Please note: In my letter, I do talk about depression, physical abuse, and suicide. If these are subjects that are triggering for you, please read another letter on our site or prepare to access any resources you find helpful.
If you’re reading this, know that what happened in your childhood still matters and it is okay to still be hurt by it.
When you’re a kid, the only thing you ever know is what you experience. For years, I normalized the completely abnormal. I thought to myself, all big brothers hurt you, choke you, make you scared to sleep. “When I'm older, this will all make sense. He’ll grow out of it.”
Five is my first memory of abuse, I remember because that’s when my brother slammed my chin down on a table, minutes before family arrived for my fifth birthday party. My parents got involved, it’s not that they didn’t, it’s just that they chose to protect him instead of me. The excuse was that he was adopted and dealing with a traumatic past. I was a child and didn’t have better logic or the ability to argue with my parents. I didn’t understand that I wasn’t supposed to argue with my parents about feeling safe in my own home. From age five on it was a series of me hiding, being found, being abused, and not getting the support I needed after. “He doesn’t know any better, but you do” was the line I got when I finally got old enough to defend myself. I had kicked him with my soccer cleats after he tried to pull me down from a tree I was hiding in.
It wasn’t that he was bad, there were just two sides of him: the cool brother and the unmedicated brother who I thought was possessed by the devil. I lived with his physical, verbal, and occasional sexual abuse for years on and off as the numerous doctors, psychiatrists, and other health professionals tried to get his medication right. I learned to cope. I learned to hide better. I bottled my emotions up and stored them away, they weren’t going to help me survive. By the time I was 16 I was a pro, just in time for him to leave the house for good and enter a series of treatment facilities. My mom had determined she had had enough and couldn't take it anymore. I don’t know why she decided then, I think to protect herself and my younger brother, but it was too late for me. In her mind I was always just “fine.” I had been surviving pretty well for a couple years. I buried myself in sports and school and no one knew what I dealt with at home. When he left everyone assumed I had come out of it unscaved and that I was fine. No one knew when I stopped eating, or when the anxiety made me throw up, or when I stood on the roof and wanted to jump. I didn’t jump, I had called a helpline and they talked me back inside where I cried for hours, listening to my parents fighting downstairs over my brother.
I wish I could say that the pain gets better, but as you get older, the more you realize how messed up it is to be robbed of your childhood by whatever it is that caused you to grow up too soon. I wasn’t supposed to go through that, I wasn’t supposed to know better. I was supposed to play outside and not worry about getting shot with a BB gun. I was supposed to ride to school and not have to worry about my brother harassing me on the way there. I was supposed to have parents guiding and protecting me, but it turned to me telling them what to do.
If you’re reading this, know that your childhood self matters. I was 18 when I decided to start validating my younger self’s experiences and go to therapy. I try to hold that self close and comfort her. I tell her she shouldn’t have had to experience that, and that what she experienced was not normal. Seven year old Maggie didn’t understand what was happening, but the Maggie today has words for what we went through: abuse, neglect, trauma. The Maggie today wants to make sure that no child will go through that. Through this understanding of my younger self, I know that I will be a better social worker for it, because I still hear that confused kid wondering when this will all make sense. I hope I can help others to realize that their childhood experiences matter and to hold that self close and provide the comfort they never got, but so desperately needed.
Maggie M., Boston College ‘23
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