The Day I Realized I was an Abused Kid

I thought everything was normal for most of my life

I was a teen in the 90’s. I wrote angst-filled poems while listening to Teen Spirit with the bitter taste of Rave hairspray on the back of my tongue. I wore flannel, combat boots, and forever chipped black nail polish. I was the shy, quiet kid in the back of the classroom who doodled into the corner of her notebook and let the popular kids copy her homework.

I was also perpetually the new kid in class as our family moved every year with my father’s jobs. This meant I had few friends and those I had were just as reclusive as I was. We huddled together in the back of the class and rarely spend time together outside of school.

I made one friend who lived within a short walk from our place, and she invited me to spend the night at her house. We had a nice time together until it was time for me to go home. My friend’s parents started yelling at her about her grades. She calmed them down until I left, but as I looked back, I saw her father backhand her so hard that she fell back on the ground.

I freaked out. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t believe what I’d just seen and had no idea what to do. Somehow with all of that, it didn’t occur to me that I regularly experienced the same treatment from my father at home. Living within an abusive environment looks very different than looking into it from the outside.

Two days later, my dad was angry at me, and he hit me in the face which gave me a slight black eye. It wasn’t a shiner, so I didn’t figure anyone would notice it. I slapped some foundation on it and headed to school.

I didn’t think about it again until the friend I’d spent the night with a couple of days before, pulled me to the side.

“How did you get that black eye?”

“I don’t know. I probably walked into a door or something.”

I didn’t think about that response before I gave it. It just came out. It was almost the exact same phrase uttered by at least 10 black and white kids in ten black and white movies about child abuse that I’d seen in classrooms across America.

This is when I realized that what was happening at home was abuse.

That afternoon I went home a different person. I went home as an abused kid. I imagined myself in my friend’s place as the kid being hit and she in mine, seeing me fall to the ground. I connected to the idea that what was happening to me was wrong.

Knowing that I was abused empowered me. Before this realization, I thought that I deserved every blow that landed on me.

I was still physically abused for several years after that, but it never dug itself as deeply into my psyche again.

For the first time in my life, I began to imagine a way out. I began to see that life didn’t always have to be this way.