214: What if you woke up in oblivion?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. It's the sense that my life is so much more fragile than I thought it was. And my existence goes beyond this tiny little place that I live in. My existence means so much more to me than I realized. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein.

You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 214. What if you woke up in oblivion?

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I grew up in a small town with my mom and my dad and my older sister. When I was born, we lived in a trailer park, but they worked really hard to provide a nice place for us to live. And I always felt loved and I have a lot of happy childhood memories.

My parents both came from hardworking farm families and they didn't have a lot. That kind of style of parenting definitely reverberated down. So they were a little bit more harsh, kind of full of expectations. My dad was definitely not the most easygoing person. He was really particular and specific about how everything should be.

My mom, I mean, to me, she was a lot more kind of warm and understanding. And my sister was very outgoing and gregarious and independent. And I feel like she really knew who she was from a young age. And she was quite demanding. And I was the antithesis of those things. I was really shy and uncertain. And I was really sensitive. And I was really attached to my mom as well.

Because my sister was so self-assured, I was the opposite. And I was always jealous because she was so likable and had this teasing rapport with everyone. And I wasn't. And so people really labeled me as shy. And it was kind of like this self-fulfilling prophecy for me, like that's who I was. And being treated that way by my family really made it hard for me to develop any self-confidence or a strong sense of self.

But it's kind of like, I don't know if I was actually that shy or if people just told me I was. When I got older, it was really amplified because in school, my sister wasn't afraid of standing up for herself. She was labeled as a bitch. And so I did not want to be like her at all.

So I didn't need to be treated like I was shy, just like my sister didn't need to be treated like she was tough. We both needed to be able to be nuanced human beings and not images of what little girls are. So my parents and my sister fought a lot for as long as I can remember. They would have screaming matches. I feel like it was this constant power struggle.

My parents were really hard on my sister, and she, in turn, was really hard on me. She was kind of angry, and I was probably the one area of her life where she had any control. And so she kind of hated me. As a kid, I never understood why, but she would really undermine everything I said, and she would gaslight me. And I kind of felt like she made it her life's mission to make me feel bad about myself.

She didn't want me to be like a confident, independent person. I think that she wanted me to stay small and always be beneath her.

While my parents were very loving and caring, they, I don't think, really knew how to handle our emotions or didn't consider them to be acceptable. We weren't encouraged to express ourselves. And if we wanted to kind of do things our own way or be our own people, they really fought against that. They wanted us to do things the way that they were taught how to do them. I think we were taught to kind of keep certain things locked up

And I also knew that I could get in trouble for having any kind of outburst. My sister would get in trouble a lot. And I definitely didn't want to get in trouble. I didn't want anyone to be mad at me. I didn't want our home to be any more volatile. I always remember being really aware of how I might be affecting other people. And so I kind of felt like I had a role of keeping the peace. And at the time, my parents were really grateful for that. But

But they didn't know how to teach us how to be okay with how we were feeling. And because emotions were a punishable offense in our household, it wasn't always a completely safe place. I think once when I was getting close to being a teenager, I wrote a note. I was really mad about something and I had written a note saying that I was going to kill myself. And I didn't even know what that meant.

And I definitely wasn't going to kill myself. But my mom found it. And her response to it was, that's a really cowardly thing to do. And that was kind of it. She didn't really like go there with me about like what that meant or why I was feeling the way I was feeling or how to deal with it.

And then around 13 years old, my sister moved to the high school. So for the first time, I was at a school by myself and I had my own friends who didn't know anyone in my family. And I kind of started this quiet rebellion. I had no idea who I was or what I wanted, but I just wanted to be different. I think I wanted to grow up.

This is when I started my own life. This is when I stopped looking like a kid. I got a lot of attention from guys. As a girl, a lot of my self-worth was tied into my looks, unfortunately. So I started dating. I started going to parties. I started drinking. I started smoking weed and getting high. And it really wasn't influenced by anyone else. It was just what I wanted to do.

I did not want anyone to know about it. I didn't want to get caught. I just kind of wanted to have this double life.

My parents were really quite strict. So I was really tricky and sneaky. I snuck out of the house a ton and I was really good at it. I definitely wanted to maintain this appearance at home like I was a good student and a good kid. I actually really loved having this secretive life that they didn't know about. I think they really thought they knew what was going on in my life and they really didn't at all.

