John

Just as I was entering the first grade my family moved from a very small town in the northwest corner of Iowa, to a modestly small town in western Illinois. I was aware that my mother had been so depressed in the small Iowa town that she lay on the couch crying for days and even went to the hospital for awhile to get better. In my five year old mind I knew that she was sad and sick and I was scared. I remember feeding her as she lay on her side in our family room on the horribly patterned burnt orange couch so popular in the late 70's and I thought she might die.

The town we relocated to was called Galesburg. I remember two things quite distinctly from those first few weeks in our new home. First, the school district wanted to place me in a rural grade school instead of send me to the school a few blocks away from the duplex we moved into because the class size was supposedly already over capacity. My parents were irate and they had to fight with the school district and school board to send me to Rose Hoben Welch Grade School. Eventually, they won. The second thing I remember is my very first day in first grade. I was already a tall, overweight, and awkward looking little girl with bright red hair that seemed to glow in the summer sun, matched in intensity only by the connecting bright freckles all over my face. My new teacher had me stand at the front of the class to introduce myself. It was a disaster. Kids snickered and whispered to each other and for some reason I chose to share that my kindergarten class used to have a bathtub in the corner surrounded by books that kids could choose to read during play time. It is true that there was a bathtub in my kindergarten class. It is also true that this may have been the most stupid thing to share with my new cohort as they could not stop laughing and I can't really blame them. I nearly cried.

Across from our duplex was a family that included a young boy named John who happened to be in my same grade at my new school. My mother and his mother became fast friends and our families spent a lot of time together, our parents often trading childcare duties and entertaining each other on the weekends. I do not remember exactly the first time that it happened. I know it was sometime in those first few weeks as everything was so new and exciting. John had a play area in their partially finished basement with a toy chest and what seemed like hundreds of miniature cars, action figures, and toys and games. Bean bags were all the rage at the time and there were a few of those down there too. I remember toys inside of me, flashlights shone at my private parts as all the lights were turned off, and John trying to put his penis in my mouth, my hands, my vagina, and anywhere else he could think to try. I don't think I ever said no or was particularly forceful in an attempt to make him stop. This would come to haunt me in my post-Oprah therapy as I worked to piece things together and assign blame and responsibility for these episodes. I do know that I was scared...scared we would get caught, scared that I didn't understand what was happening, scared that it often hurt, scared that it sometimes felt good. I also quickly became adept at blocking it all out and simply floating away until it was over. My therapy also later taught me that this is called dissociation, something that I got so good at over the years that I couldn't stop even when I wanted to.

These sexual episodes with John continued with near daily frequency while we lived across the street from his family for the next three years or so. Our families went on vacations and day trips together. There were times that John had sex with me in a shared hotel room on a trip, and put his penis in my mouth in the back of our station wagon while our mothers and my older brother were in the car. The near daily underwater assaults and touching at the country club swimming pool we went to faithfully in the summer for years would leave me terrified to be in the water for some time afterward. When we did move it was only about a half of a mile away from the duplex but it was enough space to make access a little more difficult for John. There were still times he would initiate sexual contact in the tires on the playground, or whenever our families would visit each other, but it was dramatically less by the end of 4th grade.

I didn't tell a single soul about any of it. My mom was finally happy and my dad seemed to always be at work. My older brother was old enough that he was rarely around and we weren't very close. I was completely ashamed and felt responsible and dirty and didn't feel as though it made any sense to ever acknowledge it to anyone. Instead, I chose to eat and avoid my feelings. I don't actually know how much I weighed at that time but the pictures show that I was likely around 175 lbs by 5th grade. My mother took me to weight watchers, had me eat Ayds (a terribly named dietary aid which went off the market as AIDS became a well known disease), dragged me to aerobics classes with her (all the rage at the time), and tried to motivate me to eat less by telling me I was fat. That paradoxical intervention is never really successful when one is attempting to stuff their feelings and avoid any kind of sexual interaction with anyone by becoming as large as possible. These are the seeds of my lifelong battle with obesity.

What next?

