I am five years old. I have an audacious spirit, quick-witted and talkative, cheerful and tenacious. I always said things that struck the funny bone and had rooms erupting in laughter. What I remember most was how loud I could make my voice: “I feel the earth, move under my feet!” My dad loved Carole King, and I often sang for him at family celebrations where friends and relatives encouraged my serenades. I imagined the ground beneath me shaking, and marveled at the way the sound of my own voice made them smile in cheer and clap along, so much joy in the room. As I grew older my love of singing only grew. I was good at it, too, so I had plenty of encouragement. Through song, I found steady ground. It was a part of me, my identity. Whenever I felt alone or at odds with my parents, I could always be heard from behind closed doors belting out tunes to calm my little heart.

In high school and college, I found larger audiences to perform for. I was at home onstage and I loved to watch people sing along, their bodies swaying to the music, knowing that it was my performance that made them smile. There was a power that came from within, reverberating emotions through me. Singing was a part of me.

One then one night my life took a turn. Carefree and inebriated, I accepted a drink from a man I barely knew. The next thing I knew I woke up choking, dry heaving in a motel room. My eyes scanned the dirty carpet and I counted at least two used condoms. I was nineteen years old and I’d never had sex before, and my head spun as I realized what had been taken from me—something I would never get back. But it wasn’t just my innocence, it was my integrity, my wholeness, my voice. In the aftermath of what I’d later come to understand was an assault, my friends only chastised and blamed me for what had happened. They told me I had done something grossly unacceptable. They said I asked for it. Never before had I been at a loss for words, but now I couldn’t even make sense of what had happened. Had I asked for it? Because I accepted a drink? Because I wore a short skirt? Or because I’d been so bold, so sure of myself, that someone wanted to put me in my place?

After that night, I not only lost my voice, I couldn’t sing anymore. There was no unbridled joy left in me.  I was choking from within.  I was confused, scared, and overwhelmed with shame and guilt. Shame and guilt that led me to bury what had happened to me. I wouldn’t tell anyone in my family, and eventually enough time passed that I didn’t interact with anyone who’d been there that night. My family noticed the changes in me, but they were powerless to help. Gone was the air of jest and joy I used to bring into a room. Now I brought gloom and refused to sit with my family for longer than a few minutes. I was uncomfortable in my own skin. I’d lost the person I’d been.  The voice in my head now told me I was worthless. It told me I was being punished for something I had done. Something I had asked for. It told me I deserved what had happened. My voice no longer brought me happiness; instead it carried the weight of a hundred boulders that crushed my spirit and my sense of self every single day. It was all I could do to stay as I pushed through the weeks and months and years.  

Eight years after the incident, a therapist finally helped me to claim what had happened to me as rape. It was done to me. I was unconscious. I’d likely been drugged, though I’d never be able to prove it. And what was robbed from me that night was everything that defined who I’d been. Eight years later, I was unrecognizable to myself, and of all the things I missed the most, it was my sureness, my boldness, my voice.   

Now nineteen years have passed, and I still don’t sing anymore. A single incident shattered me like a bomb into solitude. A rape is not only the violation of a body, it rips all sense of self and security from its victims. I became hypervigilant, anxious. I was physically triggered into irrational fears from things I used to not even think about, never even notice. I could not run away from what had happened to me. The aftereffects were like shrapnel lodged deep into my skin, the scabs healed over with the shards of shame and guilt still inside of me. I tried to find reasons to stay alive, but many days I got by simply by imagining the ways I could make my pain stop, planning an escape from the emotional landmine inside of me from which I could not escape.

Recently, I found my voice again through writing. It took some time for us to get acquainted, took me a while to trust. My voice is different now, gentler but clear. The angst and anguish of these past almost twenty years inform me, but they no longer course through me, threatening to break surface at any moment. 

My life has evolved despite and through the pain. I learned to trust myself and my choices again. I met and married a good man, who encourages my voice in every way he can. I have built a family, forged  relationships, and I dare to dream about a future that is yet to come. I am a mother now, the birth of my children thundered my body into a new reality. I no longer hold the chains of being silent in a world where my children need me. Mothering brought out a part of me I recognized from the past, a bolder, freer me, unencumbered by my fears and reservations. I vowed not to transfer my trauma onto my daughters, but rather to build them up for a world that’s not always predictable, that can’t always go our way.  

I see something different in myself now, a life that revolves around me and my choices. I see my life—and it is beautiful, serene. I don’t know that I’ll ever belt out Carole King or Roberta Flack the way I used to. There’s no denying what’s been lost. I am in deep contrition for the losses I suffered from my separation and shame, the loss of years I could’ve spent with my father before his brain injury, time with my grandmother who raised me before she passed, time with my family that grew despite me in a distance, all gone for the shame and guilt I carried.  My life is not free from regrets, but it is free from the self-loathing that consumed me for so many years.

For now, my voice spills onto the page. My voice is carving valleys and mountains on new earth I have uncovered beneath the pain and grief. When I write I am able to scream on the page in my early drafts, later finessing what I want to convey—which are messages to myself, to other women, to say unequivocally that we will not stand for being defined by the things that have been done to us. My voice now challenges me to face the world, to work to educate others and to make a dent in the efforts to eradicate the ghastly rape culture that can only thrive in a complicit society. That culture stole chunks of my life from me. I am one of countless women who’ve had their voices stolen and buried. I will no longer be silenced, and now I look to a different kind of audience. In reactions to my writing, I rarely see smiles, but I do witness the nodding of heads when others say thank you, when readers say “me too.” I’m on a different kind of stage, and I am choosing to be here, to be seen, to express my truth out loud. In that way, writing has given me my voice back.  Now my words fill my days and the light of song still burns within me.