Not All Scars Can Be Seen

Hello.

My birth name is Audrey Ella Kerns. However, about 2 months ago, I changed my last name to Garland. No, I didn't legally change it, no, I'm not married now, and no, I didn't ask for anyone's permission to do it. I made the choice all by myself.

So why did I do it, then? Well, because it's an essential part of my personal healing process.

What am I healing from? Well...a lot. A whole lot. It's a very long and complex story, and it's honestly exhausting to verbally explain over and over again. This is what led me to the idea of sharing my healing journey in the first place. I want to be able to fearlessly share my story, the works of art that have spoken to me, and the works of art I am creating with other people. I spent many, many years not being able to openly share certain things with other people, and I'm changing that for myself right now and right here.

I'm going to have to warn you: this is going to be a very long post and will contain detailed descriptions of emotional, mental, psychological, verbal, and sexual abuse. There will also be some profanity (I chose not to censor myself. These are my raw, real, unfiltered thoughts). If any of these things make you uncomfortable, or if there is a chance that this content could cause the resurface of traumatic personal memories, I advise you to not continue reading.

This post isn't going to cover absolutely everything; I plan on talking about some events in stand-alone entries, and I plan on not discussing other events at all, because I feel like it's not necessary to delve into every single little one. However, I really wanted to tell the main parts of my story here in this post.

I don't want this to come off as gossipy or attention-seeking, because that's not at all what my intentions are. I just want to stop hiding and pretending, and I want to be 100% upfront about all the parts of my story: the good, the bad, and the ugly. I also want to share this in the hopes that it resonates and connects with someone, and helps them realize that their own story matters.

That's what ended up leading me to finally open up about my experiences; I read and listened to and watched the stories of so many different people, both real-life stories and fictitious. Even though I didn't allow myself to fully relate and connect to them at first, they still spoke so deeply to me, and and now that everything's out in the open and now that I don't feel like I'm in any danger, I feel like I can openly and freely allow myself to relate and connect to them.

All of this started when I was 9 years old. My parents' marriage was starting to visibly crumble before my eyes. I had heard them fight before when I was really little, but now, I was seeing them act hostile towards each other and fight in front of me and my three younger siblings all the time. My father was convinced that my mom was being unfaithful to him with some guy online, but he didn't want to get a divorce because he believed it would be better for us if we grew up in a stable home with two parents.

How did I know this? I was directly told it. Over and over and over again. I heard lecture after lecture after lecture detailing the ins and outs of his side of the story. Since I was 9. I was his emotional support. Not a counselor, not a pastor, not an adult friend. Me and my 8-year-old sister.

I used to take so much pride in this. I felt so grown-up (little did I know how unhealthy it really was for me to be feeling grown-up to such an extreme degree). He called me his "patronus," which, if you don't know, is a charm from the Harry Potter book series that frightens away these creatures called "dementors" who suck all the joy out of a person and try to take their soul. I felt so special; I was helping keep my family together, a duty that I didn't realize wasn't supposed to belong to a child. I was myself a child, and I trusted my father, cause why would I need to question trusting him? He's my father, after all. He would never hurt me, and he would always do the best thing for me.

This was also when the "Family Counsels" would start. He would round up me, my second-to-youngest sister, and our mom, and he would basically have an argument with our mom right there. My sister and I were expected to participate in these conversations. He would ask us questions, usually yes/no ones, and even if, deep down, I didn't agree with the answer I knew he wanted me to give, I would say what I knew he wanted me to say anyways. I figured that if I didn't, he would go on and on for at least an hour explaining why his view was actually the correct one and mine wasn't. The topics of these "counsels" always stemmed from four main topics: infidelity, alcoholism, debt, or not investing enough time/effort/money/resources into my two youngest, autistic siblings.

