The Desperate Measures I Took to Survive My Trauma

(Things I Did to Survive (That I'm Not Proud Of) — Part I)

I don’t remember my first dissociation.
But I know it tasted like silence.
Like the moment your body realizes no one is coming to save it, so it decides to disappear instead.

I was maybe seven. Or nine. Or God, maybe always.
Age isn’t important—what matters is that my brain figured out how to leave the room before I ever could.
My body would stay, obedient, wide-eyed, quiet.
But my mind?
My mind was gone, buried somewhere in the crease of a fairytale or the thick, velvety silence between Bible verses.

When your body becomes a battlefield and the adults are the ones dropping bombs, you start treating survival like a full-time job.
And I was a prodigy.

Let’s be clear: I wasn’t a “survivor” in the beautiful, Tumblr-quote sense of the word.
I was a strategist. A shapeshifter.
A professional good girl with a permanent smile and an escape plan tucked between her thighs.
My trauma didn’t make me stronger. It made me clever.
Hungry.
Hypervigilant.
Hilarious, even.
I’ve told trauma jokes that made entire rooms laugh before realizing they were stories about my mother.

That’s how it starts. You split yourself in two.
The girl who lives it.
And the girl who tells it later, sexier, smarter, with better lighting.

I escaped into books.
Not in the cute “I love reading” way.
No, I disappeared into books like a woman crawling out of her own skin.

I didn’t read stories—I lived inside them.
I chose plots over reality, lovers over parents, fantasy over flesh.
I would’ve rather been a fictional orphan with magical powers than a real child with no protection.
Fiction was safer than family.
Fiction never touched me wrong and called it love.

And when the books weren’t enough, I turned to other forms of fiction.
I became the perfect girl.

High-performing. Overachieving. Sweet-voiced.
The kind of girl who makes adults say “She’s so mature for her age” because they can’t see that what they’re praising is trauma dressed up like grace.
I mastered the art of pleasing people who didn’t know how to protect me.
Got good at saying “I’m fine” with mascaraed eyes and clenched thighs.

Perfectionism was my prayer.
Control was my kink. Still is.
And baby, I was devout.

There’s something erotic about survival.
I don’t mean sexy—I mean charged.
A kind of slow, brutal seduction between you and death, where your only goal is to stay one step ahead.

You learn to flirt with danger, court dissociation, fall in lust with oblivion.
I used to daydream so hard I’d forget I had a body.
I’d imagine running away to the woods, building a new name for myself from twigs and smoke.
I’d watch celebrity interviews and pretend their smiles were mine.
Their safety, their spotlight, their soft American accents.

Anything to escape the stench of my own stuckness.

At some point, I started talking to myself.
Out loud. All the time.

I’d argue with mirrors like they were courtrooms.
Whisper affirmations between panic attacks like they were love letters.

It was self-soothing, sure—but it was also survival.
If I didn’t talk to me, no one else would.

Inner dialogue became my emergency exit.
It wasn’t therapy, but it was a start.

And then there was the anger.
The kind that simmers under your skin like bad sex.
Never quite released, never quite acknowledged.
Just there.
Pulsing.
Pretty on the outside but flammable at the core.

I never yelled at my abuser. Never screamed. Never told.
I learned to be polite, to perform gratitude, to swallow entire hurricanes for dinner.
But the rage leaked out in other ways.
Passive aggression, sarcasm sharp enough to slit wrists, a kind of biting brilliance that made people call me witty when I was just wounded.

I became charming, seductive, hard to pin down.
Not because I wanted to be mysterious.
But because vulnerability was a liability.

Some girls turn to drugs.
Some girls turn to God.
I turned to sex.

Not love. Not romance.
Not some Disne

yfied yearning-for-the-one.
Sex.

It started like a whisper — a dare between my thighs.
What if, this time, I was the one in control?

I learned early that my body could be currency.
That desire was a power I could wield when everything else had been stripped from me.

When I spread my legs, it wasn’t about pleasure — not at first.
It was about proof.
That I existed.
That I could be wanted.
That I could make someone need me with nothing but breath and bare skin.
That I could make men beg — even if I was the one starving inside.

Sex became my revolution.
A reclamation. A costume I wore like armor.

I wasn’t being used.
I was using them.
For validation. For ego. For the illusion of safety.
For the brief, orgasmic fantasy that I was untouchable.

And for a while, it worked.

Every time they touched me — urgently, hungrily, like they were trying to leave a mark —
I felt less like a ghost and more like a god.

They didn’t just fuck me.
They studied me.
Like I was a sacred text in a forgotten tongue.
They moaned my name like it was a prayer.
Worshipped me like they were trying to carve themselves into my skin.
A footprint on a delicate canvas.

It didn’t matter that I didn’t know who I was — they wanted me.
They saw something I couldn’t.
And for those few, fleeting moments, my self-hatred vanished.

Sex made me feel powerful.
Beautiful.
Real.

Even if the aftertaste was sometimes regret.
Even if I had to fake orgasms like I was auditioning for survival.
Even if I sometimes cried in bathrooms after — mascara bleeding like confessions down my cheekbones.

There’s a particular breed of womanhood that forms in the aftermath of childhood trauma.
We’re the ones who throw ourselves into work, into love, into writing essays like this at 3 a.m. because sleeping feels too close to surrender.

We write.
We joke.
We seduce.
We perform softness like a monologue.
But we’re still scared little girls with lipstick on.

And music.

Because sometimes, even desire needed a soundtrack.

Music understood me in a way people never could.
It didn’t ask questions.
Didn’t need explanations.
Didn’t flinch at my rage or recoil from my softness.

It held me.
Wrapped around my wounds like silk soaked in gasoline — soothing, then explosive.

When I couldn’t cry, I played something that wept for me.
When I couldn’t scream, I turned up the volume until the bass became my breath.
When I couldn’t explain what was wrong, I’d find a song that translated the ache perfectly — and play it until my body believed it had survived.

Music was church.
Music was therapy.
Music was the lover who never judged me for coming undone.

I got lost in it often.
Sometimes in the middle of chores, headphones in, fantasizing I was somewhere else — someone else.
Other times at night, lying in the dark, letting lyrics touch me in ways no one else knew how.

And healing? God.
Healing is the slow, mortifying process of letting go of what once kept you alive.
It’s learning how to feel again.
How to stay in your body long enough to know what it wants.
It’s giving up the fantasy that performance equals safety.
It’s sitting still, even when your nervous system screams, Run, baby, run.

I’m not there yet. Not fully.
But I’m closer than I’ve ever been.

Now, I write instead of running.
I talk to myself like a lover, not a critic.
I want to cry in grocery store aisles and not apologize for it.
I sometimes let people see the cracks — not for sympathy, but because I’m tired of being a statue.

I still dissociate sometimes.
I still ache with old habits.
I still dream about disappearing.

But I also feel more now. And I like it.
The sharpness of sensation.
The rawness of real presence.
The honesty of hunger, grief, pleasure — all at once.
It’s erotic, in a different way.

Desire, for me, was never just about sex.
It was about aliveness — that primal, holy thing my trauma tried to crush.

And now?
I want to live so loudly the silence can’t find me.