I am not ashamed

I am an incest survivor, and I am not sorry if that makes you uncomfortable. In fact, let me help you with that.

I AM AN INCEST SURVIVOR!!!

I am not sorry to say that I am an incest survivor. I am sorry—to me and every other incest survivor in the world who ever lived and who ever will—that I did not stand up and shout it sooner, every chance I had, to wake up the world to this wretched, nauseating nightmare.

I am an incest survivor. I am a child incest survivor. No one except for the army of child incest survivors could understand the lifelong legacy of depression, exhaustion, pain, emotional chaos, addiction and predatory experiences that go along with silence.

I am an incest survivor and I am proud to say “survivor,” because silence chases so many incested people to the grave, and they never live free of the burden of someone else’s shame and failure.

We know it hurts people, yet we leave victims on their own, justifying it on the grounds of family sanctity—a refuge for abusers. There’s always gossip, as well—like the new couple in town that are “really” brother and sister—or the sickness pervertedly romanticized in “Game of Thrones.” Somehow, in the midst of all this, coerced, systematic sexual contact from an older sibling or cousin is characterized as “kids being kids.”

No. That’s kids being predators, and adults not dealing with it, to the extent that we have children committing suicide from online bullying.

Bullies, in my experience, grow up to be bullies. They don’t know how to stop until something wakes up their humanity. But what in the name of heaven is going to finally wake us up? Acid attacks? A child pornography “industry?” How in the world is that even a thing? What is this strain of illness coursing through the human species and why aren’t we insisting unrelentingly that it be stopped, forever?

What further evidence do we need to know to be motivated to step up and stop this now? What exactly do we need to address the violence that begins within and around us as children?

I know that I am done. I am done being shamed, and being ashamed. The notion that I or someone like me ever was shamed is a deep corruption in collective human perception. Children are suffering—and becoming addictive, depressive, suicidal adults—right now, because we are not willing to wake up and acknowledge what children do to children. What relatives do to children. What we allow to happen to children, and what we then blame on them for the rest of their lives.

Shame on all of us for letting this continue another, single minute. If something I say here wakes up just one person, and they wake up one person, and so on down the line, perhaps the world can be immunized with awareness and moved to action.

Even now, a neighborhood in Perris, Calif., is waking up. The whole of Hollywood is waking up to what it’s done to Dylan Farrow. We have to wake up to the realities of children if we are ever to hope for a world of peace in which our own kind can be sustained. We must leave our simian ways behind.

I am an incest survivor, and I am not going away. I am not going to be quiet, and I am not going to give it a rest. Not anymore. I will not be a party to one more child being harmed because I could not be bothered.