Every time he would start calling us to assemble for one of these counsels, my mom would always say, "Can we talk about this upstairs? Can we not involve the girls?" And he would shoot back, "No, because if we talk upstairs away from them, you'll say a bunch of cruel, nasty things, and then you'll lie to them and say that you never said those things, and because they weren't there, they won't know whether you're being honest or not." He always won that argument, so my sister and I would have to sit through at least 3-4 tense, uncomfortable, nerve-wracking, emotional hours full of anger and yelling and crying. We both hated it, but I didn't believe that there was anything fundamentally wrong with it for years and years.

Every time my father suspected that my mom was cheating with a new guy, or felt that she was spending too much, or thought that she was drinking too much (she was an alcoholic for many years), or felt as if she had "undermined his authority" -- bam, Family Counsel time. From the time I was 9 years old up until I moved out at age 19 (though thankfully, by the time I moved out, there hadn't been another Family Counsel for at least several months).

I was encouraged by him to love my mom, but at the same time, I was told all these awful things about her, and most of them had to do with the mature, adult topics that were discussed in the counsels, the sorts of things I know now that a parent shouldn't be talking about at length to a child from the time they're 9 years old up until they're between 18-19 years old. Because of this, I hated my mom for years. I believed everything that was said about her by my father without a second thought because I know he'd never ever lie to me. He's wise, and he wouldn't say things like that if he didn't believe they were true. I believed and agreed with everything he said and every decision he made. I didn't start to remotely question anything until I was 14 years old.

During the late spring or early summer of 2015, I was molested by my father at age 14. There. I said it. After over 5 years of guilt and silence, I said it. I had been so scared. I was so afraid that if I spoke that phrase or wrote it down, it was going to make it more real, that it was going to make it hold more power over me. But the funny thing is that once I actually broke the silence, I’ve been progressively feeling better and better. I feel lighter and more free. Knowing that the people I’m closest to know and that the horrible memory isn’t only trapped inside my mind anymore has been so relieving. I had been so disgusted at the thought of dying with that secret. I wanted people to know. I wanted them to know the truth of what happened to me, and who had done it to me.

I remember the weather was getting warmer because I was starting to wear shorts and was needing more pairs. Most of the pairs I had were too tight or were getting holes in them. I had taken a whole bunch of jeans that were too short for me and cut them into shorts. I had been folding the newly cut shorts and putting them into a light-blue bin, which sat by the side of the bed, one push away from being underneath my bed. There were remnants and stray fabric from the jean leg-pants lying all over the floor. I was wearing a pair of these new shorts along with a hand-me-down shirt I had gotten recently from my aunt, I believe. I still own and wear it to this day, in fact. It’s a gray-and-white striped, long-sleeved, form-fitting shirt. I remember one of the many guilt-ridden thoughts that had crossed my mind after the molestation was wondering if I had somehow tempted my father with my outfit that day, because I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt paired with shorts, so my legs were supposedly being “shown off” more.

It happened at night, probably around 8pm or 9pm. The evening started out with me, my sisters, my brother, and my father watching a movie. It was an older, epic-style movie, I think; maybe a military or historical drama filmed in the 1960s. I was cuddling with my father on the couch, which was a very normal occurrence back then. There were times I used to cuddle with my father every day. I loved it. I was so proud of how close I was with my father. He would tell me all the time that most girls never cuddled or were close to their fathers, and he would tell me how lucky I was to have that type of relationship with him. I felt so grateful and so blessed. I thought he was the best father in the whole world.

The movie was really long and really boring, but I tried my best to be interested in it. Ultimately, we ended up switching it off before it ended. Slowly, my siblings trickled out of the room. I think that my sister had originally gone upstairs to help put our autistic siblings to bed.

My father had started slowly rubbing his hand back and forth along my thigh and my leg. There was something slightly off in how it felt. I couldn’t pinpoint what it was, but I could sense it. I had never gotten that feeling before while cuddling him, and it made me feel uneasy. Then, his hand slipped lower, and began to slowly rub in between my legs through my jean shorts. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I felt all jittery inside, and I felt disgusted as the stimulation caused my genitalia to pulsate and feel excited. I knew exactly what was being done to me, but I couldn’t process the facts. Incesteous. Sexual abuse. Molestation. I knew them, but I was desperately trying to deny them. My father would never do something like this to me. I know him. He would never hurt me like this, no matter what, right?

