In the Shadows by Oli Villescas

In the Shadows

feature by Oli Villescas

Trigger Warning: Suicidal Ideations & Childhood Sexual Abuse

There is no light without shadow, just as there is no happiness without pain. - Isabelle Allende

Solitary. Isolation. Healing. Between cold white walls, I sat on a plastic tan chair and called my mom from a public telephone, “I’m doing better and haven’t had any bad thoughts since I’ve been in .’’

My stay at a mental hospital in Southern California was an experience and stirred up many feelings, to say the least. Though I stayed for only five days, I used every day to better my mental health and focus on problems I had been suppressing for years. My willingness to fully open up came forth like the ubiquitous red Jell-O they served for dessert at dinner. Between forgotten pills and sleeping all day, I had gotten here; to a point in time where I saw myself hanging from my shower pole, only to come to the realization that it would snap from bearing my weight. Or the atrocity of someone finding me, swinging back and forth. Those were the few reasons I had to freeze-frame and unhinge myself, back and away from oblivion.

The sounds of screaming and crying surrounding me through thin walls as I checked myself in, my sister and various medical professionals swapping seats from hour to hour. Every morning would start at 5:30 AM— being awoken

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by a doctor who is monitoring my medication and progress, making sure I didn’t have any consistent bad thoughts.

There was never a moment in my life where I considered being capable of sleeping through hours of screaming. These shrieks of terror came for unknown reasons and rarely ceased— from morning to late into the night. I couldn’t tell the difference between afternoon and night time as it all blurred, at first. But groups were my absolute savior. They gave me structure and consistency, control in a time when control was merely a construct in my mind. From therapy sessions of the past, I had concepts of coping and noticing triggers come back to me and I was able to consolidate what worked But more than anything, I learned that bottling up emotions is one of my coping mechanism’s greatest flaws. And this flaw had adapted over the years. So much so that I pushed down childhood sexual abuse for 18 years. This shadow of secrecy has haunted me for nearly two decades too long, but now I am done with silence. To this day I believe recounting these events to be a severely positive and negative thing— continuously fluctuating in peace through answers, and terror through reminder.

I had read psychology books about sexual abuse– specifically about abuse that occurs at a young age– and, at first, thought I was beyond repair. That I was downright lost entirely. But then I read a morbidly confirming statistic from Bessel van Der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps the Score:

Each year about three million children in the United States are reported as victims of child abuse and neglect.

Sometimes I keep my shadowed screams inside.

I write this not for the evocation of binary emotions like happiness or sadness— for peace or to frighten—but for the grayness that many survivors live in everyday. The bewilderment, healing and struggle. Here’s to finding, that to simply exist is a fluid vastness beyond any essay.

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