Kate stayed in the hospital for the next 3 weeks and was eventually diagnosed with a psychotic disorder. I saw her parents frequently when they came into town to visit her and spoke with her on occasion when she would call to yell at me for ruining her life. I returned her cats to her ex-boyfriend and attempted to regain some normalcy in my life. My apartment still smelled of the perfume that Kate anointed me with when she thought I was dying no matter what kind of cleaners, deoodorizers, and scented candles I used to cover it up. And, regardless of how much chocolate I ate, bad television I watched, or hours that I spent overtime at work, I couldn't make it go away...I couldn't forget that I finally spoke out loud about my sexual abuse, that I saw somebody lose hold of themselves possibly forever, and that my depression was becoming so intense it was affecting my ability to function. I decided to ask another work colleague if she could recommend a counselor as her family was good friends with a local psychotherapist and I thought she wouldn't judge me too harshly for seeking that kind of help. I told her that the stress of my health issues over the past year and the episode with Kate were catching up with me. The next day she gave me a referral to a private practice just a few miles from work. It took me a year to realize that this practice specialized in trauma recovery and sexual abuse.


I was skeptical, though not resistant, to the whole therapy thing. It is a strange paradigm to enter into and I wasn't exactly sure how it was supposed to work. I spent the next several months discussing the episode with Kate and beginning to string together a narrative about being sexually molested by a neighbor, the son of my mom's best friend, who also happened to be my same age. I wasn't calling it sexual abuse at the time, but my therapist was helping me to get there. The more we talked, the more I shared, the more I realized that I had been abused and living a life half-awake...subverting my sexuality, dissociated for most of the time, emotionally numbing with food, and having extreme difficulty managing intimacy with family and friends. I began to understand that I wasn't just some sexually perverse person filled with secrecy and shame over being sexualized so early and often in my life. I realized that I was never a willing participant in any of it and there was an explanation for so many of my experiences, my lapses in memory, my tendency to be revictimized, and relationship to myself and others, that all related to these events. I was a sexual abuse survivor. Holy shit, I am a sexual abuse survivor. I began being flooded with memories of the abuse. I became extremely emotional and moody as I embraced the reality of my history. One day it might feel liberating to have an explanation for so many things, the next horribly overwhelming and inescapable that I was nothing more than a traumatized person stumbling through life as an amalgamation of defenses. I began to feel not so different from Kate and afraid that I might be more emotionally unstable than I ever recognized.

Going a little bit insane

Have you ever witnessed someone lose their mind, or better yet, themselves? I have. And, contrary to what you might think, it's not as straightforward or as easy to remain calm through than one might imagine. My co-worker, and sometimes friend, Kate, called me one night distraught after breaking up with her long-term boyfriend and searching for somewhere close by to stay for awhile to recover and figure out her next move. Sure, I could participate in the cause and provide this grieving person with a place to seek safety and mend a broken heart...what else did I have to do? That night began a 4-day excursion into a firsthand experience of a psychotic break. Thankfully, only partially my own.

Within 24 hours, Kate had attempted to leave one of those one-hour optometrist mega-stores glasses in hand and tab unpaid because "Money is meaningless. God will take care of us now". She also tried to leave a Mexican restaurant in the same fashion, but with less allusion to God's ability to pay for our purchase. This post-break-up recovery was beginning to cost me a lot of money and making Kate act rather strange. 24 hours after that Kate had not slept a wink in 3 days, had ransacked my apartment, was prosthelitizing any chance she got, and began talking about how her father sexually abused her when she was a little girl (she later retracted these allegations). My increasing concern about Kate's state of mind, my growing sleep deprivation, and her conversation about sexual abuse triggered feelings and awakened memories that I had long attempted to suppress even as I always had access to them. For the first time in my life I said out loud that the first time someone had sex with me I was six years old. Great timing, I know, but one cannot predict nor control spontaneous declarations of sexual abuse.