“Do you want me to stop?” he whispered in my ear. It wasn’t in a concerned tone. It sounded aroused. In response, I whispered things along the lines of, “Is this right? Would God say that this is okay? Is this against the Bible?” I felt paralyzed. I wanted him to stop so badly, and I had such a strong impulse to get up and run to my room, but I felt frozen. I felt like I both was and wasn’t in my own body.

Then my sister started coming downstairs. We could hear her footsteps and see her shadow cast across the dining room tile. Immediately, his hand retracted off of me completely. She walked right by us, not suspecting a thing. How could she? The mere thought of our father doing something like that to any of us was absurd. I know that she could make out the outlines of us, but we were just cuddling. Innocently cuddling. Nothing more. She went inside the bathroom and flicked the light on. I think she was using the restroom, washing her hands, or brushing her teeth. I can’t remember if she had closed the door or not. I felt like a statue. I didn’t know whether it was over or not. But then she left the bathroom and headed back upstairs, and after she was gone, his hand went right back to my crotch and resumed its stroking. I could be wrong, but I think I remember hearing his breathing getting heavier.

“Can you unzip your pants?” he breathed. I felt like my heart was going to pound right out of my chest. I asked all the same questions I had been asking before. “Is this right? Would God be happy with this?” Finally, it seemed like I had somewhat gotten to him, because he stopped. I forget why, but I think he asked me to get up. I did, and I sat upright on the other side of the couch. He got up too, and got down on his knees. He leaned in and kissed at my stomach. I had seen a movie before - Paranormal Activity 3, to be exact - which had a scene where the mother and her boyfriend got intimate, and he had kissed passionately at her stomach. My father shouldn’t be the one doing this to me, I thought. This is wrong. This is sick and wrong.

And then it was over. It was all done. I don’t remember if he left or went and laid back down on the couch. I do remember that not long after it ended, my mother came home from work. She had gone upstairs and into my sister's room to spend some time with her. This was during the first time she had her own room. She had wanted one for so long, and my father had finally allowed her to use the bonus room upstairs as her room. It didn’t have a door, but she didn’t care. She really wanted her own space. Sadly, a few months later, he forced her back into my room (which had been the room we had shared for roughly 7 years before she switched rooms this first time). He claimed that he was going to turn the bonus room into some sort of library/study space for us to use in college or something like that, but it never happened. My point in mentioning this is that I remember that I was molested sometime during the few months that my sister had the bonus room as her room.

First, I went into my room. I remember feeling dazed. I sat on the floor amongst the discarded remains of the jeans I had cut hours earlier. I was struggling to wrap my head around the fact that I had just gone through a life-changing experience. Nothing was ever going to be the same after this. It seemed so big and intimidating and frightening. It was far, far away from my comfort zone. I could’ve never, in a million years, guessed that I would not only be molested, but be molested by my father, one of my parents, someone who’s supposed to love and protect and care for me and not hurt me in one of the most horrible ways imaginable. My thoughts were screaming at me to go back to “normal”, whatever that was. I just want to go back to where I was minutes before. I want to go back to being the version of me who had never gone through this. So after that moment alone in my room, I decided that the best way to distract myself was to go spend time with my mom and sister. I went into her room and joined the conversation, laughing softly and smiling, sickened by how fake and false it felt. I still felt incredibly jittery. I was trying so hard to mask it with a smile. But I couldn’t deny the imposing truth that nothing would ever be the same again. Something of magnitude had happened.

Really early in the morning, at what must have been around 3am, my dad woke me up from my sleep. He looked panicked. I was half-asleep, but I distinctly remember hearing him whisper something along the lines of, “If you say anything, the police will come and take me away. You’ll be able to hear their sirens as they come to the house. If your mom finds out, she’ll never let it go. She’ll have something to use against me to break up the family. It’ll be just like what happened to Bob Cowan.”

