Truth may be inconvenient, but it will set you free
This feature was sent in by a reader with the request that they stay anonymous. All the words are theirs. Their story has themes surrounding sexual assault, minors, and generational trauma relating to sexual abuse. Please exercise discretion before reading if these themes have the potential to be triggers for you.
My 29th birthday was possibly the worst day of my life. An explosive moment at about 7 pm followed a week of crippling tension in my family, and thereafter silence and inaction.
This feature is about letting brown girls know that it’s not wrong to share trauma that hurt you deeply; to admit to yourself that you deserved better.
A few days before my birthday, I told my mum I had been molested at 16 and again at 20 and 25. I told her that another child might be in danger by the very same person because she knows the predator very well.
Two weeks before this bombshell moment, I visited where this man was staying to drop off stuff – a trip I deeply didn’t want to make but had to because else, I’ll have to explain to my mum.
I was going to drop off the things and leave immediately although I usually spend the whole day playing with the kids who stay there. But when I got there, the younger one was going to a birthday party and the older one was angry/sad and didn’t want to be home alone because she was “bored”. So, I took her out shopping, where she told me “Akka, this is so weird, but he came into my room and hugged me thinking I was sleeping but I wasn’t.”
My heart stopped, I went blank. I said nothing. I know I had to do something, but I didn’t know what. That night, I called her. Her mum was there too, and I just casually asked what she’s doing, where she’s sleeping and making sure she wasn’t sleeping alone in the room.
The days after, I was consumed with guilt and unease like I didn’t do right by her. Like I didn’t do enough. I thought about telling my mum or asking my sister or calling this girl’s mum but didn’t do any of that because I was scared. What was I scared of, I don’t know exactly – scared that I needed to bear/bare a truth I’d hidden so well because it’s easier to hide than to admit your pain and suffering. Scared that my family wouldn’t believe me or this little girl. Scared that it was my secret and if shared, suddenly it will be everyone’s.
A couple of weeks after, my mum was visiting them, while the predator was staying there and asked me to come along. I said no. On any other day, I would have put on that fake smile and followed her, but guilt had taken over and I couldn’t face myself knowing he could’ve hurt another girl. She responded with her usual dramatics of how I’m so full of myself because I didn’t want to come along. Feeling very emotionally drained from overthinking and guilt for the last two weeks, I decided to tell her. I told her I was never going to share any of this, but I didn’t want the child to go through what I have, and that she was the only one who could do something about it. I told her, in Tamil, that he touched me, wrongly. Funny how you learn Tamil in school, but you still don’t know the words for molest, inappropriate, and sexual assault.
Her immediate reaction was “It was for fun, you misunderstood, we play around.”
So I role-played every detail asking her if it felt like fun – how he put his hand under my shirt and unhooked my bra in the car, how he groped me while I was sleeping, how he shoved his tongue in my mouth and that I wouldn’t let him get past my teeth and how we jokingly told my dad the next day that I grind my teeth in my sleep.
For someone who tends to overreact, she took it calmly. She told me to leave it and that I didn’t need to go with her. When she came back that evening, I asked if she spoke with him or checked on that little girl. She said there were too many people there and so, she couldn’t have a word. She told me the girl will be fine because her parents were there.
I lost it. “You were in the same car when he touched me, you and dad were in the next room when he groped me and shoved his tongue on me. You couldn’t protect me.”
Silence.
The next day, someone calls on the phone and invites her to dinner. She tells them she can’t that Wednesday because it’s my birthday. She hangs up and I ask her if I could invite those kids over for my birthday and she said, “Only if he could come. How can I invite them and not him? He’s visiting them.”
I lost it again. “After all I’ve said, did you really think I would invite him to my house, ma?”
She quipped with “Then you can’t have the kids over.” In that moment, I realised she didn’t believe me, at all. She never did. I asked her point-blank if she truly believed me. She didn’t know how to answer me. I continued to tell her I was disappointed that she wasn’t protecting a child who might be at risk. She said it was not for me to worry, that I was overreacting, and that child probably didn’t know what she was talking about. It resulted in a heated argument I couldn’t win and even my own millennial brother stood there supporting my mum saying I was creating drama out of nothing.
I went to my room feeling like my heart was ripped out of my body and curled up with my bolster. My sister came in with her laptop and said, “Fuck them, fill this form.” It was a child services website to report a child at risk. I filled in the form and she pressed send.
The next morning, I couldn’t bring myself to go to work. But, I would rather work than face my mum and my brother or speak to them. On my way to work, my sister messages me saying my form will need to be reported to the police. I called the hotline on the bus, in tears, telling them we didn’t want the police involved because I didn’t want that 10-year-old girl to go through that pain. They said it’s out of their control because it’s a minor.
