ME TOO – A Time for Telling, a Time for Healing

By: JANA GREENE

Hi, Readers.

I haven’t written much lately, but today I’m sharing my heart. I hope your heart receives it in full. I hope you cannot relate to my experiences at all – that you grew up safe and protected.

Many of us did not.

Back when I was speaking at recovery meetings, I would sometimes give my testimony to large groups of people. How did I come to be comfortable sharing my most devastating experiences? That’s a much longer blog post. One thing, more than any other, became anathema – the droves of women who would line up to speak with me in order to tell me one thing: ME TOO.

When I say droves, I mean a dozen or more at a time. Women abused and exploited as children and teens. Some had been trafficked. My heart broke for them all.

They came to thank me for being transparent, but also to tell me their own stories. And as I listened, you would think the abuse had happened the day before. I could sense the raw and gaping wounds that still felt fresh, a chasm full of tears of grief.

My own experiences are depressingly common. The family member in a position of power, who wielded his strength over me. The elderly man in our townhouse complex that offered to teach me piano at his house when I was in second grade. The father of a neighbor boy I would play with in kindergarten. The grooming as a young teen in church youth group. In church youth group.

Do you know what it does to a girl, to be objectified as a child? To be told to keep secrets? To see men as aggressors so early in life? To feel helpless, with no safe place to be? I have had over ten years of therapy to help me rise to speak the truth. But it still hurts, all these years later.

Friends, when I tell you this is endemic, it is everywhere.

We are the victims who survived assault at the hands of imposing men, who used their strength against little girls. But we are not going to do the one thing every deviant, abusive man asked of us: Don’t tell.

But we aren’t just walking wounded, no sir. We are TELLING. We are telling, because it’s a salve for our wounds. Because our tears do not go to waste. Because far too many children have been victims for time immemorial.

We have risen from the ashes in order to reclaim our lives, and we are no longer afraid of the flames. In spite of your hijacking our innocence, they didn’t get the last word.

We grew up to be kind, resilient, and bold. We grew up with shattered trust, our little bodies abused, our little minds corrupted. But we are made of the toughtest stuff, and we are saying ENOUGH.

The chickens have come home to roost now. They always do. And I wish I could go back in time and hold Little Me, when she was so terrified. Me, before she deduced that she was worthless.

Me too, friends.

We are witnessing a renaissance right now – what has been done in the dark is coming to light. Not just on the geo-political stage, but in homes and schools and churches all across the nation.

We have alchemized our trauma into strength. And we have no intention of being quiet.