Bob Cowan, for context, was a former mentor to my dad who was arrested for molesting the two eldest daughters of a family from their church during several in-home Bible studies. My dad was the one who helped get him arrested (I can't remember the specifics of the plan he suggested, but I do remember that it had worked). I had heard that story several times, so when he mentioned Bob Cowan’s name, I knew exactly what he was referring to. This is one of the main reasons I struggle to believe my dad’s current claim that he was “blackout drunk” and “doesn’t remember it at all.” He was the one who had woken me up in the middle of the night. He was the one who had been in a hushed panic. I remember being half-asleep, half-awake, both pretending to not to know what on earth he was talking about and knowing all too well. I remember seeing dark shadows across my dad’s face. Behind him, light from the hallway was streaming into the room. The door was ajar enough to let a decent amount of light in.

The next day, in the late morning or early afternoon, my father was preparing meals for me and my siblings. He was telling us that the food was ready, and I was bawling my eyes out, trying desperately to communicate with him that what had happened the night before had scared me and hurt me so badly. He got the message eventually. Later that day (I believe), I remember that the two of us had gone to Grocery Outlet in Auburn. Because my autistic siblings had a special needs social group program that they attended right across the street from that Grocery Outlet, I’m assuming that the reason we were down there was to pass the time while waiting for their session to end.

We had just arrived and he had parked the truck. He brought it up first. “We’re never going to speak about last night. We’re going to act as if it never happened. It only happened once. It could’ve been worse. I could’ve gone a lot further and you wouldn’t have stopped it, you would’ve gone along with it.” I was looking down the whole time he talked. I remember feeling a pang of horror at the “you wouldn’t have stopped it” comment. I thought something along the lines of, You seriously think I’m that weak? You really believe that if you had gone further and tried to rape me, I would’ve quietly gone along with it?

And that was it. That was the only direct mention of what happened that I would have for roughly 2-3 years. I vaguely alluded to it in an argument with him when I was 16-17 years old. I never talked about using specific terms - all I said was, "You hurt me really, really bad" - but he knew exactly what I was talking about, just from that. The next morning, he took me on a drive and told me about how torn up he was about what he'd done and how he had considered committing suicide over it. He told me that if I wanted to tell people, I could, but that his reputation would be ruined forever and that no one would look him at him the same way ever again, and that made me feel terrible, so I told him that I would continue to not say anything.

It terrifies me how effectively I was able to suppress it for so long and act like nothing had ever happened. I don’t remember a lot of specifics over how long it took me to feel comfortable around my dad again, but I remember that that’s indeed what happened. I think that I eventually reached that point because I kept telling myself, It only happened once. Dad isn’t that kind of man! He would never hurt me or anyone else like that normally. He was just in a really bad place that night, that’s all. You have to be understanding. But there were little, seemingly insignificant things that would trigger the memory. Sometimes while I’d be washing the dishes, he’d come by and kiss my shoulder. It disgusted me. How dare you feel like you have the right to kiss me there after what you did to me? But I never vocalized how much I hated it. I felt it though; internally, I would feel repulsed. I could literally feel my joints and muscles crawling at how icky I felt. There were also times when I would be sitting on the side of the couch I was molested on while watching a movie or studying or doing stuff on my laptop, and the thought This is where it happened would hit me. Then the swarm of lies I had built up would come rushing out to defend myself from the horror that was the truth.

You’re overreacting. It happened one time. One time. There are girls that are molested and raped and tortured for months and months, even years! What happened to you pales in comparison. It wasn’t that bad. Get over it. Can you blame him? He’s in a horrible marriage, and he’s probably been sexually starving for a long time. Can you really fault him for slipping?

