Childhood sex abuse came to define my life: Can I be that happy kid I was before the trauma?

Not trying to be morbid here, but when I die – news flash: we all die, eventually – the death certificate is going to get the cause of death for me wrong.

Whatever it might have been in the immediate, it’s going to be childhood sex abuse that killed me.

Yeah, here we go.

I’ve written and talked and otherwise tiptoed around this publicly dating back a while now – 15 years, by my count.

Now, finally, time to address it head on.

Why it’s coming up for me now is, I was thinking recently about something my grandmother told me, about how I was the happiest baby she’d ever seen, always smiling, always with a lot to say, the light of the room.

An instant later, I was consumed by the thought of:

I’d like to find that inner me, if he’s still there.

Because all I remember is being immeasurably shy, socially awkward, distant – which I learned, when I finally started therapy a few years back, after a pulmonary embolism that nearly killed me in 2021, was how I processed being victimized.

I viewed – view, present tense – everything, and everyone, as a threat, so my survival instincts, on overdrive, are to keep everyone at a distance, and everything under as much control as I can possibly exert.

What I didn’t talk with my super awesome therapist about over the course of our nearly two years of weekly chats: underneath it all is a seething anger, which has me constantly on the line of looking to the outside world as being content to be a flower on the wall, but internally, a volcano on the verge of eruption.

***

I’m still not able to verbalize the abuse – except to say, it was my father, who passed in 2008; I hadn’t spoken to him in nearly two years before he died suddenly, of, yes, a pulmonary embolism.

My parents split when I was starting the eighth grade; it tore my mother asunder, but for me, it was the best damn day of my young life.

I still tried to be the good kid, tried to have a relationship with the man as an adult, never speaking of, you know.

I didn’t shed a tear when I learned that he died; my response, when I got the word from my wife, was: do I have to go to the funeral?

I wasn’t happy with my mother, either, in all of this.

I brought up the childhood issue with her when I was in my mid-30s, explaining why I was breaking off contact with that guy, two years before his sudden passing.

Her response: I always hoped you’d not remember that.

Not going to lie: that broke my heart.

She passed in 2015; I, again, shed not a single tear.

***

I’m writing this because, I’m a writer, am lucky to have a decent sized audience, and I want people who have friends and family who have experienced childhood sexual trauma to know what those folks deal with.

For starters, for me, I often feel detached from my own being, like I’m another person observing myself.

That’s a coping mechanism, from what I’ve come to understand.

You leave your own body to get through what you need to get through when you need to get through bad things, and eventually, it becomes a habit.

Next, on the concept of pain: I was explaining to someone recently about how I ran the New York City Marathon in 2016 with plantar fasciitis, which, for those who’ve never endured that particular foot ailment, feels like someone is taking a butcher knife through the heel of your foot on every step.

My run tracker measured me taking about 50,000 steps that afternoon.

Think: butcher knife, through the heel, 50,000 times.

I can do that because, if you can endure childhood sexual trauma, you come out of it impervious to pain.

I’ve broken numerous bones, torn an ACL – my body is covered in scars.

Nothing.

***

The cauldron inside is what scares me. I’ve managed it, for the most part, by redirecting the energy to standing up for people who need somebody to stand up for them, which is something that has defined me since I can remember.

To wit: I decided in second grade that I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer, which is an odd thing for a trailer-trash White kid in a 95 percent White area to aspire to.

I couldn’t protect myself, so I was going to protect everybody else, was what I decided.

In terms of physical, I was a scrawny kid, couldn’t do a pullup on any of those presidential physical fitness tests, but I took money from a summer job to buy a cheap weights set, and eventually built myself up to benchpressing 450 pounds, and squatting 650, around boxing 20 minutes a day.

If the motivation there isn’t obvious, I can’t help you.

***

Weird thing: I’ve always been of the what I now realize is misguided opinion that, I’m stronger because of what I had to endure as a kid.

