305: What if you were expected to do no harm?
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Secrets stay in your body. You hold it physically in your body. And they don't just go away. All of these secrets that I was keeping in and pretending like didn't happen, that harms you over time. It harms your mind and it harms your body.

From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 305. What if you were expected to do no harm?

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. My dad was born actually just one town over from where we ended up living and growing up my whole life. So he didn't get very far outside of his hometown.

His dad owned his own company that then he passed down to my dad. So they come from a little bit of generational wealth. And they had kind of that typical American growing up in the 50s and 60s, the way your life is supposed to look. Mom is at home and a homemaker. Dad is the breadwinner. And the family picture is the way that they wanted to present it to the world.

But there was always like this undercurrent of everything's great. It looks the way it is supposed to. And if dad works hard enough and provides for the family, then he's kind of allowed to do what he wants. Before my dad met my mom, he was married to someone else and they had two daughters together. When his first daughter was five, he found out that he was not their father.

The girl's actual dad was sick of pretending like they weren't his kids and told everyone, blew up their life basically, and said, these are my daughters. They're not your daughters. Your wife cheated on you because they were trying to get pregnant and it wasn't happening. So he went the first few years of the girl's life being their dad and

But then when he got divorced from his first wife, it was messy and complicated because he had raised them as if they were his daughters and then he wasn't their dad anymore. And I think that was really hard for him to deal with. And no one knew. His best friends, his parents did not know that these two daughters weren't his daughters.

My mom is a little bit younger than my dad by seven years, and they had both already been married and divorced by the time that they met. And I think at that point in their lives, they both kind of knew what they wanted. My dad wanted a family, and my mom wanted stability. She came from a life that was a little bit unstable. My mom's parents were really wonderful, but they didn't come from a lot.

My aunt and uncle work in a coal mine. My other uncle is a janitor for a school district. My mom worked in a grocery store. And after the second date, she moved in. And I think they were married very quickly after that, too.

I was born on Mother's Day in the early 90s. So I am raised with my mom and my dad and my older sister, and we have a very picture-perfect life. My memories as a child are happy, and I felt so free and comfortable to just be who I was.

We were never put in a box. I look at other people in my life like, oh, you were definitely told you had to be a certain way or achieve a certain thing. And I didn't have that at all. My parents were so open about letting us explore who we were and letting us kind of guide our own childhoods. I just remember feeling so sure of myself and never questioning anything about my reality.

When I was in elementary school, one Christmas, my dad's mom is visiting us. And we're in the car driving somewhere, and my grandma is telling a story. And she tells a story about teaching her three sons piano. And I'm sitting in the back seat listening to her story thinking, that's not right. Dad has one brother. Why is she saying three sons? She taught her three sons. I don't have a third uncle.

After we got home later, I asked my sister, why did grandma say that she taught three boys piano? And she goes, oh, because dad has another brother that they don't talk about. She's nine or ten and I'm seven or eight. And she tells me we have an uncle and an aunt and a cousin. And they actually live only a couple towns away from us. When we were really little, our cousin touched us and hurt us badly.

So we don't talk about them anymore. I then go to my mom with this new information of, Mom, sister told me something. Is this true? And my mom tells me yes. I don't know if they thought maybe I remembered and we just never talked about it.

Or if they hoped, I didn't remember. And so then we'd never have to talk about it. But I found out then just very few details. He was 12. We were very little. I was like one, maybe two. Just old enough for my sister to tell my mom after our cousin was babysitting us. But I have zero memory of it. It doesn't register at all. So even talking about it, I feel really far removed.

I remember my dad crying and I could see in him that he felt so sad and scared that his children had been hurt. At the moment I found out when I'm in elementary school,

I'm just mad that we have family that no one's told me about. And as I got older and started to understand a little bit more, as I'm like, you know, going through adolescence and realizing, wait, this thing happened to me and no one was going to tell me? I was just going to go about my life not knowing that I was molested?

I felt left out of my own life. I think my parents were trying to protect me. But when I'm 14, I like blow up at my parents for hiding this. Feeling like, how come we don't talk about all of these things? There's all these little hidden secrets. And we're trying to make it look like everything's fine on the outside. And...

For the most part, everything is fine on the outside. But we have these dark things that no one talks about. And I wanted more transparency and I was angry about it. But I didn't ever get more information. I felt at the time like no one was really listening to me.