But why couldn’t he have gone and fucked a prostitute or some consenting woman at his work? Why did it have to be me? Just because he’s choosing to stay in a shitty marriage to keep a stable home doesn’t mean that he had to resort to molesting his own child.

If you don’t put it into words...if it remains a horrible memory that’s in your head...then it never happened. Hell, you could chalk it up to your wild, macabre imagination or a terrifying nightmare you had. If you say it or write it down, that’ll make it more real. You won’t be able to hide from it anymore and you’ll have to admit that it happened.

Why didn’t you just get up and walk away once it started? Why did you stay and let it happen? How weak could you get? You’ve been raised to be a strong warrior, and you just let him touch you and rub you and kiss you. You got aroused when he rubbed at your vagina, didn’t you? You got excited.

But that doesn’t mean I wanted it! My body was naturally responding to the stimulus - I physically couldn’t help it.

While it happened, I remember this thought shooting through my mind: This is my first real sexual encounter. This isn’t at all what I expected it to be. I expected it to be with my husband. This is all wrong. I had only found out what sex was when I was between 10-11 years old from a neighborhood friend. Then, when I was 13, I started watching pornography. It only lasted for about a week or two, but I was so horrified and sickened with myself that not long after, I confided in my small group leader at church. I had tried telling my parents, but I just couldn’t do it. My father had emphatically talked about the evils of pornography, and he would often say things like, “My girls are good girls. They don’t get caught up in stuff like that.” I felt like I would be a disappointment and a failure in his eyes, so to this day, I’ve never told him. I did tell my mom though, and she was kind and understanding throughout that whole conversation.

I got so good at suppressing the memory, forcing myself to ignore it, and forgetting that it ever happened; it honestly frightens me how good I got at it. It makes sense though. My therapist explained to me that it's a survival tactic. My mind was trying to protect me, and seeing how confused and hurt and overwhelmed I was by how life-changing and horrific the event was, it did everything it could to shut out the memories. But I was never able to really escape it until I spoke up.

I used to wonder if I would ever tell my future husband about it. I had had it drilled into my mind that "it's very important for my father to have a good relationship with my future husband," and I knew that if I told him about what was done to me, that would obliterate any chance of the two of them having a "good relationship." So for a long time, I heavily considered never saying anything.

I used to wonder if I was going to die without having said anything, and that thought terrified me more than anything else. I didn't want the truth to die with me. I considered writing down what had happened and placing it with my belongings so that it would be retrieved after I died. Thankfully, that's not the route I ended up choosing.

Even after this devastating incident, my loyalty to him didn't waver right away. I had been so conditioned to believe him and agree with him, and so I continued doing that for a little while longer. However, it started crumbling more when I was 15.

I wasn't allowed to date until I was 18, but during my time at SKIE Learning Academy, me and a friend of mine (I'll refer to him as S) found out that we liked each other when we were 14. I was afraid to mention it to my father, so it was kept a complete secret for over a year. In either late September or early October of 2015, when S and I were both 15, I chose to tell my father about him, and he said that he would take S out to dinner and ask him a series of questions. After that happened, my father told me that S wasn't the right man for me. Apparently, his answers to some of the questions concerned my father, and he said that we couldn't "act like we were dating."

Then, February 25, 2016 came. That was the day my father found out that we sat next to each other all the time and held hands and danced together at school dances. He was outraged. He had stormed into my room, taken away my phone and laptop, and ordered me not to talk to or be near S again. I was forced to sit at a desk at the front of the school directly across from the principal's office and the front desk; I wasn't allowed to sit in the normal study hall room with everyone else during my free periods because S was in there. I was also pulled out of the theatre program for the spring. It was horrible. I cried for hours and felt miserable every day.