The next 24 hours are emblazoned in my brain like a slow-motion movie, frame by frame. Kate continued her downward spiral as I attempted to talk her into going to the hospital a mere four blocks from my house "just to make sure everything was alright". The more she realized that I was becoming scared and steering her towards help she became erradic and was threatening to drive herself in her car out of state "on the wings of God". I had to do something bold to protect her and myself. Don't ask me how I made this decision, out of all other options, but I ended up faking my own death. I get points for creativity at least, right? Perhaps I was merely acting out how I felt. I told her I felt like I was having a heart attack, made believable by her awareness of my previous cardiac condition, and knew that I was dying. I collapsed on my floor as Kate began chanting and strangely made the choice to empty the entire contents of my Issey Miyake cologne all over my body to "bless" me. That is literally the last time I spent that much money on cologne. She was so far gone at that point that she let me walk downstairs with her, in my dead state, and drive her car to the ER entrance of the hospital. She ran screaming into the hospital that I was dying while I was attempting to whisper to the doctors out of one side of my mouth that my friend was going crazy. Now the frames of the movie become jagged and out of time...Kate begins screaming and is tied down in restraints on a gurney...someone is asking me about her insurance, her closest relatives, and the events of the past 4 days...Kate begins screaming obscenities at me as I begin to uncontrollably cry for what would turn out to be the next 2 days...I'm waking Kate's parents up at 3am, people I've never met, to tell them that I've taken their daughter to an ER nearly 50 miles away from them because she is losing her mind...I'm driving back to my apartment, barely able to see the road, after I realize that her 2 cats have been in her car the entire time as Kate had planned to take them on her road trip...I collapse in Kate's car, unable to move, and watch the sunrise with two screaming cats in carriers unsure of what to do next...I hear a song on the radio which somehow perfectly captures my confusion, fear, and the unspeakable sadness of watching Kate lose herself and speaking my own crazy history in an unscripted moment of exhaustion and emotion, a song that will flood me with unbearable emotions for years to come...I'm in my apartment cleaning up my expensive perfume so that the cats don't eat it up off the floor...I am naked on my red IKEA couch trembling...I am back at the hospital crying to a psychiatric nurse who tells me that Kate has been stripping her clothes off all night and has yelled at her terrified parents who drove in the middle of the night to find their daughter a shadow of herself...I am hugging this nurse who is gracious enough to whisper to me "you did the right thing, sweetie, this isn't your fault." Thank you, dear, unnamed psychiatric nurse, for saying the words that I clung to for dear life over the next several weeks. It was not my fault. I did the right thing.

I'm a bit murky here

This should bring me up to approximately the summer of 1998. I wish I could remember that spring and summer with the clarity that I recall so much of my early Oprah experiences but I was in a highly dissociative state as I embraced my weight loss failure and my life became, once again, lonely and hopeless. My fantastic roommate who nursed me through my physical and emotional breakdown moved out and away to Los Angeles, a plan we once intended to complete together before I spent any and all of my savings on medical bills. I moved into my own apartment in a north shore suburb and attempted to settle back into my half-abusive, most certainly boring job and feel grateful that I had come through a pretty serious health scare mostly unscathed. I had managed to lose my dear friend from college over the past year as my grandiosity about my supposed transformation into my athletic and skinny self and then torturous decline into depression and chronic pain pushed her away and into her own successful weight loss and life transforming journey...without me. I know now that I deserved that and likely more. I felt abandoned and punished for even attempting to flip the script on my fat self. I had a new mission to find some new friends to populate to desolate landscape of my life and was on overdrive with binge eating. I found solace in a motley crew of work peers who were just as eager, for their own reasons, to be distracted from their lives and didn't really mind so much sharing a high calorie meal out from time to time.

Where my memory does come back into sharp focus is the spring of 1999. See, I really have glossed over a fairly decent chunk of a year there. I'm not certain I'd really like any of it back but it remains disconcerting to have no access to rather large chunks of one life. But the spring of 1999 is crystal clear. The spring of 1999 is when Kate went crazy in my one-bedroom apartment by the lake and effectively cracked open a small tear in my universe that would soon become a gaping hole.