They asked if I was okay and if I wanted to report my assault – no one asked me that before or described what I had experienced so definitively as an ‘assault’ and it was oddly comforting. I didn’t report what had happened to me because it was going to hurt more people than the predator himself – his daughters, my family, me. It’s the same reason why I didn’t tell anyone for all those years because it was just me who got hurt so it didn’t matter. Two days went by and there was no news so I thought we had avoided the police situation.
On my birthday, my mother tried to make nice, but I just felt indifferent. But when you’re brown you learn to make your parents happy no matter how much they hurt or abuse you. So, I decided to make dinner for everyone so that we could be a little happy for the next few days while my mother and brother were staying with me. As I’m making dinner, my mum gets a phone call – she looks at me with her eyes burning in fury. I asked what’s wrong when she hung up.
“What have you done?”
I didn’t connect the dots at the moment. “What do you mean?”
She asked, “Where have you been spreading this to?”
It took me a while and I told her I reported it. The police had visited the girl’s house and questioned him and her. The girl told the police she has known him for a while now. I apologised saying I didn’t know what to do because I was scared and I didn’t want this girl to go through what I have. She said, “You told me, wasn’t that enough?”
“No mum, you didn’t do anything, it wasn’t enough.”
She said my dad would be ashamed if he found out about what I had done.
I slapped her.
I was disgusted that as a woman she didn’t take a second to accuse me at the very least but still doubted that he was guilty. I was angry that what mattered more was “what people think” than “what my daughter felt”. I was disappointed that my greatest fear had come true – that they wouldn’t believe me. And it hurt that I had to apologise for trying to protect a child when he did the crime.
I told her I am really upset that she thought what I had done was more shameful than what he had done to me, her daughter.
And she threw the biggest tantrum I’ve ever seen in my life. She dropped to the floor and rolled around like a crazy person beating her chest. I didn’t know what to do. My brother told her to fuck me and my sister and leave because we were not good to be around. I’ve never felt so many emotions before and I felt so helpless. I called my friend and could barely put words together so he just listened to me cry.
The next morning as I got ready for work, she told me I had made a mistake, I was in over my head, the internet has corrupted me, how I think I can do anything I want traveling by myself, and that I need to start calming down.
I calmly told her “He made the mistake” and left to work.
She said she was going to talk to this man and to leave it to her, but she’s never brought it up again to this day. Swept under the rug.
I wore glasses to work the whole week to hide my eyes, which had been drained of every tear, only to receive compliments that I looked cute and the glasses suit me. The worst is when you hear people tell you that you’re such a happy person. Only if they knew that if I’m not “happy” outside, I wouldn’t be able to survive because I am consumed by sadness every day when I’m at home alone every night.
My family who knows what has happened thought, and still think, that it didn’t hurt as much or it wasn’t that big of a deal as I made it out to be because I’m “normal” again. But I have to pretend to be normal because everyone else does, except my brother who has stopped talking to me.
In their eyes, what my sister and I had done by reporting was way worse than what he had ever done to me – because I ruined everyone’s lives, while he only ruined mine (who cares about what he did to any other girl). He goes about his life as he used to because he’s a sinner who needs forgiveness. But I have to bear the pain of faking a positive relationship with my mum, an estranged relationship with my brother, hiding why that is so from my dad, and walking on eggshells around everyone who knows about it.
The thing is truth isn’t valued when it’s inconvenient. That’s especially true in brown families but it doesn’t mean you have to suffer in silence. If 16-year-old me came out with the truth that day – my family would’ve reacted exactly the same way. But it would’ve been far worse of a blow because I used to view my problems as mine to be faced alone. Growing up in a brown family means that family IS everything. They make you feel like no one else outside the family would understand and that talking about what really happened ruins family reputation.
Brown families teach you to mask pain, especially if you’re a girl. We’re almost indoctrinated into minimising the pain we go through to make it “easier” or “pleasant” for people to be around us. It’s easier for brown families to pretend that everything is okay for the greater good than having an honest, open conversation that shit happens to individuals and acknowledge that individuals hurt, deeply. It’s more convenient for them to belittle the trauma and say “It’s not that bad” or, “You’re exaggerating” than normalise the sexual assault that happens in brown communities.
But all of that is bullshit. They’re wrong.
Sexual assault happens in brown families more than we realise and most of our families choose to pretend it doesn’t.
It’s the very reason I had pushed this trauma to the back of my mind for years because I knew in my gut it wouldn’t go down well with my family although it hurt me deeply. But that trauma and suppression that brown families subconsciously force you into were shaping who I was becoming. Self-diagnosis tells me this is why I’ve never been in a relationship, why I’ve never had “best friends” till I was in my 20s, why I wouldn’t dare anyone near my truths except myself, why I had to move countries to be alone. Because it’s the only way I knew how to feel safe/protected/unhurt. There’s a term for it – compensatory hyper-independence.