It's like they had already dealt with it. They'd already processed this thing. But I have no way to process because I don't know what happened. I know that we went to therapy as little kids afterwards. My mom says that I went like a year without hugging my parents when I was little.

I responded in these ways that was clear that I had experienced trauma, but I don't remember any of this. I don't remember not hugging my parents. And a big part of me wonders if that's why we had such an open, free childhood where they just let us be us because this thing had happened when we were so little that maybe that shaped the parents that they were and how they raised us because they just wanted us to have good, happy lives where we could feel fulfilled because this horrible thing had happened at the start of our life.

Even as I'm like processing and angry and kind of going through that teen angst, they accept that from me. They don't push back. They don't get angry back. They kind of just let me yell.

There was no talk between me and my sister about it. So even as I'm upset with our parents, my sister is kind of staying out of it. She's kind of just letting us deal with all of this. It makes me think like they kind of knew at some point that I was going to have some feelings about this and that they were letting me have those feelings. I think we don't talk about it because we don't want to go there. It feels so disconnected from me personally.

That if I talk about it, it's almost like it's more real. Like I found out this horrible thing, but because I don't remember it, I feel pretty disconnected from it. It almost feels like ignoring it keeps me safer. I don't want to have this thing be a part of my story, even though it is. So I had a really great time in high school.

I identified as bisexual when I was 12, when I first learned the meaning of the word bisexual. But by the time I'm a freshman in high school, I've had a few boyfriends and I like boys. So I'm what my parents would maybe call a little boy crazy. But it's fun. I'm having fun.

I have a boyfriend who's a year older than me. We were 15 and I felt so certainly that I was in love with him and that I'm going to be with this person forever. And so when the topic came up of having sex, I was very willing. Yes, let's share this together. So we have sex.

And we tell each other, okay, I'm just going to tell one friend. I'm going to tell my best friend. And you can tell your best friend. And this happened over summer. And by the time we get to school in the fall again, everyone knew. That boyfriend and I, of course, do not work out. But I continue dating. And I just thought, this is fun. It feels good. Why not? And this reputation, unfortunately, really spreads through school.

that I'm easy or a slut. I personally did not feel that way. I felt like the rest of you are missing out.

So I didn't feel shameful. And when people would slut shame me or say nasty things to me or make stupid jokes, it didn't really affect me. I just had this inner confidence about like, nope, I'm good with what I'm doing. And I feel very in control and empowered by the decisions I'm making.

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I kind of go along with this reputation for the first couple years of high school. And there's a boy in my history class.

We start connecting. This history class was the last period of the day, so because I was a junior, I had a car and I was allowed to park in the school parking lot. We'd kind of walk out of class together and then we'd just keep talking and eventually we would get to my car. So I drove him home a few times.

And we started hanging out. A few times he hung over at my house. His parents were going through a divorce and he didn't want to be home. We had maybe been hanging out for a month and we had kissed a couple times. Like I kind of liked him, not a ton. He told me that his parents were officially getting divorced. And he told me when the new term starts, I'm actually transferring to a different school because I'm moving in with my other parent a few districts over.

I was kind of bummed, but I didn't feel like, oh, this is a very special person that I really want to explore a relationship with or anything. We were just friends. One of the last days that we had history class together, we walked to my car and we get in the car and I go like I'm going to take him home. And he tells me, I don't want to go home. I said, OK, if I'm not taking you home, though, I can't take you to my house. My parents aren't home. And he goes, oh, come on.

just for like a little bit. I just really don't want to go home. I turn to him and I say, okay, fine, but we're not going to have sex. I think he thought I was being coy or playful or maybe that I didn't mean it. I don't feel like I said it in a way where there was any wiggle room in my tone, but that's not how he interpreted it. And when we got to my house,

I knew immediately that we should not be there, that this was not okay and not a good idea. When we get into my house, immediately the tone changes. The look on his face went from being really open and charming to a little scary. Like you don't know what you just got yourself into. It's almost like he thought I was playing along, but I was not.

I felt immediately like I know what's about to happen and how do I keep myself safe? Very quickly, he has me down on the floor and the main level of my house is hard tile. And I'm thinking this will probably hurt. I don't want any bruises because I don't know how to explain that. And I don't want to have to hide it with makeup. And I don't want to tell anyone.

So I'm already doing the calculations in my head of like, okay, this is probably what's going to happen, even though I've said very clearly, I do not want to do this. I've said no now that we're in my house. But just looking at him, I know it does not matter what I said. It doesn't matter what I want. This is going to happen.

