Call Me Cockroach

by Leigh Byrne

You begin to think you’re crazy when everyone around you pretends something never happened when you know damn well it did. Makes you think you’re viewing life through a dirty window. You question yourself—your memory, your sanity. Did it actually happen?

With mature eyes, I could now see that what you want at twenty is not necessarily what you will need when you’re thirty.

Talking openly and honestly helped me to understand that the most significant hindrance to my healing process had been my inability to discuss the details of my childhood abuse.

As a child, all I wanted was to be loved. As an adult, all I wanted was to be loved. But it was hard for me to believe in happily ever after when the one person I should have been able to count on to love me unconditionally had failed me. If my own mother didn’t think I was deserving of love, how could I expect anyone else to?

But that’s the danger of isolation; it lures you in with the deceptive promise of protecting you and then it feasts on your spirit.

Only a woman with no confidence or sense of self-worth would have allowed a man to dominate her in such a way.

My ability to trust has been fractured, because I know, first hand, evil can exist even behind seemingly kind faces.