City University of New York.

Foo, Stephanie. 2023. What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing From Complex Trauma. New York, Ballantine Books

Harjo, Joy. 2012. Crazy Brave: A Memoir. New York, W.W. Norton & Company.

Kouchner, Camille. 2022. The Familia Grande: A Memoir. New York, Other Press.

Nin, A. 1969. The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931–1934. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Steinem, Gloria. 2016. My Life On the Road. Random House, LLC.

Strayed, Cheryl. 2012. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Tarantini, Diane. EVERYONE WAS SILENT: A memoir. Heard Communications, LLC.

V (formally Ensler, Eve). 2013. In the Body of the World. New York, NY, Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company.

V (formally Ensler, Eve). 2019. The Apology. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Westover, Tara. 2018. Educated: A Memoir. New York, Random House.

Yuknavitch, Lidia. 2011. The Chronology of Water: A Memoir. Portland, OR, Hawthorne Books.

Yuknavitch, Lidia. “Lidia Yuknavitch Tells Us.” Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugar (blog), February 4, 2025.

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Design

Romagnoli, A., A. Saxena, G. Vagnarelli, and Design Thinking for Social Change EU project. 2023. “Design Thinking for Social Change.” https://european-echr.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Btn2_Design-for-change-PR2.pdf.

Disability Rights

Wong, Alice. 2020. Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century. New York, NY: Crown Books for Young Readers.

El Salvador

Brackley, Dean. 2004. The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times: New Perspectives on the Transformative Wisdom of Ignatius of Loyola. Herder & Herder.

Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. “St. Óscar Romero.” Encyclopedia Britannica, October 15, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Oscar-Arnulfo-Romero.

Doll, Don, SJ. “The Stations of the Cross.” Creighton. Accessed October 22, 2024. https://onlineministries.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/UCAstations2.html.

Garsd, Jasmine. “How El Salvador Fell Into a Web of Gang Violence.” NPR, October 5, 2015. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/10/05/445382231/how-el-salvador-fell-into-a-web-of-gang-violence.

Heidenry, Rachel. “Archbishop Orders Destruction of Salvadoran Mural.” Pulitzer Center, January 6, 2012. Accessed October 23, 2024. https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/archbishop-orders-destruction-salvadoran-mural.

Llort, F. (n.d.). The Artist. Fernando LLort. Retrieved December 9, 2024, from https://www.fernando-llort.com/biography

Markey, Eileen. 2016. A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura. Bold Type Books.

“Murder of Jesuit Priests and Civilians in El SalvadorThe Jesuits Massacre Case,” n.d. https://cja.org/what-we-do/litigation/the-jesuits-massacre-case/.

Opus Dei. “History of Opus Dei in El Salvador,” October 2, 2015. Accessed October 2, 2024. https://opusdei.org/es-sv/article/historia-del-opus-dei-en-el-salvador/.

Romero, Oscar. 2021. The Violence of Love. Orbis Books.

Teaching Central America. “History of El Salvador — Teaching Central America,” n.d. https://www.teachingcentralamerica.org/history-of-el-salvador.

Feminism

Brock, Rita Nakashima, and Rebecca Ann Parker. 2002. Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us. Boston: Beacon Press.

Dowling, Colette. 1981. The Cinderella Complex: Women’s Hidden Fear of Independence. New York, Pocket Books.

Henking, Susan. “‘A Feminine Complaint Against Theologians.’” Religion Dispatches, January 19, 2022. https://religiondispatches.org/a-feminine-complaint-against-theologians/.

Plaskow, Judith. “The Coming of Lilith.” In Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality: A Sourcebook. Ed. Ellen M. Umansky and Dianne Ashton. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.

Steinem, Gloria. 2015. My Life on the Road. Random House.

Steinem, Gloria. 1992. Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-esteem. Boston, Little, Brown and Co.

Steinem, Gloria. 2010. Scholars, Witches, and Other Freedom Fighters. BetterListen!

