Yeah, A Child Called It brought it all back for me, too... I think I've managed to mostly repress most of that entire book. Funny thing, I used to volunteer at our school library, and when I went to return my copy, it went missing from the box. Of all the books of the several hundred I ever borrowed, it had to be that one which would wreck my library record.

Similarly, when we read Speak... I almost had a breakdown in class. I couldn't explain to all these children who had never lived through what I had lived through and the things I knew... they just didn't understand why people don't talk about it. Why it's so hard for a survivor of sexual abuse or rape to talk about it, to admit that this thing happened to them and to finally realize that it's not your fault. That was the closest I ever came to someone caring about what had happened to me, because my English teacher was a smart cookie and she put two and two together.

For the record, I love Speak. It helped me deal with a lot of things and helped me learn to talk again. A year or two after that, I was raped in college and that spelled the end of my time at that college for a while. Campus security was useless, the police couldn't or wouldn't do anything with my report, and the on-campus support group asked me to leave after my first meeting because I was male-bodied and my presence was upsetting to some of the other people in the group. Another, off campus group wouldn't even let me in and turned me away at the door. All of that taught me to shut up again and go back to hiding... which I was very good at, the sole benefit of growing up with depression, abuse, and living in a homophobic culture. I was very good at keeping my head down, making good grades, and trying my very best to keep out of any sort of trouble.

It's been a couple of decades since... certain things have happened, and it's been at least a decade since I was raped the first time. Thankfully, I haven't seen my rapists in years, and if they managed to fall off the planet or get stranded on some island somewhere, that's just fine with me. I still turn to Speak sometimes, because it reminds me that I can still grow and that broken parts of me maybe aren't so broken after all.

I've been through a lot. I joke about it, sometimes, that someday I'll write a memoir and it'll be a bestseller... but mostly, mostly I work on the little things and helping those I can, and I hope I do make it to the point where I can write my memoirs. When I was a kid, I never seriously thought I'd make it to 30. I tried a few times, but I never managed to actually die, so I kept hoping for some sort of useful accident that would conveniently erase me, but that didn't happen either. I'm at this point now where I still have a lot of fixing-up to do.

I'm good at sticking around and helping, or at least I try to be.