I was told by my father that I had "given into temptation" and had "broken his trust in me" and that "it was going to take a long time for it to heal." At first, I thought it was bullshit and was beyond hurt and pissed over it. Then, over the summer, my mentality changed. The things that he had said to me sunk in and took over. I ended up believing them. I ended up truly believing that I had "given into temptation" and that I was a horrible daughter for having lied to him and broken his trust in me, and that I needed to do everything I could to prove that I was a good daughter and that I was worth trusting. So when a different charter school, WSCA, accepted the application that my father had submitted for me a few months earlier, I chose to go there instead of going back to SKIE, which was the original plan. At that point, I felt like running away and starting over was going to be the easier way to keep him happy, because if he was happy with me, he would let me go back into theatre.

Thankfully, I was able to do theatre, show choir, and dance during my 2 years at WSCA, though he did bring up the idea of me dropping out of theatre and dance because I supposedly "wasn't spending enough time with my autistic siblings who needed me."

Around this timeframe, I was also often reprimanded when I would ask to go to see shows, or hang out with friends, or participate/volunteer/perform at different community events on my own without going with any of my siblings. I didn't have my own car or a license back then, so either my mom or my father would have to drive me. He would tell me I was always only thinking of myself and my dreams, and I was wasting his and my mom's time and money, and I was causing wear-and-tear on their cars, and I was so selfish. One time, I kid you not, he told me "Maybe you and S should have gotten married because of how selfish you both are" after I had politely asked to participate in a local dance competition that was going to be happening 5 minutes away from our house. Because of this, I became terrified to ask him if I could go anywhere or do anything with friends. When friends would invite me to their theatre performances, I often ended up not going because every time I would even think about asking him (because I had to ask him. Asking my mom wasn't good enough, because he was the "man of the house" and what mattered was whether he approved of it, not her), I would get a panic attack and my heart would start pounding and my stomach would get butterflies.

It was during my time at WSCA at age 17 when I started realizing how abnormal things were in my home. After class one day, I was talking to one of my teachers, who I was very close to. I had been having a rough week because my parents' fighting had spiked up a lot recently, and I knew that she was someone I could talk to. As I explained the situation, I mentioned the Family Counsels, and she looked very confused. She asked me whether it was mandatory for me to be involved in these counsels, and I told her I was. She then asked me why my sister and I were being involved instead of a counselor or family friend or pastor, and that was the question that really got my brain working. After roughly 8 years of going through all this stuff, I had never once thought of that before.

Why DOESN'T he talk to other adults about these things? Why does he lean so heavily on my sister and me? I thought. After that conversation, I slowly but surely became more and more aware of the fact that I was living in an unhealthy environment. I started realizing that I shouldn't have ever been intimately involved in all the nitty-gritty details of my parents' marriage, an excessive source of my father's emotional support, or saddled with the responsibility of "helping keep the family together."

As this realization grew and grew, I started to resist my father more and more. For example, every few months, he would tell my sister and me that he could "feel in his spirit that Mom's going to try and break up the family again soon" and ask for us to reaffirm that we were on his side, that we would help stop her attempts, and that if need be, we would tell her that we didn't want to live with her if she did leave, and that we both wanted to live with only him. I started to stop verbally responding when this lecture would come up again, choosing to only nod my head. This annoyed him a lot. He would tell me, "Your sister is committed to keeping the family together. I can't say the same thing about you." He was concerned over my "loyalty" and "dedication" to my family. This upset me, because by this point, I knew that this wasn't supposed to be my job in the first place. The whole thing was so unstable. I never knew if the family was about to fall apart or if things were "better than ever."

These sorts of comments only became more common once I graduated high school and started college. Naturally, I became way busier than I had ever been before. I was (and still am) a full-time student, working part-time at multiple jobs, taking numerous dance classes, and performing in theatre shows. I didn't have time for all the family drama he kept trying to shove on my plate, and I didn't care for it anymore. During the lectures, I would fiddle with a bracelet or scrunchie, pick at my lips, or squeeze and scratch at my palms while letting my mind go off someplace else, thinking about the homework I still needed to finish, the scene I wanted to finish writing for an original musical, the choreography I needed to rehearse for the show I was in.