At 14, I really started to get interested in guys and they started to get interested in me. I was still a pretty shy, nervous kid and I had always been treated that way. And so it was kind of like refreshing to be able to be carefree and wild and kind of pretend to be someone else, I guess. Even though inside I probably was uncomfortable with a lot of the things I was doing, I was just being young.

The summer that I was 14, I convinced my parents to let me go stay at a friend's relative's house. It was in a town that was pretty far away. My friend and I were kind of on our own. And so what my parents didn't know was that we were basically unsupervised the whole time.

My friend knew a lot of people in this town and there were some older guys who had an apartment and we would go hang out there and we would drink and get high and kind of live out this fantasy of being older and doing whatever we wanted. I was definitely...

still nervous to be in these situations, but I think I was really done with my childhood. And so in this town where I didn't know anyone, I was able to be a grown-up. I had no sexual experience at this time, but for whatever reason, I wanted to lose my virginity.

It was kind of this thing that was tying me to childhood and I really didn't know what sex meant in any way and I was very naive, but I, yeah, I wanted to have sex. So it was my last night there and I was at the apartment with my friend and I was a little bit high and this 17-year-old guy that I vaguely knew took me back into this gross bedroom and it was kind of like this foregone conclusion that

He just had sex with me and it was not remotely romantic or okay. And the whole time, this voice in my head was literally screaming at me to get out of there and I ignored it. I think in my head, I tried to justify it like this is what I wanted to happen and it was fine. But my body knew something was not fine and my body knew that trauma was happening.

I really feel like I left my body when it was happening and I wasn't even there. And then it was over and I felt so empty. I knew I was too young to be in that situation. And I knew that I wasn't prepared for that. And I knew that my ability to do anything about it didn't exist.

When I was in that apartment and I needed to stand up for myself and have a backbone and have a voice, I didn't know how to and I couldn't. I was completely frozen. And I think like if I had been taught those things of like, it's okay for people to be mad at you. It's okay for someone to call you a bitch or it's okay if someone doesn't like what you're doing or saying. Those ramifications are nothing compared to what's going to happen to you.

I went back into the main area of the apartment and there was like a bunch of people there and everyone was smoking weed, joking around. And yeah, it was like it had never happened. I remember this girl making this comment about how I looked a lot older than 14. That always kind of stuck with me because that was what I had wanted. I wanted to be bad and I wanted to be grown up. At that point, yeah, I do feel like my childhood was over.

And I just felt like I had taken it too far and I felt kind of ruined after. My friend and I just went back to her relative's house and we left and we joked around about it. We definitely didn't talk about what actually happened. I really think I just wanted to pretend like it hadn't happened, like it was just a non-event in my life and did my very best to not think about it ever again.

But I was definitely changed in ways I didn't really understand. I started partying a lot and I definitely sunk into a depression. I started self-medicating. I started taking a lot of prescription painkillers from my parents' medicine cabinet, allergy medication, just basically any kind of medication I could get my hands on, I started taking. Something had changed where I wasn't like a happy kid anymore.

I was always really hard on myself. And because I didn't know who I was, I just kind of felt like everything was my fault or my responsibility. So I just kind of hated myself. I really didn't think that I had any reason to have anything wrong in my life. You know, I came from a good home.

My parents were there and everything was stable and I had friends and I was privileged in a lot of ways. And so I just felt like there was something wrong with me that I was so depressed and I hated myself so much and I didn't know why I was like that.

I had so many friends who I felt like had gone through worse things than I had. You know, people who came from divorce or people who lived in a bad part of town or people whose parents did drugs or whatever. And I didn't have a lot of those problems. And the problems I did have, I felt were really self-inflicted. And so I felt really like there was something wrong with me. Like, who am I to have all of these feelings?

And who am I to feel so much angst all the time? Why do I need to be numb? Like, why am I doing these things to myself? At this time, you know, around 15, my depression was getting bad enough that it was starting to affect my school. And I just really didn't care like about school at all at that point.

My mom would always try to get me to talk to her. I remember her like begging me to talk to her. That was really unimaginable to me to be honest with her about anything at all. I would have never just sat down and told her exactly how I was feeling. I didn't even really know how I was feeling or how to process that. And I would just like bite my lips with tears streaming down my face to stop myself from talking because I had no idea what would even come out.

I really thought that sharing my suffering with anyone would perpetuate it and make it worse. And so I just wanted to keep it all to myself and I thought it would go away. The small town life meant there was always parties happening all around. A lot of the time it was like these big parties in the bush and we would just go and drink a lot.