Trible, Phyllis. 1992. Woman Spirit Rising : A Feminist Reader in Religion. Edited by Carol P. Christ, and Judith Plaskow. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco. https://summerstudy.yale.edu/sites/default/files/02trible_genesis.pdf.

Films

Knight, Mary, dir. Am I Crazy? My Journey to Determine if My Memories Are True. Mary Knight Productions, 2022. 1 hr., 43 min. www.maryknightproductions.com.

Mustard, Amanda, and Rachel Beth Anderson, dirs. Great Photo, Lovely Life. HBO Documentary Films, 2023. 1 hr., 52 min. www.max.com.

National Film Board of Canada. “Hollow Water,” n.d. https://www.nfb.ca/film/hollow_water/.

Grief

Weller, Francis, 1956- and Michael Lerner. 2015. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. Berkeley, California, North Atlantic Books.

The Holocaust

Chicago, J., & Woodman, D. (1990). “Double Jeopardy. Judy Chicago.” Retrieved December 9, 2024, from https://judychicago.com/gallery/holocaust-project/hp-artwork/

Frankl, Viktor E. 2013. Man’s Search for Meaning: The classic tribute to hope from the Holocaust. Random House.

Nelson, Halle. “Reckoning With Sexual Violence, Sexual Terrorism, and Sexual Trauma in the Holocaust.” National Sexual Violence Resource Center, n.d. https://www.nsvrc.org/blogs/reckoning-sexual-violence-sexual-terrorism-and-sexual-trauma-holocaust.

Incest/Child Sexual Abuse Research & Resources

“Accueil Du Site De La CIIVISE,” September 30, 2024. https://www.ciivise.fr/

Ahrens C. E. 2006. “Being silenced: the impact of negative social reactions on the disclosure of rape.” American journal of community psychology, 38(3-4), 263–274. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-006-9069-9.

Andrew Ortiz and CHILD USA, “CHILD USA DELAYED DISCLOSURE FACTSHEET: 2024,” CHILD USA, 2024, accessed October 23, 2024, https://childusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Delayed-Disclosure-2024.pdf.

Armstrong, Louise. “Who Stole Incest?” On the Issues Magazine, October 8, 1994. Accessed October 24, 2024. https://ontheissuesmagazine.com/violence/who-stole-incest/.

Armstrong, Louise. Rocking the Cradle of Sexual Politics: What Happened When Women Said Incest. Addison-Wesley, 1994.

Bach, M. H., Beck Hansen, N., Ahrens, C., Nielsen, C. R., Walshe, C., & Hansen, M. 2021. “Underserved survivors of sexual assault: a systematic scoping review.” European journal of psychotraumatology, 12(1), 1895516. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2021.1895516

Bertele, N., & Talmon, A. 2023. “Sibling Sexual Abuse: A Review of Empirical Studies in the Field. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse,” 24(2), 420-428. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380211030244

Burke, Tarana. “History & Inception: Where we started. The evolution of our movement.” Me Too. Movement. Accessed October 24, 2024. https://metoomvmt.org/get-to-know-us/history-inception/.

Çimşir E, Akdoğan R. 2021. “Childhood Emotional Incest Scale (CEIS): Development, validation, cross-validation, and reliability.” J Couns Psychol. 68(1):98-111. doi: 10.1037/cou0000439. Epub 2020 Apr 20. PMID: 32309960.

Enevolsden, Christina. “Home | Overcoming Sexual Abuse.” Overcoming Sexual Abuse. Accessed October 24, 2024. https://overcomingsexualabuse.com/

Epstein, Jane. 2024. I FEEL REAL GUILTY: A MEMOIR OF SIBLING SEXUAL ABUSE. Life to Paper Publishing Inc.

Fang, Xiangming et al. 2012. “The Economic Burden of Child Maltreatment in the United States And Implications for Prevention” 36, no. 2.