I closed off the world living for this family but then they left me feeling like I was nothing and that I didn’t really matter. Family is important; I would still do everything I can for them and protect the people I love. I still speak to my mum every day and she hasn't disowned me. But, it’s a two-way street and it breaks my heart every day as I slowly learn it’s okay to let go of toxicities. I'm not obligated to respect or try and maintain a relationship that harms my wellness just because it is family.
I wouldn’t have gotten through coming out with the truth and feeling rejected by my family if not for my three best friends (and my sister). It was a horrible few days, weeks and months but they made it lighter simply by picking up the phone and just listening to me cry – something I’ve never done in my almost 30 years of my life. I’ve been friends with these angels for maybe a decade, but I never quite openly spoke about the dark sides of my life until maybe a few years ago and it’s possibly the best thing I’ve done. Being able to speak to my best friends knowing they're not going to judge me or to text them saying I’m having a bit of a trigger has been my best way of coping. It sounds really stupid but I didn't realise how just talking about it freely can be healing and make you feel supported. Telling my mum has been the most liberating thing because it’s now out in the open.
To whoever’s feeling alone, I know that you will find that safe haven in a person or people will listen and believe you. It’s okay to open up to people and cry because everyone has gone through shit in their own way and we all want to be heard.
Speaking the truth seems to necessitate burdening the family but suppressing trauma results in internalised pain, self-hate, depression, anxiety, the list goes on. Many of us brown girls hide our truths in our own little worlds and suffer for years in silence. I’ve slowly grown to learn that there are more of us with similar experiences and trauma. No one talks about our mental health or wellness because most of us look fine on the outside and pretend it’s okay though we are all broken inside.
There’s a small chance our parents may unlearn the way they have been brought up and we can keep trying but at the very least (as cheesy as it sounds) let’s open up to each other, support each other and lift each other up – so we can heal those cracks together. Not all of us have to open up to our family because of the possibility that it could hurt more than keeping silent. But tell someone. I genuinely wish I had done that years ago – trusted someone to be open and talk about what happened.
I followed protectbrowngirls.tumblr.com and #metoomovement on Instagram to almost self-convince that I'm not the only one and other people are out there as well. Treasure those who listen to you and listen to them. It’s also okay to let go of those who don’t, even if they’re family. 10-year-old or hell, 19-year-old me never thought I would have true friends (my sister till jokes about it today, if I actually have friends) but I do now and without them, I might have gone way darker than I’ve ever been.
The cynic in me used to feel that no one really cares – while I care deeply about the people I love, I also started to distance myself so I don’t need to care and so they wouldn’t want to care about me. It takes time to rewire that mindset and consciously make an effort. Take small steps to tell something personal to people you know in your gut that you can trust – your instincts are always right.
What I’ve also learned is that you don’t wake up one day and feel healed. Healing and closure is not an endpoint – the trauma is always going to be part of you and so some days will be better than others. That’s something I’ve also slowly tried to accept because I’ve tried to forget or erase all of this from memory, but it doesn’t work that way. I’ve slowly let people in and some days I feel comfortable in something as simple as letting someone hold me and other days it still scares the shit out of me – but that’s okay.
Living in a new city means my best friends aren’t here with me so I opened myself up to new friends to build a second layer of support system and new meaningful connections. I've made a conscious effort to be genuinely more open about myself rather than presenting a facade of openness. I don't have to hide anymore and I can be real about my opinions and thoughts. I don't need to share trauma stories at the get-go but if at some point I need help, I know I’m comfortable to reach out.
Coincidentally the final episode of Burden of Truth I watched last night could articulate this in better words than I could:
No one gets out of childhood without some kind of trauma and that kind of damage makes people put up walls, make bad choices, do bad things. If you want to heal, seek out people, find safe harbor.
And if you’re hurt by people who love you, you have to be open to being loved again. Find just a small handful of friends who you like and whom you trust.
And, if you’re really lucky, find someone who gets you. And loves you. And take shelter in them. And provide them with shelter because there’s a pretty good chance they’re damaged too. You’re going to be okay.
It’s funny because if young me read this last paragraph, I’d be like these are all lies, I’m never going to find people who would or could care about me, I could never share. But I did. And it’s slowly helping me heal. I pray and hope that every one of you finds that person, people, community to share the naked truth.
If you are based in Singapore with similar experiences and would like professional help, please call, email, WhatsApp, or go to the Sexual Assault Care Centre (SACC) of AWARE. Everything will be safe, confidential, and requires no expense from you.