Not just literally stronger, from the weights and distance-running – hours upon hours of running alone, angry music blaring at stadium concert levels in my headphones.

I sold myself on wanting to run to angry music as, that kind of music gets me to run faster.

Yeah.

I came to think that my drive to succeed, to want to be there to help those who need help, the anger that I’ve redirected into mostly positive energy, was derived from childhood trauma.

It’s only recently begun to occur to me: who would I be if I hadn’t been traumatized?

My grandmother’s description of the happiest baby she’d ever seen is a person I don’t know.

I’m not trying to say that I’m not happy; just that, I’m always on guard, looking around corners for the next threat, which can come from anywhere, and often does, if only because I’m looking for it.

I’ve not known myself to ever relax, not for a second.

I’ve chosen a job that gives me a good excuse to work seven days a week, 365 days a year, because god knows, if I take even an afternoon off, that’s going to be the afternoon that something big happens.

When I’m not working, I’m working out, obsessively – grueling weight training, distance running with an eye on my splits, eternally wanting to outdo how I did yesterday, for fear of not only falling behind, but dying.

Seriously, that’s how bad my wiring is screwed up.

I spoke earlier of coping mechanisms; how’s that for a coping mechanism?

I’m so afraid to confront myself that I have as my default that I might die if I even let up for an instant.

Free time is my enemy, because I can’t be alone with my thoughts.

***

To say the least, this makes having friends difficult.

My default is, don’t trust anybody – basically, one strike, and you’re out.

Here is where the world needs to praise Crystal Abbe Graham, for somehow putting up with me for going on 26 years now.

I’m not the religious sort, but there may be something akin to divine providence there, that I would be connected for life to someone who works in the mental health field.

If it wasn’t for her, I’d be on my own, and if you think my writing comes across as cranky now, man.

***

My other constant companion these days is a rescue dog that we named Tyrion, and let me tell you here about this little guy, because his story is instructive.

We got a call from a dog rescue group in 2018 – we’re known to be bleeding hearts in these parts when it comes to dogs – about a chihuahua whose owner had passed away several months prior, and the people that he’d been left with were about to abandon him.

We drove over to the house, and the man who answered at the door was a rough character, kept referring to the little dog as “shithead,” and whoever was responsible there wasn’t doing anything to care for the little fella, who clearly hadn’t been bathed in months, and was walking around with a noticeable limp.

As the man who answered the door told us that “shithead” wouldn’t have anything to do with any of them, I walked over to the little fella, and he immediately jumped into my arms.

We named him Tyrion after the character on “Game of Thrones” who was stripped of his proper place in his royal family because of his physical limitations.

Our Mr. T, as we usually call him, is possibly more neurotic than me, and like me, his default is to hate everybody, to want to lash out, to never let down his guard.

Except when he’s sitting on my lap, which he’s doing right now, as I wrap up this column.

I think I’m his therapy dog.

***

Is the happy kid pre-trauma still inside me? Maybe.

Crystal learned long ago that she can’t buy stuffed animals as gifts for our friends’ kids, because I’ll end up claiming them before she can gift them, and I end up naming them, and giving them deeply sourced backstories.

My parents wouldn’t let us have dogs growing up, because, they just weren’t good people – so, naturally, Crystal and I have six, a mix of rescues and puppies from an acquaintance in Rockingham County.

They all, of course, have interesting names with their own deeply sourced backstories, and innumerable nicknames.

I realized several years ago that what I’m doing is trying to recreate my childhood – or rather, redo it, the right way, this time.

Which is, maybe, a good sign.

***

One thing we don’t have is an actual kid or kids of our own.

I couldn’t do it.

I know enough from having had to write about child sex crimes over the past 30 years to understand that a lot of these cases involve perpetrators who were themselves victimized as kids.

I mentioned this to my therapist, who got back to me with the right answer: you don’t strike me as that kind of person.

Yeah, well, my bloodline dies with me.