During the summer before my senior year at Georgia Tech, I was assaulted with a different kind of violence—this time, not physical, but emotional and existential.
It came in the form of a phone call from my sister Carrie. She was distraught, crying, barely able to speak. She had just been assaulted by both of our parents. At nineteen, she had been trying to start fresh at a community college in Florida after the family relocated from Connecticut to Hobe Sound, following our father’s layoff.
I can still hear her voice. The way it trembled. The way she said she and her friend—who I vaguely remembered as the stunningly beautiful girl she often hung out with—had talked after the assault and agreed, “Next time, we’re calling the police.” But there wasn’t a next time. Carrie just moved out.
That phrase haunted me: Next time. It carried a bitter recognition. We had been abused before. And we both knew it. But until that moment, it had never been spoken so plainly.
From that day forward, I saw Carrie differently. And I saw my parents differently, too. There was a strange new discomfort when I visited them for Christmas. I wasn’t sure how to act. I didn’t want Carrie to think I had forgotten. I hadn’t. I couldn’t. But I also didn’t know how to confront what we now both knew.
My brother had an easier time, in part because of his size. At 5’11”, he could stand up to our father. I couldn’t. Not then. Not in the same way.
But something had started to shift inside me. I had begun to feel better about myself—thanks to the support I was getting at school, in counseling, and from my close friends Thomas and Jo-Lee. I hadn’t told my parents about the conversations I’d had with my friends about the abuse. They didn’t know how much those outside relationships were helping me heal.
At my graduation, my parents met Thomas and Jo-Lee. Jo-Lee, ever kind and warm, made an effort to be polite. Thomas was quieter, more reserved—but his silence carried weight. He knew what I’d been through. And he didn’t want to pretend. My mother later commented that she “got along” with Thomas but didn’t feel comfortable around Jo-Lee.
If only she knew how much more intensely Thomas felt. How much we all saw and remembered.
That’s the legacy of gaslighting. You know something happened. You remember it vividly. But the people who hurt you deny it ever occurred—or worse, they pretend you’re the one who’s changed.
Years later, in 2020, I brought it up to Carrie again. At first, she seemed to hesitate, as if she had forgotten. I reminded her of her friend—the one she confided in. The one I remembered, even decades later, because of how shaken Carrie had been at the time. But she deflected. Changed the subject. There was no acknowledgment.
Maybe it was too painful. Maybe it was a kind of self-protection. Or maybe it was just another way shame rewrites the story.
Whatever the reason, it left me alone again with the memory. Not just of what happened to me—but of what I witnessed happen to her.
It was against this backdrop that I moved back into my parents’ home after graduation—without realizing how much unspoken tension I was walking into. I thought it would be a transition. Just a place to pause while I made my next moves. But in truth, it was a test I didn’t yet know I was taking: Could I grow in a house where silence had been more powerful than truth?
And those memories didn’t stay locked in the past. Years later, I would still wake in the night—next to Lynn, in a home built on love and safety—shouting, flinching, trembling. Nightmares of being assaulted as a child would surge to the surface, vivid and raw. I worried, in those early moments of waking, whether my arms had moved in sleep, whether I might have hurt her. But Lynn would reassure me: You didn’t hit me. I’m okay. My body was reliving what my mind had tried to bury. The violence I grew up with didn’t just haunt my memories—it lived in my muscles, my breath, my dreams. And it would continue to live there, in my memories and nightmares, until I was at least thirty.