A few days ago I totally had a breakthrough that I want to share with you guys. So I call my inner child “Five” because when that part of me gets triggered I feel like I am five years old. I know, totally weird, I swear I’m not crazy. Well, maybe… lol. When I was five years old I felt voiceless.
The Important Backstory
It’s hard for me to delve too much into childhood stuff for obvious reasons (hard subject matter). But I was very much raised with the notion of “we don’t air dirty laundry.” My family is very private and at times it felt like the facade was way more important than reality.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a great family. My siblings are awesome and my mom is one of the nicest people on the planet. Well at least the people that I know, lol. No one in my family would ever hurt anyone intentionally. However, every person in my family has endured some sort of trauma. We function, we’re nice and loving but we are also dysfunctional. The biggest source of disfunction, in my opinion, has been the lack of communication. No one really talks about anything real..
Voiceless as Adult
As an adult, I really have trouble communicating. This is especiallly hard for me when its about MY thoughts and feelings. It’s kind of why this blog/vlog thing is so important to me. It gives me a voice. I mentioned that my family didn’t talk about anything real. I could be wrong, you see I’m the youngest of 4 BY A LOT. The second youngest sibling is 8 years older than me. So maybe the correct statement is no one really talked to ME about anything that was real because I was so much younger than them. Even when I was a teen, they were already in their twenties/early thirties. I have always been at a different stage in my life. Now that we are adults, I have a hard time communicating because I never had the chance to learn that skill. Does that make sense?
Seriously, I get extremely uncomfortable when people ask me personal questions (I’m working on that so please don’t stop). I don’t know how to ask other people questions that I think might be “personal” because I don’t want others to feel the discomfort. So as an adult I make myself voiceless but I am just now realizing why that is.
Voiceless as Five
At five things were different. I want to tell you my story and if I gloss over the details please know that it is because I am protecting others’ right to privacy. When I was a toddler, my mom, siblings, and I moved to Mexico to be with my grandparents. When I was five we came back to the states (we are all citizens) to visit for the summer and we ended up staying. I don’t know when all of that changed or if it was always the plan but they didn’t tell me until they had to.
When we came to the states my mom wanted me to learn English (my siblings were much older so they already knew English from when they were kids in the states.). In order to help me learn English quickly, there was a rule… we could ONLY speak English. It was a good idea, in theory. Obviously it worked, most people would never know that English is my second language. But that rule stole my words.
Voiceless and Isolated
Let me put this into perspective: I didn’t know ANY English which basically meant I wasn’t allowed to talk at home. I am sure I was probably allowed to talk about super important/emergency things in Spanish. Like I said, no one in my family would intentionally hurt anyone. At school, there were no other kids that spoke Spanish. I really couldn’t talk to anyone. Even if I had known that what was going on was “wrong,” I couldn’t tell anyone. I was voiceless.
Get help
If you or someone you know is being abused, don’t remain silent. Reach out to a trusted friend, counselor, pastor, priest, teacher.
If you are an adult survivor RAINN has a lot of great resources. If you know of additional resources, please comment below.
To read the poem that inspired this post click here **
** Trigger warning: poem is about childhood abuse.