And I'm really afraid of what's going to happen if I physically fight back. So the whole time I'm just trying to like smooth it over, get him out of there. I didn't want to make him angry. So I just thought, how can I make this better? So I suggest maybe we should just go to my room. I don't want to get hurt and I'm scared. So I say, hold on, let's just go to my room.

I almost wish I wouldn't have said that because it was so hard later to have to sleep in my own bed. Afterwards, I had to drive him home still. And I'm just trying to like get through as fast as I can, like get him home, get him out of the situation, get him out of your house.

So I drive him home and I can't even make it to his house. I get to the stop sign closest to like his street and I say, get out. I'm not taking you further. I had hit this point of, I need to cry and scream and feel all the things I'm feeling and I can't hold it in anymore. I need you to leave. The way he looked at me as he got out of the car was like,

hurt almost. He had no idea that what had happened was not okay. He looked like I was hurting his feelings. I called the person who I'd just recently been closest to, boyfriend I'd had like a month before this, and said something happened that I did not want to happen, but I didn't really use the words to

He just kind of said, what do you want me to do about it? I can't help you. I think that response was probably what kept me from continuing to tell anyone else because it felt so, this is your fault. I just decided not to keep telling anyone. I felt like because of my reputation, it really didn't matter if I said anything. It would be my word against his.

Even if someone did believe me, I felt so certain that the response would be like, well, yeah, you probably asked for it. None of my friends even knew I had been hanging out with him. And so when he left, I kind of just felt like, okay, I'll slip back into the life I had before. I just have to get through the last couple days of the term and then I'm not going to see him anymore. So I can kind of just ignore this.

I went for so long afterwards questioning, well, maybe it was my fault. I drove him to my house. I knew my parents weren't home. I shouldn't have done that. If I hadn't been this way about sex, if I had not talked so openly about it, if I hadn't kissed him before and given him the impression that I maybe was an option for him, maybe it's all my fault anyways.

I struggled with thinking or saying the word rape. And I think because I didn't want to name it anything, I didn't want to say that this is what's happened to me. It helped it stay not real. But it also kept me from like dealing with any of it. I felt that this thing that I felt really empowered by was gone.

I felt so powerless. I felt like I had no value. I feel ashamed and mostly I do not feel like I have any power anymore. So I'm dealing with all these feelings and I'm not telling anyone. I just wanted not to feel any of the things I was feeling anymore. I got through the rest of my junior year. I did not tell anyone else. My senior year starts.

I found out through our friends he had transferred back. And because of that, I was like, get me the fuck out of here. So I start really withdrawing from school. I wait until the halls had cleared and then go from one class to the other because the idea of having to face him was paralyzing. I graduated early. I got the fuck out of high school. I was so done.

So when I'm just freshly graduated from high school, my dad had been not feeling very well and he'd had some imaging done and they found a tumor on his pancreas. My mom tells me this and I mostly felt shock. I think my mom was too, but we're not incredibly emotional people, but I'm definitely feeling shock and fear.

I just graduated from high school. I am just trying to move forward. My plan had always been to go to college and I was pre-med. That was what I wanted to do. I wanted to go to college and be a doctor. And now this.

I want to stop sleeping in the goddamn bed that I was assaulted in. I want to move on. And now I feel trapped here by my dad's illness. And for God's sake, he's dying. So how horrible am I that I just want my own space and time to be away from this? Don't be so selfish. You can kind of put yourself away for a minute. So I like shove all that down.

and pretend like it's okay. At this time, my whole life has kind of stopped to help him and my mom. I kind of take over caring for the household things, and my mom moves into caring for my dad. Only a few months into all of this, they found spots on his liver that had metastasized, and he died only a couple weeks after that.

You know, he was sick in spring and summer and then gone by the time I was supposed to be going away to college. And it felt like a relief. I struggle with saying that.

But I think a lot of people who have had a family member die of a pretty rough illness are relieved when they finally die because they're not suffering anymore. And we are not in this constant state of knowing this person is going to die and just waiting for the day that it's going to happen. I got really close with my mom, probably the closest we had ever been at this point. And we get home from the funeral together.

And she sits me and my sister down and says, "I need to tell you guys something about your dad. He is not your biological father. Both of you were sperm donated. Your dad was considered sterile. He could not have children. We knew this and we went through a sperm bank to get pregnant with you guys." And the immediate feeling is, "Oh, that makes so much sense."