Fang, X., Ren, J., Kang, J. et al. A systematic review of the global and regional estimates of the prevalence of sexual violence against children. Nat Hum Behav (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02436-1

Finkelhor, David, and Anne Shattuck. “Characteristics of Crimes against Juveniles.” Juvenile Justice Bulletin. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, May 2012. https://www.unh.edu/ccrc/sites/default/files/media/2022-03/characteristics-of-crimes-against-juveniles_0.pdf

Freyd, Jennifer J. PhD. “Project on Institutional Courage — Jennifer Joy Freyd, PhD.,” n.d. https://www.jjfreyd.com/project-on-institutional-courage.

Gewirtz-Meydan A, Volman-Pampanel D, Opuda E, Tarshish N. “Dating Apps: A New Emerging Platform for Sexual Harassment? A Scoping Review.” Trauma Violence Abuse. 2024 Jan;25(1):752-763. doi: 10.1177/15248380231162969. Epub 2023 Apr 10. PMID: 37036157.

Gordon, Sherri. “Is Someone Gaslighting You? Look Out for These Red Flags.” Verywell Mind, September 10, 2024. https://www.verywellmind.com/is-someone-gaslighting-you-4147470.

Grant, Zida. “A Life With Dissociative Amnesia.” Substack. Accessed October 23, 2024.

A Life With Dissociative Amnesia

Writing about dissociative amnesia and other aftereffects of childhood trauma

By Zida Grant

Harsey, Sarah, and Jennifer J. Freyd. “Deny, Attack, Blame: The Prosecution of Women Reporting Rape - Ms. Magazine.” Ms. Magazine, November 30, 2022. Accessed October 23, 2024. https://msmagazine.com/2022/11/28/darvo-deny-attack-blame-prosecution-women-report-rape/.

Hébert, M., Tourigny, M., Cyr, M., McDuff, P., & Joly, J. 2009. “Prevalence of childhood sexual abuse and timing of disclosure in a representative sample of adults from Quebec.” The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 54(9), 631-636.

Incest AWARE. “What Causes Incest? | Incest AWARE,” n.d. https://www.incestaware.org/what-causes-incest.

“Intra-familial child sexual abuse” (2024, August 8). CSA Centre. https://www.csacentre.org.uk/research-resources/key- messages/intra-familial-csa/.

Jaffee, S. R., Takizawa, R., & Arseneault, L. 2017. “Buffering effects of safe, supportive, and nurturing relationships among women with childhood histories of maltreatment.” Psychological medicine, 47(15), 2628–2639. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291717001027

Kamenetz, Anya. “Child Sexual Abuse Reports Are on the Rise Amid Lockdown Orders.” NPR, April 28, 2020. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/28/847251985/child-sexual-abuse-reports-are-on-the-rise-amid-lockdown-orders.

Lawrence, A. L., & Willis, G. M. 2021. “Understanding and Challenging Stigma Associated With Sexual Interest in Children: A Systematic Review.” International journal of sexual health: official journal of the World Association for Sexual Health, 33(2), 144–162. https://doi.org/10.1080/19317611.2020.1865498.

Letourneau, E. J., Brown, D. S., Fang, X., Hassan, A., & Mercy, J. A. 2018. “The Economic Burden of Child Sexual Abuse in the United States.” Child abuse & neglect, 79, 413–422. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2018.02.020

Madonna PG, Van Scoyk S, Jones DP. “Family Interactions Within Incest and Nonincest Families.” Am J Psychiatry. 1991 Jan;148(1):46-9. doi: 10.1176/ajp.148.1.46. PMID: 1984705.

The Mama Bear Effect. “Understanding Abusers” Accessed October 23, 2024. https://www.themamabeareffect.org/understand/understanding-abusers.

