[iSpeak] Owning my trauma, no matter how 'small'

Warning: This piece contains sensitive and graphic content that may trigger certain readers, particularly those who have experienced a form of sexual abuse, no matter how small.I was 14. I was a skinny sophomore in high school and I loved reading about wizards and demigods and shadowhunters and vampire slayers. I had a regular childhood, as we defined regular in my tiny part of the world. My father worked abroad.

I was sitting at a huge mahogany table, on a matching mahogany chair that had been in that house even before I was born. And on the chair to my left was my uncle, all of 37 years, scrolling through his own laptop with his left hand and fingering me with his right hand. He did not use all of his fingers. I do not remember how long he took, moving his fingers through a patch of my skin where hair had just begun to bloom.

I chose to deal with it, first, by telling 3 of my friends. I cried each time. I did not want to remember that night at our old house, with the mahogany table and the lizard on the ceiling. It was a memory that never served me. I had no reason to even think about my uncle anymore. Every time they’d come home to the Philippines to visit, I'd never make the effort to see them. Perhaps it was me implicitly distancing myself, like a survival instinct.

It marked another time of reckoning for me, but this time, I asked myself, what happens to a harasser who is not a moneyed movie producer nor a legendary professor nor a nominee to the Supreme Court? What happens if he’s just a regular, unremarkable man, with a daughter the same age as you? What if he is a good brother who has sacrificed a lot for his younger siblings? What if he is one of your grandmother’s favorite...

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