All these little things started coming together of, yeah, I didn't really feel like I came from this person. I had all these little things that just didn't really connect. And I couldn't believe sometimes that we could be related.

And it just made sense immediately. And my sister felt the same way. But my mom reveals to us, too, that she had always wanted to tell us. But my dad did not want us to know because he never wanted to have a moment where we could be arguing with him and say, well, you're not my real dad.

When my dad had been sick, the hospital he was being treated at is like the premier hospital in our area. And while he is sick there, every nurse who comes into the door when I'm in the room, my dad introduces me and says, this is my daughter. One day she will work here and she's going to help people too. He was so proud that I wanted to be a doctor and he wanted everyone to know it.

And the nurses would be really sweet and be like, oh, that's so great. Like, good for you. But kind of move on and just treat him. But it was so important to him. And it really resonated for me that, okay, this is now what I have to do. And after he died, I went to school and I thought, I can do this. I'm going to be a doctor. I go really hard into college. I'm taking a ton of credits. I'm trying to get everything done so I can apply to medical school because now I'm ready.

And I'm taking a bunch of prereqs. I have a boyfriend at the time. And I find out that I'm pregnant. I decide to keep my baby. That I will go to medical school later. And I will be a mom now. I guess this isn't the order I thought things were going to go in. But I will stop going to school. I will be a mom. And when my child goes to school, I'll go back. I have my son.

It was really wonderful and special and I loved it. Even in hard moments, I still felt like it was exactly where I should be and that I was doing what I should be doing. Finally, things are kind of going smoothly for me. I met my wife and we get married. We buy a house.

We start trying to have a baby of our own, which was so meta because we're doing the exact same process that my parents did. And I know now that I'm a baby of sperm donations. So now I have a daughter that also is a product of sperm donations. So her and I will have that in common, which I think is fun and lovely.

And I could also support my wife in different ways because I had been pregnant before. I'd had a baby. I knew what it felt like to be pregnant. It just was a wonderful experience to get to do it again, but not be the pregnant person. It felt like my life is really coming together. I get a job answering phones as a receptionist at the hospital that my dad was at and had told people I would work at one day.

Part of it is I'm working there because it feels like I'm making my dad proud. But the other part is I'm working there because it's a great opportunity and it gets me closer to medical school while I'm kind of waiting for my kids to get older and for life to kind of fall back into that place where I can do it again. And while I'm working there, I find out the name of my donor.

And it turns out that he was a doctor at the hospital that I am working at now before he died. And I've actually walked past his picture on the wall and I have been walking past it to get to the cafeteria for three years and had no idea. While I'm at this job, I really love the patient side of things, but I am missing medicine. I want to be doing more than what I'm doing.

And I see that they have a lot of other programs. And one of them is for medical laboratory science. I have never heard of this. Most people have never heard of this. I get into this program and I am finally going to college. I'm going to finish and get my degree. This is the answer. So I finish everything and I get hired at the same hospital. And it still feels so special. I feel like I'm supposed to be here.

What I've always wanted to be and do is help people. And now I'm in this place where I'm helping people and I have a degree and it finally feels like, okay, things are on track for me. Part of being a laboratory technician is you also work in a blood bank. And because I worked at a trauma hospital, I worked blood bank shifts a lot and I worked nights.

I'm working one night in July and a part of the way our hospital works is we have this track board. It's just a big computer screen that's attached to the wall and it has all the names of the patients that are in the emergency room who we're going to do a workup on either because they need blood right now, like emergently, or because they might die.

The way our hospital works, it's really busy and it's a big hospital. So I work with a partner. I always have someone else in the blood bank with me, except when we have to take breaks. So my partner is on her lunch break this night and a name comes on the board and it's his name. The person who assaulted me when I was 16. I have not really had to think about him since we were teenagers.

I had no idea that he was back in our hometown. I had not thought of him in a long time. And now I have to help him. He's in the emergency room and there's a chance he might need his life saved. And I am the only blood banker right now. There is no one I can hand this off to unless I go get my partner who's on her lunch break.

I froze, thinking, like, what the fuck do I do? I don't want to go get someone and tell them, but I don't want to help this person. And I didn't know until this moment that I wouldn't help someone. I thought I'm working in this job because I want to help people. I am obligated in an emergency situation by a code of ethics to help someone.

And I purposefully work in human medicine where you help everyone who walks through the door regardless. And I don't want to help him. Like if I had to be a part of the care team more than just processing his tests, I honestly think I probably would have been fired because I wanted to refuse to help him.