I was in always like really intense relationships and they always felt kind of self-destructive in a way, like they weren't really healthy. It always felt good to have someone there who wanted me, even though I didn't have those feelings within myself at all. I had no sense of self-worth at

Along with drinking and smoking weed at parties, this kind of secretive part of it was the pills. So it would just like take me out of myself. It just became this habit that I developed and I didn't think about it at all. And I didn't share it with anyone.

Painkillers made me kind of angry, especially if I would drink and not even at anyone or anything. I was just like kind of raging inside of myself. It was just this like terrible time of not knowing what I was doing and trying anything to feel better. Along with the pills, I also started self-harming. I would cut myself off.

Just to kind of feel something and like physically manifest this pain and these emotions that were happening in my head. I couldn't have imagined like physically ending my own life, but I also just didn't want to exist. I just didn't think it was worth it.

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And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24-7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. One night, I was 16, and I was at a random party, and everyone was drinking. I think some people were doing ecstasy in another room, but I would have been too afraid to try it.

I'd found this case of compressed air cans for dusting like keyboards called Dust Off. I saw it and I knew that it could get me high. And so I wanted to try it. And I probably wouldn't have made that decision if I hadn't been as drunk as I was. But I took a can and I just went for it. I huffed it. It was cold and it was kind of sweet. And then it was like euphoria. Yeah.

It made me laugh really hard and everything slowed down and sped up at the same time and it felt like everything was vibrating. It was also really quick so it started and then it was over. It was just this crazy thing that we did and I just knew that it could get me high and I wanted to be high. I enjoyed the sensation so much that I took the can with me from that party. I brought it home.

Huffing this dust off just kind of fell into rotation where sometimes when I was by myself, I would huff some air and get high. And that was kind of it. I just carried on like that for a few weeks.

It was a Thursday night and I was alone in my room. I had school the next day. I definitely wanted to numb myself. And so I started to do some huffing and each time it wore off, I inhaled more over and over. I didn't want the sensation to wear off. I wanted it to keep lasting.

I kind of settled into my bed with this can of compressed air and I just laid there trying to keep my high going until I fell asleep. As I laid there in the dark, I noticed something seemed off. So I got up, I turned on the lights, I looked in the mirror and my lips were swelling. But I convinced myself that it was fine and I got back in bed.

My mouth felt really strange. Everything was kind of tingly. My head was a little bit fuzzy. So I got up and turned on the lights, looked in the mirror again, and my lips had swollen further. I just kept telling myself it was fine. I would turn off the lights, get back in bed, get up, look in the mirror over and over again for what felt like hours. And the swelling just kept growing.

I knew something was wrong, but I also knew that telling my parents how badly I fucked up was absolutely out of the question. But something inside of me knew I was in danger. You know, that voice, again, was screaming at me. And this time, I could not just ride it out and do nothing.

I barely remember, but for whatever reason, something inside of me forced me to get up and tell them that I had messed up. I went right into my parents' room and I told them that we needed to go to the hospital. My mom kind of sprung right into action.

I don't remember even telling her what I had done. You know, all of this shame that I was afraid of and like the judgment and all of this, like it's all just this like complete blur compared to what was actually happening. I had to be taken by ambulance to the closest city. And I remember the paramedics saying, we're going in hot with the lights and sirens on.

And my face just continued swelling. I remember constantly being asked if I could breathe. And I would just kind of nod my head because I could breathe out of my nose. And I also remember my shoulder was in a lot of pain. It felt like it was on fire. Then at the hospital, I was just in a complete daze.

This doctor came up and asked me if he could take my photo because he said that they hadn't seen this before and it might be helpful for teaching purposes and showing other kids what could happen.

I had this burning sensation kind of on my face and mainly my shoulder, which was really confusing to me. And it was really intense pain. But because my face was swelling so much and I really couldn't talk or communicate, I remember being very still and

The whole time I just felt this weird like crystal clear calm. I was probably in shock but I obviously knew something big was happening and I just felt like I was kind of frozen in time. There was a lot of talk about a tracheotomy and making sure I could breathe. Then for me everything just went dark. My next memory felt like I was coming up from underwater.

It was almost like being born and I was taking my first breath. I could feel the breathing tube sliding out of my throat. And I could see this giant digital clock on the wall with red numbers and it was counting up. What followed that sensation was a lot of hallucinations.