Michałowska, S., Chęć, M. & Podwalski, P. 2025. “The mediating role of maladaptive perfectionism in the relationship between childhood trauma and depression.” Sci Rep 15, 18236. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-03783-1

Morgan, R. E., PhD, & Thompson, A. 2021. “Criminal Victimization, 2020 | Bureau of Justice Statistics.” Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/criminal-victimization-2020

Moster, Aviva & Wnuk, Dorota & Jeglic, Elizabeth. 2008. “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Interventions With Sex Offenders.” Journal of Correctional Health Care. 14. 109-121. 10.1177/1078345807313874.

Olafson E, Corwin, DL, & Summit, RC. “Modern History of Child Sexual Abuse Awareness: Cycles of Discovery and Suppression.” Child Abuse Negl. 1993 Jan-Feb;17(1):7-24. doi: 10.1016/0145-2134(93)90004-o. PMID: 8435789.

Ortiz, A. & CHILD USA. 2024. “CHILD USA DELAYED DISCLOSURE FACTSHEET: 2024. In CHILD USA DELAYED DISCLOSURE FACTSHEET: 2024.” https://childusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Delayed-Disclosure-2024.pdf

Pickett, M., Satifka, E., Shah, R. S., Juvenile Law Center, & Vic Wiener. 2020. “LABELED FOR LIFE.” Juvenile Law Center. https://jlc.org/sites/default/files/attachments/2020-08/JLC_SORNA-Report_8-15_0.pdf

Simmons, Aishah Shahidah, ed. 2019. Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse. Foreword by Darnell L. Moore. Chico, CA: AK Press.

Schmucker, Martin & Lösel, Friedrich. 2017. “Sexual Offender Treatment For Reducing Recidivism Among Convicted Sex Offenders: A Systematic Review And Meta-Analysis.” Campbell Systematic Reviews. 13. 10.4073/csr.2017.8.

Townsend, C., Rheingold, A., Haviland, M.L. 2016. “Estimating A Child Sexual Abuse Prevalence Rate For Practitioners: An Updated Review Of Child Sexual Abuse Prevalence Studies.” Charleston SC: Darkness to Light. Retrieved from www.D2L.org/1in10

Vanderbilt, H. 1992. “Incest: A Chilling Report.” Angelfire. https://www.angelfire.com/or3/tss3/incest.html

Vickerman, K. A., & Margolin, G. 2009. “Rape Treatment Outcome Research: Empirical Findings And State Of The Literature.” Clinical psychology review, 29(5), 431–448. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2009.04.004

Villines, Zawn. “What Is Emotional Incest?,” August 24, 2022. Accessed October 23, 2024. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/covert-incest#examples.

Wilson, Melba.1994. Crossing the Boundary: Black Women Survive Incest. Seattle, WA, Seal Press.

Latin American Liberation Theology

Gutierrez , Gustavo. 1988. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (15th Anniversary Edition with New Introduction by Author). 15th ed. Maryknoll: Orbis Books.

Palumbo, Gene. “El Salvador, Back in the Day: A New Way of Being Church and Doing Theology.” Revista: Harvard Review of Latin America, March 19, 2021. https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/el-salvador-back-in-the-day/.

Literature

Kidd, Sue Monk. 2013. The Secret Life of Bees. Penguin Books.

Morrison, Toni. 1994. The Bluest Eye. New York, Plume.

Mental Health

American Psychiatric Association. 2013. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596

Greitens, Eric. 2015. Resilience: Hard-won Wisdom for Living a Better Life. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Jamison, Kay Redfield. 2014. An Unquiet Mind. Picador Classic. London, England: Picador.

Jamison, Kay R. 2023. Fires in the Dark: Healing the Unquiet Mind. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.

Myth

Chaliakopoulos, A. (2021, May 29). “Apollo and Daphne: A detailed breakdown of the famous Greek myth.” The Collector. Retrieved December 9, 2024, from https://www.thecollector.com/apollo-and-daphne/

Native American Liberation

Betasamosake Simpson, Leanne. 2017. As We Have Always Done. Indigenous Americas. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Kimmerer, R. W. 2020. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Penguin UK.