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I am having like an active panic attack seeing his name on the board.

I have not dealt with any of this. I just pushed it down and now it is right in front of me and I feel like I'm in high school and he's tapping me on the shoulder and he's behind me on the bleachers. I just feel like he is everywhere. I have no control and in my body I feel exactly like I did.

But his specimens come into the lab and I make the decision. I will process his tests. I can just pretend like it's just another name and I will just do the testing, figure out his blood type. But a part of that is looking into his history. ♪

So sometimes someone maybe has a condition where they've gotten a lot of blood transfusions before, and that might affect the way that I'm going to do my testing. So I'm processing, and I open up his chart, and I don't want to look because I want to just get this done with and not think about this anymore. It's how I felt when the assault was happening. Just get it over with. So I open up his chart, and I immediately see that he has been to the emergency room a lot.

It's what we call like a frequent flyer. A lot of times they are either very ill, like they have a chronic condition, or they're addicts. And right away I can tell that he is an addict and he has struggled, it looks like, for quite some time with multi-substance abuse and alcohol abuse. And he's here this time for the DTs.

That means someone who has been abusing alcohol is going through withdrawal. And it's really hard on their body to the point in his case where he's coming to the emergency room. And it hits me that like this person who was my friend has had a really horrible life. Since all of this has happened and I have not really thought about him, things have been really shitty for him.

And I keep looking, and a lot of his records that I need to see if he's had transfusions or any sort of blood products that he's received, those are coming from the county jail. And my immediate thought is, like, if this is a person who is being regularly jailed because of drugs, that really sucks because that's not ever going to help someone dealing with addiction. The hospital lists it like no known address transient, but that means he's unhoused.

When I see these records on other patients, I feel bad for them. I don't ever feel like, oh, you deserve it. Addiction is terrible and it takes over your life. I felt pity and sadness. I feel really bad for him that I'm also dealing with. Well, good.

So he went to jail. So maybe he didn't go to jail for what he did to me because I didn't press any charges or even tell anyone what happened, but he did go to jail. So maybe I feel good about that. Like, I don't want to feel sad for him or empathetic. I just want him to go away.

I run his tests and thankfully because he just had the DTs, he got discharged. So he didn't need products from me emergently. So thankfully that night I did not have to see him, but I now know he is nearby.

I had these thoughts going through my mind of, I think I just need to quit. It felt so sudden. I'm going to have to keep talking about this and I don't want to tell anyone. And if there's like a fallout where I have to sit in front of a board and explain myself, I don't want to do that.

After I got home from that shift, I had seen that he'd been in jail. And in the state that I live in, you can look up what someone was charged with when they were arrested. So I pulled up his records. I had to know. Like, I had been waiting all night to check this.

And a lot of the charges were what I thought. It was a lot of possession of an illegal substance, a lot of breaking and entering that seemed related to drugs. Just the kind of arrest records that you would expect of someone who is deep in addiction and unhoused. So I'm clicking through each arrest record. And then I click on the very last thing. And the charge is rape. He's done this again to someone else.

okay, that's really what happened. I had been holding onto this whole time. Maybe that's not what happened to me. Even though I'm having panic attacks related to this person and I have changed the course of my life because of this person and wanting to avoid them, maybe that's not what really happened. And then I see that he has done this to someone else, at least one other person, but I know people don't report. So how many, how many people?

But it felt like I could finally just trust my own reality. This really happened. That is what it was. It wasn't just because I had a shitty reputation and I was easy and a slut like I felt like people would have said. This is something about him. He is a bad person.

And I really struggle with that belief because it's like so core to me that people aren't naturally bad. We're all good. And I have to believe that to like exist in this world. But this person, he keeps doing this bad thing. So does that make him truly bad? And what does that mean for me in caring for people now?

I know there are terrible people out there, but I always try to like just believe that it's their circumstance or something horrible that happened to them. But for it to be that he is just a rapist, like that is just a part of him. I grapple with that. I don't know how to come to terms with that, that he just is a bad person, that this is how he operates.

I also felt when I read that there was someone else that he had hurt, really guilty. What if I had said something? Would he have gotten away with it again? Would he have done this to someone else? What if I had told someone? Would this have happened to her too? I even went through a period of time feeling like, is he an addict because of what happened?

Because he thought we were friends and then I shut him down and ignored him and then avoided him as much as I could. How could I have changed the course of this? How did it turn into this? Could I have done something differently? So then I'm feeling guilty and responsible for this thing that someone else did to me.