I had no idea what was going on or where I was. It was this terrifying feeling of just kind of floating in this wonderland. You know, I felt like there were clowns all around me. I felt like I spent weeks as a child in a daycare. I remember exactly what the floor of the daycare looked like. It was that like colorful foam floor.

My family was kind of looking in on me as I sat in this daycare, but there was like a piece of glass between us. And so they could see me and I could see them, but they weren't there with me. I truly felt like, you know, I was this child living in a daycare and I was playing and that was my reality for what felt like a couple of weeks.

I remember staying with some friends at this dusty farm, and I know exactly what it smelled like. I remember falling out of this barn window and the rain hitting my face. I remember feeling like I was lifted in the air and spun around while this priest blessed me.

There were days and it felt like weeks or maybe even months of me coming off of all of the drugs and just hallucinating and having all of these experiences that weren't actually happening. Maybe parts of me knew that I was in a hospital, but I don't think so. I think I was just living out a completely different reality for a lot of days.

The whole time I was hallucinating, there was kind of this undercurrent of fear because I knew things weren't exactly right, but I didn't know why. It's kind of like in a dream when you know you're dreaming because things aren't happening the way they should. It was just kind of this scary experience going through these hallucinations.

There was a lot of confusion while the hallucinations from all of the drugs wore off. And so my mind would kind of slip in and out. My parents had to tell me where I was and what was happening a lot of times before it kind of sunk in. And I realized that I was in the hospital.

And so at that time, I woke up and I learned that I had been intubated and placed in a medically induced coma on a ventilator for 10 days. When I first fully comprehended that, I was really shocked and I didn't know why, to be honest. I didn't know why I was there.

It was really confusing and scary realizing that I had almost died and that I was still here. I knew that my life was different. It had to be, and I knew that I was different. I really felt kind of like a child when I woke up, like almost being reborn in this new reality again.

For a while, I think I really wasn't in my body. I think it was, I was just kind of living in my mind. And then the first like really clear memory that I have is when I was able to get up for the first time, because I think it kind of put me back in my body of like, I exist and I'm here. I felt like I was a newborn baby deer. I could barely walk. I was on these like wobbly little legs. And I remember I had to go to the bathroom and

So my mom and this nurse helped me get to the bathroom and they said, don't look in the mirror. And I was really confused by that. So of course, like the first thing I did when I shut the door was I looked in the mirror. My lips were swollen to the size of hot dogs. And basically from my lips to the entire left side of my face, my cheek, my jaw, down to my chin, that whole area was black.

and just covered in scabs. It was really shocking. I thought for sure in that instant that I was scarred for life, but I knew that I was lucky to be alive.

What I learned was that the chemicals and the cold from the aerosol had burned down my throat, into my airway and lungs, also on my face and my entire left shoulder. It had caused all of this swelling from the inside out that couldn't be controlled.

All of this damage meant that I had to be put on life support, and they really didn't know if I was going to come out of it, or if I did, if my brain would have any damage, or if I would be able to breathe on my own. It was kind of this wait-and-see situation the whole time. After I woke up and I started breathing on my own, there was a lot of

physical issues within my trachea. I couldn't eat or drink for a long time. Once they had taken me off the breathing tube and waited for me to come back, I basically was moved to the children's ward. And then I spent three weeks there. During that time, I also met with the psychiatrist and had to kind of start unpacking all of the psychological things that were going on as well.

These burns, you know, were really this physical manifestation of what had happened. And so they were incredibly painful and scary. Every time I looked at myself, it was horrifying, but I was grateful to be alive.

That feeling of almost dying and then still being alive is something you can't really explain. It's the sense that my life is so much more fragile than I thought it was. And my existence goes beyond this tiny little place that I live in. My existence means so much more to me than I realized.

I feel like leaving the hospital for the first time and like I could feel the warm sun on me. Just this like epiphany of like I'm alive and I felt so grateful and I knew that I was lucky to have my life. I don't think you really know what that means to not want to be here until you're almost not here and then you realize what it would mean to not be here.

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So I had a lot of conversations while I was still in the hospital with psychiatrists about what had happened and kind of all of the whys and hows. They definitely wanted to know if I was suicidal and if I had wanted to end my life, which I didn't. I remember this nurse actually, she saw me and was just like, oh, what happened? And I was so taken aback. I was like, oh my gosh, what am I going to say? And I was like,

I inhaled dust off and I burned myself and I don't know why. And she kind of stopped me and she was like, oh, you don't have to explain yourself to me. And I loved that because it was like, oh yeah, like I don't have to explain myself. Like this is just something that I did and this is what happened.