Nuclear Family

Manoukian, Marina. “On The Etymologies and Linguistic Evolutions of ‘Family.’” Literary Hub, June 21, 2022. Accessed October 23, 2024. https://lithub.com/on-the-etymologies-and-linguistic-evolutions-of-family/.

Philosophy

Centre, Ethics. “Ethics Explainer: Existentialism.” THE ETHICS CENTRE, October 26, 2023. https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-existentialism/#:~:text=Existentialism%20is%20the%20philosophical%20belief,governments%2C%20teachers%20or%20other%20authorities.

Ideo U. “What is Design Thinking & Why Is It Beneficial?” Accessed October 23, 2024. https://www.ideou.com/blogs/inspiration/what-is-design-thinking?srsltid=AfmBOoouypU2etYku6MHzWHndMhG3NXR1bs2B2y6zQ2Aj5-XgRyef2Nf.

Poetry

“Machado, ‘Caminante, No Hay Camino/ Traveler, There Is No Road’ | Favorite Poem Project,” n.d. https://www.favoritepoem.org/poems/caminante-no-hay-camino/

Oliver, M. 2009. “I Want to Write Something So Simply.” Evidence: Poems. Beacon Press.

Sexual Assault Statistics

“Me too INFO SHEET: The Red Zone: Sexual Violence on College Campuses.” Me too. Movement. Accessed October 22, 2024.

https://metoomvmt.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/1.5.11_The-Red-Zone-Sexual-Violence-on-College-Campuses_INFOSHEET_V2.pdf.

Song

Guillermo Cuellar. “Vamos Todos Al Banquete,” July 21, 2014.

Transformative Justice

Kaba, Mariame and Naomi, Murakawa. 2021. We Do This ‘til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. Chicago, IL, Haymarket Books

Writing

Gilbert, Elizabeth. 2015. Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. New York, Penguin Audio.

Goldberg, Natalie. 2016. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Boston, Mass. London, Shambhala.

Thank you for your interest in the post below. If your email server clips the message, then you can read the full post on Substack. You can also listen to the post by clicking the audio button at the top of this page. This post mentions incest abuse. If you’re seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.

Dear friends,

Thank you for being part of my journey through my writing. I am thrilled to announce that my memoir, The Home I know: A Liberation Story, has found its home right here on Substack. I’ve renamed this space, From a Strong Place, and redesigned it to house my full writing portfolio alongside the book.

Starting Monday, I will publish one chapter of the manuscript every week through mid-July. The memoir is organized into five parts. At the conclusion of each, I’ll be hosting a virtual book club to discuss the story with you. You can register for our book club meetings below.

This project has been years in the making, and so many of you have played such an intimate role in its creation. I am deeply grateful for your support.

Register Now

Synopsis

Annie’s childhood by the sea seemed to be an imaginative dream—until she moved away from home at eighteen and her body began to tell a very different story. What followed was a lifelong reclamation of history, identity, and name. Now writing as Josephine A. Lauren (she/they), the author offers a powerful, forty-year retrospective on their journey from a traumatic past to a liberated future. This raw and resilient story uncovers the complex reality of safety and sexuality in society, and especially at home.

Schedule

January 19: Table of Contents, Support Resources, & Bibliography

PART I

January 26: Acknowledgements, Epilogue, & Chapter 1

February 2: Chapter 2

February 9: Chapter 3

February 16: Chapter 4

February 23: Chapter 5

February 27: Virtual Book Club - 7PM ET

PART II

March 2: Chapter 6

March 9: Chapter 7

March 16: Chapter 8

March 23: Chapter 9

March 30: Chapter 10

April 3: Virtual Book Club - 7PM ET

PART III

April 6: Chapter 11

April 13: Chapter 12

April 20: Chapter 13

April 27: Chapter 14

May 4: Chapter 15

May 8: Virtual Book Club - 7PM ET

PART IV

May 11: Chapter 16

May 18: Chapter 17

May 25: Chapter 18

June 1: Chapter 19

June 8: Chapter 20

June 12: Virtual Book Club - 7PM ET

PART V

June 15: Chapter 21

June 22: Chapter 22

June 29: Chapter 23

July 6: Chapter 24 & Prologue

July 10: Virtual Book Club - 7PM ET

I really look forward to sharing my life’s creative work thus far with you all! Please, feel free to share this post with others who may be interested in reading the book. It will remain free and accessible to anyone with internet access. Thank you.

