I Was Sexually Abused When I Was 4

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I don’t know how common this is, or how badly it affects a person, but I do know that it happened to me, and it affected me. Yet, I never told a living soul about it.

I guess you can call my family dysfunctional. My mother was my father’s third marriage and I could tell growing up it was not a happy life for the two of them. I have step siblings from my father’s two other failed attempts at a ‘perfect suburban life’. It was my step brother.

I remember playing with a can of blue paint. My brother cleaned my fingers, and then brought me to his bedroom. He undressed us, made me give him a blowjob, and then fucked me. I could have made it sound more appealing to read, but I don’t see a better way of putting what happened. He must have been in his teens then, and I was always a quiet child. Naturally, he told me not to tell anyone, and that this was our little secret.

Funny how things like this always involve a ritual. Every single time he abused me, he would make me rinse my mouth. It was as if with that single act, he could rinse away any evidence of what he just did, and together with it any feeling of guilt that he might have felt.

A few years later, he moved out, and I never saw or spoke to him again. It could have been the abuse, or just me, but growing up I knew I was different. I liked boys, and it didn’t take me a difficult self-discovery journey to acknowledge that fact. I grew up alone, friendless and unable to make any lasting relationship.

I learned from my now widowed mom that my brother has married and has four kids. I didn’t bother asking more. In a twisted way, I was also glad my physically abusive father was dead, however horrible that makes me sound. Eventually, I went to college, made some friends and life looked normal, at least from the outside.

In the inside, however, I am falling into a deep depression that I can’t handle. I am always different from others around me. I don’t feel the same way they do, nor do I empathize like most people. I guess my feelings have been numbed, and now I’m like a human robot with an empty heart of metal. I can’t fall in love, I can’t get into a serious relationship, I don’t enjoy sex, and I have given up all hope for a normal, happy life. A part of me wants to blame him for what has been done to me, but another part also blames myself for letting it happen.

Most people will ask me to get help, but I live in a conservative society where it is unheard for a guy to be sexually abused. Like I have done all my life, I will have to persevere without any help. Will I tell anyone about what happened to me? Perhaps, on my deathbed maybe, or if I miraculously find that special someone that somehow gets me. They say a woman’s heart is as deep as an ocean, but I think that applies to all souls that have been forced to grow up too fast too young.

Will I forgive him so I can finally move on from this part of my life? Not right now. There will come a time when I decide to let go, but that time is not now. Until then, life goes on for this ‘cheerful’ college student.

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image –vivek jena