Abby Laurence

This I Believe Podcast Script

 

I’m a people pleaser. I’m quiet. I’m a peace keeper. Most of my “hello’s” are asked to be repeated because they were too soft to be heard the first time. It’s hard to remember High School because I spent most of my time there with my head down. And if a restaurant gets my order wrong, you can count on me to eat whatever is in front of me because I’d rather stay silent than cause a scene with my words. I used to believe that my silence was the only way to please everyone else around me. 

 

When I was sixteen, I was assaulted in the back of a car with a group of friends that I trusted. I didn’t have a voice in the moment to stop the situation, and I didn’t have a voice for a very long time following that night. About a month later, the situation was brought to the police. The question that was presented to my parents and I was, “Do you wish to move forward and press charges, or would you prefer to stay silent and move on with your life?” If I chose the first option, I was told that the process would be messy, long, complicated, and would jeopardize the perpetrator’s football career which could result in serious retaliation from him against me. If I chose the second option, he would essentially face no consequences for what he did to me; however, I’d avoid any sort of conflict and lingering tension with him. Being sixteen, impressionable, scared, naive, and a people pleaser, I did what was comfortable to me and I chose the second option. Staying silent was what I was best at. In a situation where I felt like I had no control, I thought that I’d feel a sense of control and power back if I stayed silent because that was what I was conditioned to believe was the right thing to do. My perpetrator spent his whole life playing football and working his way to the top- after all, he was crowned the best running back in the area. I was convinced that I would be selfish to end his career in a second because of what he did to me and that it’d be unfair to him. I spent the next year with my eyes glued to the floor every time I went out in public, I was told I couldn’t go certain places or hangout with certain people because, “he might be there,” and my social media feed was flooded with his stats, articles comparing him to Barry Sanders, and videos of his High School’s student section chanting “MVP!” the second he ran out on the field. I was enraged that the same person who stole my innocence and my voice was also the same person who was getting praised everywhere he went. He was our city’s ‘star’ and I was the girl who was too scared to speak. 

 

My voice felt oppressed, so I used my hands to do what my mouth couldn’t do: I wrote. I wrote down every word, thought, feeling, and emotion that I had associated with him and that night. I wrote until my fingers had calluses and my eyes were dry from staring at paper all night. It felt good, having my hands accomplish what my mouth could not. Eventually, I got to a place where I could share this dump of emotions. I decided I wanted to write a poetry book. Poems constructed from all my built up emotions throughout the last seven months. I worked on the book for about a year and just wrote, rewrote, crossed out, deleted, added, and continued to write until I was finally satisfied with my work. I organized the book into three sections: sadness, anger, and acceptance, which were the three phases that I lived in during my healing stage. I wanted to share the raw and real process of healing from trauma. 

 

Now, it’s been nine months since I published my book. Over the past nine months, I have had so many people confide their own stories in me, tell me how much my poetry has validated their emotions, and how my words have given them the confidence to speak about what happened to them as well. Not only did I speak up for myself and use my voice, but I encouraged other people to do it as well. I decided to write my book because I thought that it would help give me closure. I had no idea that it would help so many readers find their closure as well. My social media was no longer flooded with my perpetrator’s name and how successful he was, but instead was flooded with people sharing their thoughts on my book and my name. Because of what happened to me, I believe in using your voice and never apologizing for the noise you create.