Getting my wisdom teeth pulled was one of my more traumatic experiences from childhood. Although I’ve mostly healed from what happened that day, there’s one part that sticks with me—a reminder that who I am is different from who people say I am.
After my mouth had been gutted by the dentist with minimal novocain, and he left 1-1/2 teeth in the crook of my jaw, my mom rushed me to an oral surgeon in the city to finish the job.
This time they put me under. I remember three things: the coldness of the room and the people in it, counting backward from 10 to 8, and the doctor’s hand between my thighs.
I woke up to someone telling me my dad would be taking me home. I’m not sure why, but my parents had traded places. In the car I told him about the doctor’s hand. I’m autistic, so there was little emotion in it, just a matter of fact tone telling him I’d been touched inappropriately. He went back inside and then returned to the car, saying, “I talked to the doctor. He said you have a vivid imagination. It never happened.”
Vivid imagination.
I stewed on that awhile. For years, in fact, I gaslit myself, believing I must be wrong about the doctor’s hand between my thighs, and probably too, the boy who felt me up while I slept. I just had a vivid imagination.
Until I started to talk about things on TikTok and people believed me.
For the first time, I believed myself. At 43 years old, I thought, “My imagination is vivid, but this isn’t that. This isn’t my imagination. This is very very real.” For the first time in my life, I began to feel confident in what I was experiencing. My husband had been angry with me for saying no to sex. I did experience rape. I had in fact developed C-PTSD from 20 years of sexual coercion and a lifetime of objectification.
Believing myself changed everything.
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