Me, Too

Me, too.

By now, you’ve probably seen this post.

And if you haven’t, you may live under a rock.

Normally, I don’t do copy and paste statuses.

But this is important.

We have many huge issues plaguing our society.

I won’t claim this to be the biggest, but it certainly isn’t small.

And like some of the other huge issues, it’s simply displaying a symptom of a much larger, underlying problem.

Me, too.

I don’t know a single woman this doesn’t affect.

And I can be damned certain that it affects a far larger percentage of males than any of us want to believe.

Growing up in this country as a woman is tough.

Some of my youngest memories involve being deprecated because I was too fat, therefore, leaving me undesirable.

The direct result of a father figure calling me a “fat ass” as a three, four, and five year old was a deeply rooted eating disorder spanning nearly 17 years.

I also distinctly remember my mother starving herself, working out incessantly, and taking sometimes hours to primp to look “presentable” for this same man.

But that’s what we’re here for, isn’t it ladies?

To stand still, look pretty, and serve our man?

I thought the 1960’s died.

This same man drunkenly showed up naked in my bed on a number of occasions.

I have clear memories of standing in a bathroom being forced to touch a man’s penis as a three and four year old, but to this day, I’ve blocked out the face of that man.

And to this day, I wonder if it was him.

I wish I could say these were the only instances of sexual discriminations I’ve faced.

But that would be far from true.

From the ages of five until nine, I was molested by a young girl just a little older than I was.

She threatened that if I didn’t comply with her demands, she would go home and tell her parents that I was doing worse things to her.

She was my only friend for years, and I couldn’t stand the idea of being alone.

I was also absolutely terrified of getting into trouble because that man I mentioned earlier wasn’t very forgiving.

This resulted in years of self-hatred, some very early use of pornography, a clear distaste for women, and buckets upon buckets of shame.

Flash forward.

I’m twenty years old, and all I want is to be loved.

I’ve lived a life being told I wasn’t beautiful like I needed to be, and I had finally lost some weight, which I wrongly equated to being more beautiful.

I had hoped it was enough to be loved.

So I willingly stepped into an abusive relationship that was sexually aggressive and divisive.

I didn’t know I deserved more than someone who used all my money, regularly talked down to me, used me to please him, and slept with other women.

He moved in with another woman while we were together.

I still brought him a parting gift because I wanted him to know I wasn’t mad at him.

As you might imagine, my time after that relationship wasn’t the easiest.

I couldn’t handle being alone after my entire identity for a whole year was wrapped up in pleasing someone else.

I had a short-lived period where I was involved with the local group of sexual deviants.

(If you thought 50 Shades was scandalous, you never met these people.)

I figured, I was already characterized as a whore in my mind, why not continue to allow people to do whatever they wished with me.

The level of shame I harbored continued to grow, as I allowed men to do whatever it is they wanted, so long as I wasn’t alone.

Even when those things were painful, disrespectful, and often left me lonelier than when I arrived.

A few years after I decided to walk out of that life, I still had my struggles, but I was on an upswing.

Then I went to a small house party.

And I drank too much.

And I fell asleep early in a dark room as the party swirled around me.

I woke up hours later to a man inside of me.

He quickly stopped once he realized I was awake, but those few minutes of extreme confusion seemed eternal.

He slid out of me and attempted to pull my pants up.

Then he left.

And I laid there, my world spinning.

I blamed myself for that night.

After all, I’m the one who went somewhere when I felt like I shouldn’t.

I’m the one who put myself in that position by drinking more than I should have.

And at least it happened to me, not someone else.

Because I could handle being used.

I had handled it my whole life.

And I was a whore, anyway, wasn't I?

This problem is deeply pervasive.

And we live in a land where even the majority of the church tells us as women that “modest is hottest,” and we as females are responsible for covering our ankles and midriffs, lest we “make” a man stumble because our top was a little too short or our pants were a little too tight.

As if it is my responsibility to wrangle another’s out of control desires.

Cat calls are innumerable.

There are many places I simply avoid going because the fear of being outnumbered and assaulted by more than just words is very real.

And I don’t ever want to be put in a position of physical assault again, one where I’ll again believe the lie that it’s my fault.

Guys, I didn’t want to share this.

But it is important to know that these problems are, for better or worse, so commonplace in our world that we often walk around never having shared our stories.

And never sharing means never breaking a sick cycle.

I hope that even one person is given hope by reading this.

Hope that they can finally let out that haunting ghost that’s been screaming in their head.

So that they can step into the incredibly abundant freedom that’s waiting on the other side of turning the light on and clearing the dead bones out of the closet.

This is a problem.

Turning on the light is the first step.

Being the solution is next.

And remember: your standards are what you allow to happen in your presence.