The final straw came between June and August of 2019. Remember S? Well, I had ended up getting involved at a local Christian community theatre (I'll refer to it as RS) that he happened to work for as a theatre teacher. We were both performing in the theatre's summer musical, and in early June, we realized that we had feelings for each other again and wanted to date - actually date. We were both 18 by this point, and we were certain that because of this, my father wouldn't try to make things difficult and painful for us. Boy, were we wrong. It was even worse. I was lectured for hours and hours day after day on how "concerning" S's behavior was and how he wasn't the man God meant for me, and I was put under immense pressure to end things with him. My father banned me from doing future shows with RS, from becoming a dance teacher there when I was offered the position, and from going to any get-togethers with my RS friends, all because he didn't want me around S anymore. He would also say horrible, horrible things about S and his parents to me, things that were based on nothing more than assumptions he had made from the briefest of interactions with them. I would cry and say anything I could to try and make my perspective heard, but it did nothing. I was always proven "wrong" somehow. Nothing I could say could change his mind; it was never good enough. I actually did try to end things with S twice because of this; that's how intensely I was being pressured. But each time I tried, I just couldn't do it. It wasn't coming from the heart, so I'd chalk it up to me miscommunicating.

By late August, I had decided then and there that I was going to move out and live on-campus starting in the spring, whether I was still at community college or whether I was accepted into my dream university (I ended up being accepted there, and that's where I moved in on January 10, 2020). I started dreading when my father would come home from work. If I was downstairs when he came home, I'd hide and then dash up to my room when I had the chance. Whenever I did leave my room while he was home, I'd slink around the house, praying that I wouldn't run into him. I'd keep my ears peeled for the sound of his bedroom door creaking open so that I could brace myself for another 1-5 hour-long lecture. Every night, I would lock my door and turn on the fan to the highest level in an attempt to muffle myself so that he couldn't hear me through the door talking on the phone with S.

Despite all of this, I didn't fully accept that my father was abusive until a few months later, around November/December 2019. Until then, while I did recognize that he was overbearingly controlling, I originally felt like the term "abusive" was too harsh. Abuse is when you're getting molested or raped or tortured or beaten every day - the stuff he's done is nowhere near as bad as any of that...right?

One of the most complicated parts of this whole thing for me is that my father is not all bad. He has done a number of good things for me and I have many good memories of just the two of us together. But that doesn't mean that the hurtful things he's done to me stop being hurtful. That doesn't mean that the painful, unnecessary things he put me through were okay. That doesn't invalidate the fact that I have emotional and mental wounds that I need to heal from that were caused by him. He's a weird grey area in my mind that I still don't quite know how to understand. I don't hate him; I do still love him, and I appreciate the good things he has done for me. But that doesn't mean that I'm going to be anywhere near as close to him as I was when I was when I was younger, and that doesn't mean that I want to be around him very often anytime during the foreseeable future. Figuring out how to manage those two truths is, I think, a big part of my healing process. It's messy and nonlinear, but that's how real life is, and I know that I'll be able to accept it and thrive despite it.

I am not a victim.

I am not defined by what happened to me.

I am not going to let any of it hurt me anymore, not now or in the future.

I am not going to let him hurt me anymore, not now or in the future.

And part of my journey is not going by my birth surname anymore. It's been such a freeing experience for me, getting to choose the name I go by.

I am so thankful to God for bringing me out of that toxic environment unbroken. I'm wounded, yes, but I am not broken, nor will I ever be.

I am so grateful to God for the supportive, loving community of family, friends, mentors, professors, and counselors He has placed in my life who are encouraging and helping me along this journey.

I am so excited to continue growing and improving and healing throughout this year, and to uncover the big, beautiful future that God has in store for me.

I am thankful for the opportunity to be able to fearlessly share my story without any shame or regret, and I pray that God works through me and uses my story to reach, touch, and connect to others, whether they have similar life experiences or not.

My name is Audrey Ella Garland, and I thank you for taking time out of your day to read my story.