I had a lot of conversations with my parents. And at first, I really tried to resort back to that, like, everything's fine. I don't know what you're talking about kind of idea. And then, you know, they were just kind of like, okay, the jig is up. We know everything. We know what's been going on. I had to like for the first time stop lying to them and be honest, which was really weird.

I was really ashamed and guilty about what I had put them through. They were obviously traumatized as well, and so I felt a lot of shame. The whole time I had been in the coma, they were kind of emotionally processing and preparing themselves for the worst. You know, my mom had kind of hardened herself. She really thought that she was going to lose me.

My dad was really kind of softened and he talked to me about when I was in the coma, I was restrained. And so sometimes I would kind of get really frustrated and want to try and pull my tubes out and stuff. And so he would stroke my eyebrows to calm me down, which I thought was really kind of him. It was like this little detail that he had for me, but I didn't know what to make of where our relationship was at for quite a while with them.

and feeling this like sense of guilt and shame of like, I've done all of these things. I fucked up in this huge way and I almost killed myself. I really didn't know how my life was going to be different or how it was going to be changed, but I knew that it was. I just felt like I needed help and I didn't have ways to cope and I didn't know how to express myself in any way. And so I knew it was going to be a long road.

Before I left the hospital, the plastic surgeon came and scraped a whole bunch of the black scabs off of my face and shoulder. You could just see this like perfect pink skin on my face underneath it all. That was really the first time that I realized like my face might actually be okay.

We left the hospital. I remember it was this like beautiful sunny day and I could feel the sun, the heat on my face and it felt so good feeling like I'm alive. It was really wonderful.

I did stay in the same school and a lot of my friends stayed the same. Everyone was really supportive. And I didn't really talk about what had happened, but I did do a lot of therapy on my own and with my family. I did vaguely talk about my assault and they kind of knew that it happened.

We did a lot of family therapy as well. And we talked about how my parents would kind of take it upon themselves to shame and punish when I messed up instead of just letting the natural consequences of the world teach me. You know, I just wanted them to be my safe space while I figured everything out.

I remember my therapist telling me, "You need to have temper tantrums." Like even though I was a teenager, she was like, "You need to express yourself and let it out. Show your anger." And I was able to. I was able to let myself do that a lot more than I had in the past. Because I was so young, my face healed quite quickly. It was discolored for maybe a month or two and I could kind of hide it with makeup.

I just had this like jagged line of pigment on my bottom lip where I had been burned and then my shoulder was a lot more damaged. A pretty sizable patch of discoloration on my shoulder that ends in this lump kind of the size of a quarter where the chemicals had settled. But otherwise looking at me you would never know that this happened.

This kind of huge event happening was really probably the best case scenario because the path that I was headed down was so bad and I wasn't capable of stopping myself. And so for everything to kind of come crashing down around me all at once probably ended up saving my life.

I finished high school. I went traveling and I kind of had to learn who I was and gain independence and get out of this tiny bubble that I had been in my whole life and allow myself to have experiences and meet people, which is really healing. My ways to cope my whole life kind of involved harming myself, doing things that were self-destructive and numbing myself and not talking about it.

It took a long time for me to figure out how to not harm myself. And all through my early 20s, a lot of stuff came up that was difficult. For sure, I would slip back into how can I hurt myself to make this better? And I was at one point diagnosed with bipolar type 2, but I do think what I was experiencing that whole time was PTSD.

After I finished traveling, I went to university and one of my roommates, I was pretty close to her and I shared a lot about my life. And then close to the end of the year, I found out she had been tweeting about me and posting pictures and just basically harassing me and bullying me online the whole time. And I didn't know why.

That really triggered a lot for me, and I kind of sunk into this really major depression. I didn't leave my room for a long time, and I started self-harming again. I saw a psychiatrist, and I was diagnosed with bipolar type 2.

I was going through this huge depression and it wasn't out of the blue. Nothing that happened was for no reason. It was all just triggered by these traumatic events that had happened. And so once I was able to have a more steady, stable situation in my life, I can kind of look back and realize like I didn't have bipolar disorder. I had PTSD.

Learning about trauma response. A lot of people think these big events will happen and then you come out of it and it's a story to tell, but it changes you. Especially when you're still figuring out who you are, it's like your formative years, you will struggle. There will be things that are difficult and you have to go back and unpack it all.

