The Red Thread

I didn’t plan to write this.

For a long time, I chose forgetting. Not because it was easy, but because it was necessary. Because forgetting was the only way my younger self knew how to survive. I tucked the memory away and built a life on top of it—layer by layer—until it felt solid, until it felt like mine.

And then, without warning, it was brought back to the surface.

I’ve been asked to remember.

Not gently. Not slowly. Just… remember.

No instructions followed. No map. No explanation of what to do with a memory once it’s unearthed. Just the suggestion to write it down, as if naming it would contain it, as if words could keep it from spilling into every corner of my life.

The truth is, remembering feels like an uprooting. Like every fiber of my being has been pulled from the ground at once. The past isn’t arriving quietly—it’s rearranging the present. It’s changing how my body sits in a chair, how my breath moves in my chest, how time behaves when I’m alone with my thoughts.

This happened to me.

A family friend abused me as a child.

Even writing that sentence feels like breaking a long-held agreement with myself. I learned early how to be composed, how to be functional, how to move forward without looking back. Forgetting wasn’t denial—it was strategy. It was self-preservation. It was a child doing the best they could with the tools they had.

Now I’m being asked to pick up those memories with adult hands, but no one tells you how heavy they are until you’re holding them.

I don’t know what to do yet.

I don’t know what healing is supposed to look like, or how much remembering is enough, or whether there’s a right way to hold grief that’s been waiting patiently for years. I only know that something inside me has been disturbed, and it deserves honesty instead of silence.

So this is not a resolution. This is not a lesson. This is not a neat story about overcoming.

This is a record of where I am right now: suspended between forgetting and knowing, between the life I built and the truth that insists on being seen.

If you are reading this and recognize yourself here—if you, too, chose survival in the only way available to you—know this: forgetting was not a failure. And remembering, when it comes, is not something you have to rush or perfect.

For now, I am writing because it is the only instruction I was given.

For now, that is enough.