My Story
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6 out of 10 children under 18 have experienced some form of physical, emotional and sexual violence, according to the National Population Commission Nigeria.
Between 2014 and 15, more than 53,000 rapes were reported to the South African police services. That is about 150 women victims per day.
Harassment affects millions of women across Africa, but in this region, sexual violence is more common.
Rape is traumatic.
Rape is evil
Rape is spirit-crushing.
I know from personal experience. I was raped from birth.
I’m 22+ now. Some few years back, I learned of the circumstances that surrounded my birth. I did not come out easily at the labor room. For many weeks, after I was born, the hole on my navel where the umbilical cord sprouted from didn’t close up. I learnt that then the belief was that such a child is expected to die after a while if the hole remained opened, but well, it stayed that way for long yet I was very normal. While it gave Mama sleepless nights, I seemed to know what I was doing, I was told. How could a baby, few days old on earth, seem to know what she was doing?
I also cried in a shocking way. Scary was actually the word my sister used as she reminded me what she heard from Momma. The tonality, cadence, and timbre of my cries were eerie, creepy, and unusual for an adult, not to talk of a baby. They said I cried like I was being tormented heinously, like office pins draped over my skin by some sinister hands, beastly soul. And they could never found out any reason. Of course the Doctors found no treatment. It got so bad I had to be taken out for treatments and also to consult those healers versed in the versatility of herbs and concoctions.
Everybody believed I was an abnormal child. I looked nothing less a beautiful child, yet nobody seemed to understand my place within normal beings. The voices were vociferous and overwhelming. Momma tried to convince herself and others that I was normal. But sooner, she began to believe it. And later, it became a conviction!
Everybody around me was convinced I had a strange spirit. People said there was something abnormal about me. And Momma was convinced I existed only as a bane in her life. I existed only to frustrate her efforts and waste all her hard-earned money.
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Right from birth I have suffered. I called it rape.
The very foundation of my sense of self-worth, self-belief, esteem, and confidence was raped away brutally by the thoughts, beliefs, words, and attitudes of those I have come to see myself through.
Whenever I had common headache, the way of thoughts go like, “I knew what I was doing and I only want to waste their money in the hospital.”
Often times, I always kept information of any illness or sickness to myself until it couldn’t stay a secret again.
I couldn’t stand the barrage of words hurled at me about how abnormal I’ve been from birth, how everything about me had been intentional, and I was only acting a script co-written with some dark, clandestine forces, of the veiled world, far beyond the range of sight.
“If you want to die, die” was a word I got used to when I fell sick.
I became a victim of rape. I grew up fearful of everything. I started contemplating suicide from early age.
My health started failing me even before ten. At such a slender age I already racked up history of sight problems, back issues, ulcer quagmires, joints pains, stomach aches, hair loss, and a host of other ailments. They all came to be as a result of negligence in treating symptoms at early stages.
Often times, I would be asked to take Panadol for whatsoever happened to me.
Then mental and emotional issues stared permanently. They formed within my soul and like eggs, hatched into myriad babies of impregnable disorders and obsessions.
I was gradually becoming psychic. I would be told that a certain spirit controlling me and before I knew it I would start acting like it. I would speak words, gibberish, echoing in the recesses of my soul. My mind had been raped and it had free course to anything, demons or anything foul that needed a space to thrive. Regularly I would be taken from places to places for prayers and deliverance and the priests in charge used whatever method they deemed fit, from hypnotism to torture, among many others, on me.
My teenage was that of slavery. I was drowning, yet knew not where to reach to or what to reach for.
I was in chains of despair, sorrow, and disorientation. I knew I only had dreams but would never fulfill it. I had mere aspirations that would never float. I had visions that would never march upon the corridors of fruition.
Why?
I believed I may not even be alive to do anything meaningful in life. I had already spent more time in the clinic than in church. I was doing many tests, even exams, right from the hospital bed. I was never good enough. Everybody around me is better off. What could this girl, skinny and gaunt from debilitating health issues, ever become?
All I knew was hatred, distaste, nothing about love. My love life was zero. Somehow, every guy that wanted a bit of friendship looked like a potential rapist or cultist to me. I was paranoid. I was afraid of guys. I was afraid of female friendship, even thinking some were lesbians reaching out for me. I was afraid of height. I was afraid of too-many things.
And the only place of refuge was within my cage.
Inside my cage I would revel in my thoughts and shut myself in from the world. I erected a mammoth wall around myself. For more than 20 years, nobody could break in that wall.
I was dying.
Then there was this prophecy that I would die at 20.
I believed it. It seemed an escape from this world of filth where I am the most protuberant garbage therein. On the road to clocking 20, I had the most bizarre sickness ever in life. Death was finally hovering. I could see his sinister eyes, laced with embers of cruelty, groping at me. His scorching embraces, like mallet on my joints, crushing it, I felt.
I used almost a month and half in the hospital. My sister broke into tears as she came to visit me in the clinic. I was mere bones, with two breasts.
I had no reason to fight for life. Everybody thought that was the end. I was going to die.
Then something changed!
This is my first post on steemit and this series is just an appetizer before I do my official introductory post. I feel I may not be able to cover my story completely in the introductory post. That is why I am giving you a summarized version of in two series.
I am Pulchritude.
Ghostwriter/Content Creator
Check me @ Me
