A Survivor Responds to the Sandusky Conviction

I wept when I read the headline: “Jerry Sandusky convicted on 45 counts” related to sexually abusing children. I wept in gratitude, sadness, and too many other emotions to count. You see it happened to me too, though I never met Sandusky. Twenty years after my first memory, my family is not interested in knowing about it. In addition, my fellow writing students and professors sixteen years ago generally discouraged me from writing what they called “confessional” material (as if I had some sin to confess with regard to this). One professor quoted a poet in class who had written “We’ve had enough incest poems.” I even had one acquaintance explain that her adolescent sexual relationship with her father wasn’t incest because she enjoyed it. Granted, that was a unique response, but most of the people I know have reacted at best with embarrassment, most often with disinterest, and, at worst with disbelief or outright rejection.

There is an unreality to remembering long-forgotten memories, and while God has placed individuals in my life who helped me honor those memories, the reactions described above have contributed to an ongoing disconnect, or rather, several huge disconnects. First, I feel unknown by the members of my family of origin, and vice versa. They seem like exotic species that I visit occasionally and with whom I have few points of connection. Similarly, at my church, my other primary community, I feel that with all but a handful of people, I have shown them only a thin reed of myself every week. Even my close friends there have experienced at best a little of me. The biggest aching gap is between my head, where I generally live, and my body, which is a distant country of which I have little awareness.    

Beings an abuse survivor is not the only truth of my existence, but the wounds created when I was sexually abused as child have not completely healed, after twenty years of living with the memories, getting counseling, and seeking recovery. What I experienced does not explain all my struggles. Still, when I realized someone had been convicted, that a court system and a jury listened to and believed his victims, I felt gratitude. The foggy unreality of walking through memories clears. It is a victory, and, lives remain scarred, trust remains broken, and there is nothing to celebrate.