Nowhere but Up by Pattie Mallette, with A. J. Gregory

See? I told you I wasn’t lying.” No one would have believed me, and there was no way I was getting involved in a he-said, she-said argument.
    So I did what was most comfortable—I retreated.
    I think that happens a lot with abuse victims. Instead of using our voice to speak out, we keep quiet. We hide. We ignore. We pretend. There are so many different reasons we don’t tell others. We don’t want to rock the boat. We don’t want to make anyone mad. What if they think we asked for it? What if we look stupid? What if they think we’re lying? It’s such a difficult and delicate thing with which to wrestle.
    Though it feels like talking carries too much of a risk, in the process of keeping silent, we dig a deeper grave for ourselves day by day. By shouldering the burden alone, we are forced to find other outlets, usually unhealthy ones, to help us deal with it. Most times they lead us further down a dark road, making it harder to find our way up.
    As a teen, I envied people who could be unguarded, unafraid. I even wrote about that in my journal: “I think [I’m getting] more open with my feelings. I wish someone could understand what I’m going through. In drama class, everyone is so open. Girls told the class how they got abused sexually and a couple raped. It was so sad. Everyone was crying.”
    Yet in the next sentence, I made a sharp U-turn from writing about being vulnerable and wrote, “I hate how people are popular because they are pretty.” It was a stark about-face. There was no transition. I was so removed from the pain in my past, not even my diary was privy to the deep waters.

    Not long after the camping incident, I was drinking and doing drugs every day. I was getting into even more trouble at school and going to parties almost every night. I rarely ate dinner at home, and I never made curfew. Some nights I even stayed out until the early hours of the morning.
    Getting drunk and high for fun turned into a means of self-medicating. I couldn’t get through a class at school or a holiday function with my family without being stoned or drunk. By the time I was sixteen, I couldn’t function at all without numbing myself in some way.
    I stuck mostly with pot, my tried-and-true friend, though at times I had a feeling the joints I smoked were laced with angel dust or cocaine. I also did LSD. My trips were racked with paranoia and fear. I would feel unrelenting anxiety during the twelve-hour high. If I took a hit before school, I was a goner the entire day. I’d sit in class and try to follow what the teacher was saying, but I’d forget everything two seconds after she said it. Same thing with reading. I’d run my finger along a sentence, and by the time I got to the end of the line, I had no clue what I’d just read. If I was walking down the hall at school and saw the principal, I was convinced he was walking past me straight to my locker. He’d open the metal closet, find my stash of drugs, and have me arrested. The police would then drag me kicking and screaming out of the school and throw me in prison, where I’d spend the rest of my life. A little extreme? Sure. Welcome to the world of LSD.
    My mom wasn’t stupid. She noticed my strange behavior. Though she would get upset if I came home drunk or high, she didn’t press the issue. She would occasionally question me about using drugs or alcohol, and I’d always lie and say I wasn’t doing that stuff. She’d let it go.
    Though my mom and I didn’t see each other much because I was either out partying or holed up in my room, when we did, World War III tended to break out. All the pent-up emotions that had been building in me since I was a little girl spewed mini volcanoes during these arguments. My rage came out in bits and pieces, and unfortunately my mom took the brunt of my temper. Once it even got physical.
    I can’t remember what we were arguing about. It kept escalating at a pace neither one of us could stop. Heated words were