Where'd you get that stamp?

It’s the summer of 1998, between junior and senior year. I remember stopping in with my parents in Boston on the drive out to Tanglewood. I’m sitting on the ground, eating a slice of pizza on the 4^th of July, looking every bit my seventeen years.

I don’t have a lot of photos from that time. It was before smart phones, after all. I look at the photo again. Long hair pulled back in a ponytail, dirty white Keds, a Micky Mouse wristwatch. I keep scanning, searching for any indication that I seemed older than I was. But no, my face still had that adolescent roundness to it, no chiseled signs of womanhood, soft cheeks. And yet, when that photo was taken, I was already about nine months into the entanglement that would have lasting effects in every area of my life.

I want to make it clear that I don’t believe the fact that I was groomed and picked up on the internet by a much older man is unique. I’m sure it happened a lot in the early days of America Online, and sadly, I’m sure it still happens a lot now on other online platforms, as well as schools, jobs, churches, pretty much anywhere there is a combination of teenagers and adults. I do think my story is a little different in the way it played out, and I want to share parts of it because I want to broaden people’s minds to what they think a victim of this sort of thing looks like. I typed and erased “victim” about five times, interspersed with “survivor.” Where do we cross the line in life from one to the other? I wasn’t “in with the wrong crowd,” I never used any recreational substances, no underage drinking, and I did very well in school. It’s also complicated because if you would have asked teenage me what was going on, or if you found out, I would have said I wanted it, that it was all I wanted. And boy was I loyal. Loyal to the point of skimming a rock bottom multiple times in my early adult years.

“The most consistent predictor of future trauma exposure is a history of prior trauma exposure.”

But middle-aged me knows better. In fact, just about the time I turned the age that the other party had been when it all started, I happened to be teaching at an all-girls’ school. I spent my days working with children ages 12-18. I saw them in first hour, with their messy buns and sleepy eyes. I saw them at performances when they were in their long concert dresses. I saw them at their school dances made up in full glam, with faces of makeup, professionally done nails, and heels they hadn’t yet learned to walk in. Even among the most put-together, not a single one could be mistaken for an adult woman.

The summer that that photo was taken, I went on to be one of the selected soloists for the big choral work. I felt like a bit of a black sheep there, as most of my peers went to performance art high schools and were clearly coming from a different background than myself, but I was thrilled, and it all tracked with me being generally hard on myself and an over-achiever in every area I could manage. I wanted out to see the world. Hours after graduating high school the following spring, I was on my way to New York. The next week, he moved in. Those first few years there were really bad. I’m not going to jump into the gory details right now, but the entanglement continued. There were a lot of other women, I was working to financially to support us while going to conservatory full time (Yes, you read that right), my apartment reeked of cigarettes thanks to his strong two-pack a day addiction and it was affecting my voice. There were much darker things too that I’m not ready to share. What I do remember, is that one spring day when I was nineteen and alone, I made the conscious decision to double down and try to make it work no matter what. A driving force in that was a message I had been raised with; that the absolute worst thing you could do as a woman was to have pre-marital sex. It was a hell sentence. I knew my life wasn’t good, and at that time I believed deep down that even though I was in the situation I was in and had made the choices I had, if I made it all work out, then maybe things would be ok.

It’s difficult for me now to even decipher what were my choices and what weren’t. In this country, we pretend that a magic flip of the calendar suddenly means that people are capable of making their own decisions. Depending on how deep you are in, sometimes what you want or need seems insurmountable. When you’re experiencing something like this, it’s pretty common and understood that you are keeping a lot of secrets from friends, co-workers, teachers, and family. And I was very good at keeping secrets and not getting caught. The only thing worse than them not knowing, is if they know and blame you for it, or brush it off because “you were always so mature.” Even now, I say, “Not getting caught” like I was the person responsible for everything that was happening when I was sixteen and he was in his 30s. I still have very complicated feelings about the people in my life who did know things were going on from its earliest stages and chose to look the other way. I’d like to think that times have evolved enough that it wouldn’t happen like that today.

The entanglement had a strong grip on me. I did continue to sing through it all, but I dropped out of school several times, had brushes with homelessness, night terrors, and of course lost many caring people along the way. Not to mention, and this is a big one, revictimization is real. Multiple assaults, harassments, and worse from multiple sources occurred throughout my late teens and early 20s. If you’ve been through something similar, you understand. As stated in the 2019 research study, “Risk for revictimization following interpersonal and noninterpersonal trauma: Clarifying the role of posttraumatic stress symptoms and trauma-related cognitions. Journal of Traumatic Stress,” “The most consistent predictor of future trauma exposure is a history of prior trauma exposure.”

I have long said of the opera industry that, “You can’t work your way out of not getting chosen.” Meaning, in a field where the top commercially successful artists are well on their way by their mid to late twenties, it is a nearly impossible feat to work your way up and have it all come together in your mid-thirties or later. But, depending on what it is you are chosen for, the opposite can also be true. What if you’re chosen to be one of “those” girls? The type that used to make an appearance on Maury or Sally in the late afternoon before the six o’ clock news? Once you have been on the receiving end of multiple significant traumas, it’s very difficult to convince yourself that there isn’t a stamp on your forehead. It’s as though the universe says, “Go ahead and work your tail off. Over-achieve. Push through. Go ahead and try to do good things in this world. You’re still going to be the girl chosen for THIS, but never the girl chosen for these.” You can fight that little voice, and you can go to therapy, and you can try to build a life, but every time things fall apart, that voice comes back with a vengeance.

THIS is what is just different enough about you when you walk into the room or pull up a chair at an interview. This is what the gently-raised can’t put their finger on. They think you’re stepping out of bounds when you suggest change or make an observation that they perceive to be blunt. Their life scale goes from 1-5 and yours starts at a seven. They’re say it’s a bad match. And if you’re an artist, they’ll marvel at your ‘bravery,” at your “fierceness,” your open display of vulnerability. And you don’t tell them that it feels safer to be on display from a distance because all of your walls were knocked down brick by brick and that you’ve been waiting so patiently for the dust to settle so that you can be seen for who you actually are.

Every time something good happens I teeter-totter back and forth between “Finally! I can rest!” and cautiously waiting for the other shoe to drop, because it always does. I’m at another crossroads in my life, and I’m so tired. I don’t know what the answers are, but I keep moving forward and I need all the help I can get. It was a journey to leave that entanglement, but it still rattles along behind me like a rusty can on a string. I dream of the day that string is finally cut for good. For now, onward.