Shame for what happened to you. Part 2

3t Vakil (Miss Tree)
4 min readJun 20, 2024
Invisible Scars: Life beyond the Incident (AI Image by the author)

Well.

Now here I am telling the story about an incident.

The reason I can talk about it NOW is because I’m understanding what happened to me in that moment.

That this incident happened. That something happened to me, and that I was not to blame.

Well, what happened?

I was raped.

It took me 2 years after the incident to ‘remember’ that something had happened that had shaken my reality so violently, that I ‘forgot’ it; swept it under the carpet of my reality.

I was raped. It came crashing into my decaying and broken reality. I could not escape the relentless will of the human psyche to work things out. Only, I could barely use the word ‘rape’ to myself. It took 20 years and more to say that to myself, and really understand what that meant. It is now 38 years later. Amazing, isn’t it? When I finally said these words to myself, I could finally start on the road to healing. The road proved to be rough and dangerous too.

It does take time to tell one’s stories. Some stories linger in the shadows, not because we shy away, but because they are cloaked in an inexpressible complexity. Sometimes you cannot tell the story because you cannot understand it, and you don’t have the words that can help you to tell it…

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3t Vakil (Miss Tree)
3t Vakil (Miss Tree)

Written by 3t Vakil (Miss Tree)

Performance Scientist Research Artist -trees, botany, plants, conservation in Puerto Rico

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