Even like in action movies, you know, like the hero comes and saves the day from the villain and the hero's like, everything's fine now. And it's like, these people are all traumatized. This is not okay. After that experience in university, I decided to switch lanes and become a flight attendant. It was just a great way to kind of see the world and meet people and get away from it all and just kind of like see what else was out there.

I did feel like I was kind of finding myself and figuring out what I wanted and who I was. And then I experienced a second sexual assault when I was 21. And I was out with my friends and I was really drunk. I left with this guy I met to go to an after party. And he assaulted me there. And then whoever owned the house kicked us out. And he offered to drive me home.

The sun was coming up and he kept driving further and further from the direction of my house. And I kept asking where we were going. He finally pulled up to his house and took me inside and pushed me on his bed. And I got up and ran out of his house. Trauma triggers trauma. And so it wasn't just dealing with what had happened then, but it was dealing with what had happened when I was 14.

The thing that I did differently was I took myself straight to the hospital and I called my sister. And so right from the get-go, I wasn't going to hide this. It wasn't going to be my shame to carry.

When I considered reporting it, I kept thinking that I had voluntarily left with him and I wouldn't be able to explain that. And so that's how ingrained it is in women that we're responsible. And looking back now, it's so clear to me that he knew what he was doing and that it was wrong. But I felt like now that I was older, I was capable of reporting it and seeking justice. And I still wasn't. So I

I felt a lot of guilt about that and I hated that I couldn't bring myself to report it. But I can look back now and know that I was really re-traumatized and I kind of was just doing everything I was capable of to put myself back together and be okay. And I see just how difficult the world makes it for women who do come forward

I cannot explain how much reverence I have for women who come forward, but it isn't only our burden, just like it's not our job to prevent it from happening. I think the hard thing about sexual assault is that you're put in this place of either being this victim or having made bad choices and it's your own fault. And so there's really no good place to be. I resorted to

Blaming myself and kind of the most difficult truth was that like I had to come to terms with how much I hated myself and I would harm myself and hurt myself and I would never like allow myself to just kind of accept who I was. It was always like there was something wrong with me.

I used to think that existing is somewhat cruel. You just have to be in pain and suffer on the inside and pretend everything is fine on the outside. As a kid, I didn't have this sense that my feelings were okay. So I was kind of angry at myself all the time. And I didn't want to be at fault. I realized that I don't have to be so hard on myself. I don't have to hurt myself.

I can just be who I am and I'm enough. And so much of self-worth comes from trusting yourself. And I didn't trust myself. And then I didn't really trust anyone else either. And I had to learn how to change that. I met my now husband at the end of high school, but we were mostly just good friends for a long time.

He was just someone who was kind of always there, always incredibly supportive. Being able to accept his support and, you know, feel worthy of his love has been a big part of my healing. Like, I'm so grateful that I allowed myself to be with him. And a huge part of the shift has been having children myself.

Raising kids, you just really realize that kids are these like complex autonomous beings who are so completely themselves right from the beginning. Being able to parent my kids and learn how to be gentle and understanding with them and then let them be themselves and hopefully be their safe space has taught me so much.

Being able to do that with my kids has shown me that I can do that with myself. What I'm feeling and what I'm experiencing can be okay. And I also have a really remarkable relationship with my sister. We are extremely close and we've had a lot of conversations about our childhood and how she treated me and I've forgiven her completely. I know that she was a child and she didn't know what she was doing just like I didn't know what I was doing.

Now, I don't know what I would do without her. I also am close with my parents. You know, really recently, I was able to have a conversation with them about how I almost died when I was 16.

And it would have been really easy to never have that conversation. Generations of people have been not having conversations about things and passing that down. But I was really surprised. I was able to talk to them about it. And I'm so grateful that they were able to go deep with me and talk about it with me. It really helped, I think, all of us.

Moving past the bullshit of shame and being able to be vulnerable is so powerful. And reaching out for help and talking is so powerful.

walking into my parents' room and telling them what happened and calling my sister after I was assaulted or even like just sharing this right now. It's just this kind of like theme of being able to reveal things that you didn't think you could or you don't think you should and being incredibly honest and vulnerable. And that's part of why I'm okay now.

Today's episode featured Jenna. You can find out more about her on Instagram at Jenna Jacqueline. That's at J-E-N-N-A-J-A-C-Q-U-E-L-I-N-E.

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