Tread gently – child sexual abuse content ahead. 

Autumn was my favourite season growing up. The air hit differently as soon as October set in. The melancholy of death, my feet crushing the leaves, and the crusty wind matched my emo demeanour as a Twilight movies enthusiast. With Star Movies as my go-to channel for special Twilight marathons, my screen time had to be beyond suspicion. For hell would befall if my parents saw me watching an “angrezi movie”, especially if I was caught red-handed mesmerised by a kissing scene. To save my TV rights and reputation, I had much to juggle with. 3:30pm to 5:50 pm was the range for any chance at TV-time alone, and the reverse-button from Disney 505 to 124 Star Movies became wired into my muscle memory. If I lucked out, I could catch most of the movie to make some sense of it … I gathered much fodder for my imagination. 

At thirteen, I used to argue that there is nothing sexier than being transformed into a vampire after shedding much blood, sweat and tears. I didn’t care about the storyline as much as the all-consuming aspiration for an immortal love that changes your biochemistry – the possibilities are endless. 

The reward for this love is a forbidden bite in exchange for a lasting imprint of ownership. Painstaking relief, I’d imagine it to be. What I wasn’t able to watch, I conjured up in my imagination. All that I derived from Edward, Bella and Jacob’s “will they, won’t they” raged and unfurled in my teenage dreams and stayed in my “fantasy notes”. 

I surf through my “forbidden folder” to take a sneak peek, and the urge to press delete on almost everything is a massive challenge.  But as a psychologist, I revisit my fantasy notes as memoirs of becoming. 

For context, I was sexually abused as a child for a period four years, often at home, by someone known to my family. My family is still oblivious and I’m still working my way around that.      When it comes to my desire and sexuality, I’ve had a baffling time. When a friend in college was describing how her tutor used to touch her inappropriately, it was only then, at 19, that I first uttered, “I think something like that happened to me too.”      

If my memory isn’t failing me, from the 2nd grade to the 5th grade, I was playing these weird games with the abuser, under strict instructions to not tell my parents. Gaslighting myself into believing that everything was alright was a much better strategy than to grapple with the possibility of being disowned by my parents. 

All these realisations came with crushing defeat of how I was failed by caregivers, society and institutions. From the age of 19 to now, eight years later, I feel gaps in my childhood memory, and cannot pinpoint anything that transpired. There are times when I have sex and I break down in tears from feeling too much pressure in the chest, or when a feeling of unfamiliarity creeps in. It is as if my body remembers something that my mind can’t trace. 

Research on memory reorganization suggests that trauma memory is heightened in sensory and emotional detail. Therefore, what the body remembers is often a key to understanding how agency is found (Crespo & Fernández-Lansac, 2016). Research highlights how expressive writing that captures emotional upheavals can improve wellbeing. The catch is, that simply writing the facts about traumatic events doesn’t work, and emotional expression alone is not enough. The gain lies in curating a language that translates experience. While venting might be cathartic, narrative practices can better supplement recovery and agency (Pennebaker & Chung, 2007). 

A qualitative research study interviewing eight women survivors of childhood sexual abuse who view themselves as having a positive sexual self-schema revealed some crucial findings. Sexuality after abuse does not necessarily remain defined by victimisation; some survivors develop a positive sexual identity through exploration, relationships, agency and reclamation (Hitter et al., 2017). Studies on child sexual abuse and healing reveal that survivors often take charge of what happened to them by storying their experiences (Draucker et al., 2011). While these may not often be a direct recollection of what happened, the recollections or utterances of what is said is a way to organise, own, and make meaning of what survivors hold or wish to hold (Draucker & Martsolf, 2008).

The number of times Bella, Edward and Jacob have all done things together in my notes is indicative of how I wanted it all for them, and for myself. Case in point, my pansexuality.  In Writing Oneself into Someone Else’s Story, Lehtonen (2015) explores how self-insertion stories create a domain of speculative life writing through which a fan explores their own persona without the fear of societal scrutiny or pressure of social desirability. From my own fantasy notes, I am reminded of how my troubled brain developed the agency to vocalise autonomous desire, away from the jarring grasp of an unwanted touch. My fantasy notes have formed a map of my sexuality as well. 

Reading my smutty diaries today gives me a direct look at my kinks. Through my scribblings I annotate how I like power, ownership, authority, pain, bondage, submission and domination. Most importantly, at 27, I am learning, through my teenage fantasies, how to convey my desires in a healthy and consensual manner. I often find myself testing the waters with a potential sexual partner by exchanging thoughts that are based on kinky scenarios. I gauge how we react, what we like and what turns us on by experimenting in fantasy, away from the pressures of reality and performance on the get-go. And, of course, because I find it super sexy! 

In many ways, Bella, Edward and Jacob thrive in my world and I in theirs. The power of smut is supreme. 

References 

Crespo, M., & Fernández-Lansac, V. (2016). Memory and narrative of traumatic events: A literature review. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 8(2), 149–156. https://doi.org/10.1037/tra0000041

Draucker, C. B., & Martsolf, D. S. (2008). Storying childhood sexual abuse. Qualitative Health Research, 18(8), 1034–1048. 

Draucker, C. B., Martsolf, D. S., Roller, C., Knapik, G., Ross, R., & Stidham, A. W. (2011). Healing from childhood sexual abuse: A theoretical model. Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 20(4), 435–466. https://doi.org/10.1080/10538712.2011.588188

Hitter, T. L., Adams, E. M., & Cahill, E. J. (2017). Positive sexual self-schemas of women survivors of childhood sexual abuse. The Counseling Psychologist, 45(2), 266–293. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011000017697194

Pennebaker, J. W., & Chung, C. K. (2007). Expressive writing, emotional upheavals, and health. In H. S. Friedman & R. C. Silver (Eds.), Foundations of health psychology (pp. 263–284). Oxford University Press.

Lehtonen. S. (2015). Writing oneself into someone else’s story: Experiments with identity and speculative life writing in Twilight fan fiction. Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, 2(2), 7–18. https://journal.finfar.org/articles/writing-oneself-into-someone-elses-story-experiments-with-identity-and-speculative-life-writing-in-twilight-fan-fiction/ 

Cover image by Dollar Gill on Unsplash