Watch or listen to the video. The audio button at the top of this page will read the content below as well. This post mentions incest abuse. If you’re seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.

Thank you to and for inviting the Incest AWARE Alliance to submit survivor stories for your mini-documentary addressing child sexual abuse for The New York Times!

I’m so proud to see incest and child sexual sexual abuse represented on the first page of the Times this morning. The video features the following Incest AWARE Alliance members:

Brinn Langdale

Diane Tarantini

Donna Jenson of Time to Tell

Josephine A. Lauren

Kelly Wallace

Nubia DuVall Wilson

Thank you to all of the survivors who shared their stories, as well as The New York Times for featuring this article and video on the front page today. Read, watch, or listen at the links below.

Read the OpEd

Watch/Listen to the Video

This post mentions incest abuse. If you’re seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma by 5WAVES.

About the Episode

Josephine Lauren, founder of Josephine A. Lauren, LLC and creator of Incest AWARE, a content and consultation business that helps individuals and organizations improve methods of incest prevention, intervention, recovery, and justice.

Through thoughtful research, creative programming, and community organizing, Josephine collaborates with activists, researchers, and organizations to develop resources that keep children safe, support survivors, and drive systemic change.

Now, Josephine’s own journey of surviving serial sexual violence and finding few paths to recovery demonstrates incredible courage and a commitment to transforming personal pain into collective action.

And while building an awareness movement from the ground up, she is proving that even the hardest conversations can create real change when communities choose connection, healing, and shared leadership.

Listen Now

About The Unforget Yourself Podcast

“Welcome to The Unforget Yourself Show where we use the power of woo and the proof of science to help you identify your blind spots, and get over your own bullshit so that you can do the fucking thing you ACTUALLY want to do!

We’re Mark and Katie, the founders of Unforget Yourself and the creators of the Unforget Yourself System and on this podcast, we’re here to share REAL conversations about what goes on inside the heart and minds of those brave and crazy enough to start their own business.

From the accidental entrepreneur to the laser-focused CEO, we find out how they got to where they are today, not by hearing the go-to story of their success, but talking about how we all have our own BS to deal with and it’s through facing ourselves that we find a way to do the fucking thing.

Along the way, we hope to show you that YOU are the most important asset in your business (and your life - duh!).

Being a business owner is tough! With vulnerability and humor, we get to the real story behind their success and show you that you’re not alone.”

There is something ABOUT

This moment.

This time.

This SPACE.

A separation

From all that WAS.

A blank page,

ONCE inked

Has been erased.

The impressions of the

WORDS remain,

But the stain

Has gone AWAY.

I feel anxious to fill the page.

Define it once AGAIN.

Write with my dry pen,

I feel FRICTION.

But when I

Sit still ENOUGH,

The paleness of the page

CLAIMS:

“I did THAT.”

Memory recalls

The LOVES who

Bought me erasers,

Who pulled out erasers,

Who stayed with me

And pressed the rubber

Of our erasers

Against the darkness

Until it no longer

Stuck to me.

“WE did that.”

Liberation as

COMMUNITY.

Newness can be

penned NOW.

So what will BE?

The signatures of

My FRIENDS?

A thank you,

A million thank you’s,

A thanks to all of you?

For pulling me OUT.

And keeping me out.

For rubbing my tired

Body back to life

And gifting me

This spaciousness.

This EMPTINESS.

I’m ready.

To pen a new STORY.

To share what I know now,

From all I learned back THEN.

The rest a MYSTERY.

A reunion of past and future.

The present TURNS me.