skeletons in my closet

Ghost Town by Stephan Würth

My therapist asked about my hesitation to date. She wondered what I saw it resulting from: my past abuse or my incredibly limited history with dating. I said both contribute almost equally.

The thickest wound thread between the abuse and my fear of dating is the inability to speak about either. I want to talk to my best friends about this desire to date, but the words will not leave my throat. I want to tell them about what I have endured, but I do not know how.

I had a therapy session in Moab where I got to the crux of the abuse, and I told her, “there is one night that sticks out, but I literally cannot speak what happened. The words won’t come out.” I left that session with jaw pain so intense I thought I had an ear infection. It continued for weeks and eventually shifted the bite of my teeth. It was like some internal force was keeping my jaw locked so the words could not escape.

Months before, when I finally believed that what happened to me as a child was rape, I told my therapist. Then, as if having spoken it aloud brought me deeper into my terror of that memory, I did not say the word for nearly a year. From winter through the end of summer, rape could not leave my mouth, and if I heard it from the mouth of someone else, my entire body would tense.

It was Labor Day weekend when I said it again for the first time. It caught me off guard. I wrote about it: I said the word rape today. Aloud for the first time since last winter. For the first time outside of a therapist’s room in over a year. It came out of my mouth and the world stilled as if I had been caught. Saying the word, giving it a life in front of others, I felt naked. But the conversation kept flowing. No one heard that underneath was my confession.

This is the truth for me: I was abused as a child, and that is my only experience with sex. Though for it to be sex, it both has to not involve children and have explicit consent. So perhaps I have no experience with sex. I do know I am just as hesitant to say the word rape as I am virgin. I rarely say either word, and I never say them without my stomach muscles clenching. Both carry the same weight of shame. Both feel like I am laid bare and waiting for someone to come along, scoop me up and tell me I am saved from the reality of either of those words.

This history feels heavy to carry into dating. I am standing in front of a closet that is stuffed with so many skeletons the door cannot shut without my body weight pressing against it. I am scared to step away. And that’s the trick, isn’t it? In order to date I have to knowingly step away from the door and accept what will come to light. I am not there, yet. Instead, in my mind, I brace for disaster imagining for what is going to come bursting out, and I prepare shamefully how to explain what others will find.