I would do anything for it not to be real, but it is. And I’m starting to think it’s more common than any of us want to admit. But it’s time to be brave and acknowledge these hard truths no matter how much it hurts. Because we deserve healing and even more than that, we deserve a world that sees and acknowledges these horrors for what they are. The nature of the trauma that comes with living through something so disgusting is that your brain tends to block a lot out as a way to protect you. That’s how shattering of an event CSA is. I can’t remember how exactly young but it was YOUNG—- so young that everyone refused to believe me even though all of the signs were there. I’m talking 5 or 6 years old, and so that would have made my younger brother, the perpetrator, as little as 4 years old. Was it because he was younger that my dad just ignored it when he’d see my brother pinning me down in the yard and rubbing himself on me? We were all there to witness it but I’m the only one bearing the scars. What do you think happens when a little kid can see he can get away with something? Of course it escalated. And no one did anything when they found my bloody underwear even though it would be 7 more years before I saw my first period. My mother yelled at me when she saw them….Why? I didn’t make them that way, why am I in trouble and not your son who I keep telling you is hurting me when he lays on me? But according to her it had to have been something else, a medical condition or anomaly, certainly not what her own son was doing. Poor thing had to think about something that made her uncomfortable, meanwhile I had to continue to live with and be groped by and molested and penetrated by that “uncomfortable” for the next decade. Yes, kids can most certainly abuse other kids even at ages that seem horrifically young to you. If it’s horrible for you to realize, imagine how horrible it is to have happen to you. And no, I don’t talk to that “father”, or that “brother”, and certainly not the “mother” who insisted she’s actually the biggest victim in this horror story by having to think about any of it in the first place. If only she cared what her own daughter, and all of us other survivors, must think about. Tell your story as many times as you have to, and don’t entertain folks who do anything but give you the unrelenting, undying support you deserve. I mean that. If you read this and take anything away from it, please take that.