Everything starts to feel unsafe. I can't go to the grocery store. I can't be outside. It completely takes over the way I move about in the world. I could not undress anymore in front of my wife. Like, I didn't want to be looked at. I didn't want my kids to touch me because it just felt like it was being done to me.

I felt so unsafe and violated constantly. This fear and pressure that I am ethically obligated to care for him if he comes back. I now am coming to work every night having to take anxiety meds because I'm having panic attacks just being here. Just existing in this space is becoming impossible and I can't tell anyone why. And...

I ended up quitting. I lasted two more months after this of every night being in fear of what about my career? I actually stopped working in my field for almost a year. I thought, I can't do this anymore because I don't know how to handle if this happens again.

I don't know what someone should do. I'm thinking as it's happening, Jesus Christ, there has got to be another woman somewhere who has been raped by someone and then had to care for them. And this sucks. Like it should not be this way. So my wife, who is so supportive and wonderful, tells me, I think you should go to therapy. I do. And we do EMDR therapy.

And it's the first time that I can finally relax just a little bit. I don't feel like I am constantly in this state of anxiety, but I still couldn't work there anymore. There was nothing that was enough to make me feel safe in that job. And that was so tragic for me to leave this place that I felt I belonged at. And to leave felt like failure.

It felt like I was giving up on myself and my own dream that I had finally gotten to. Like I had no say in my life anymore. And yet again, this person has control of the decisions I'm making. The part that's like the worst is that I felt like I let down. I let down my dad and my parents had worked so hard to just give us a good life.

But the last thing that he was so gung-ho on me doing was working there. And now, because of this fucking person, I have to leave. I felt like something had been taken from me. And it wasn't physical.

He took the future I had envisioned for myself and this way that I was still connecting with my dad. This was kind of the last thing that I could do to make my dad proud. And I couldn't. I couldn't do it anymore. I really did not realize until I'm talking about it. This is a lot about my dad. Like I didn't connect that.

I was so just trying to get through it when he was sick. And so I didn't really realize how much the feelings I have had about what happened to me tie back to like how I felt about being his daughter. That I was trying to keep the picture perfect life that my parents, but mostly my dad, wanted us to have.

It had so much to do with how it looks on the outside and not really what's going on on the inside. And getting my job, getting the career that I had felt like I was actually finally doing the thing. I was making him proud and making the picture look nice.

It wasn't until I met with my therapist. She gave me the space to hate what happened to me and hate the act, but not hate the person.

And I needed that because I am not someone who holds hate in my heart. I can't. I can't function that way. And I couldn't keep feeling this. And I really needed my therapist to say that, that I can hate what happened, but I don't have to hate the human being. It made me be able to look back at what happened and just feel sad for the person that they happened to.

Like I can look back at younger me and feel really sad for her, but not feel scared anymore. I can just look at these memories and these moments in time and just feel sad about it and let it go. This happened to me and that sucks.

But I don't have to be in this state of fear and panic. And I feel more now disconnected from the trauma feeling and more able to just see it as a memory. Just through the process of going to therapy, I do forgive him. I feel like forgiveness is the way of letting it go. Of saying, you did this thing to me, but it holds no power over me anymore.

You have to live with that, but I don't. I didn't make those decisions, you did. And you will have to deal with how that feels, but I am letting it go. I think if I was faced with him now, I would feel that way. Secrets stay in your body. You hold it physically in your body and they don't just go away.

All of these secrets that I was keeping in and pretending like didn't happen, that harms you over time. It harms your mind and it harms your body. I was not really ready to face any of mine, but I did not have a choice anymore. When I was finally ready, I went back to this job very much with the open door of, I might not be able to do this anymore, but let's just try.

So I chose a job at a smaller, less trauma-filled hospital with a very different patient population. We mostly have elderly people. Being in a really different environment in the hospital helped me a lot to be able to just do my job and feel safe doing my job and enjoy my job again. And I've been at that job now for over a year, and I love it.

I get to work in health care. I get to help people and be a part of the care team. And I feel like I'm in a more secure place in my own mind and body. I could handle a situation. If it came up and I'm able to actually do my job and enjoy it, it just took taking a break and going to therapy to be able to keep doing it. And I feel like I'm going to help everyone who comes through the door.

Today's guest requested to remain anonymous, but if you'd like to reach out to her, you can email at v as in Victor 2174359 at gmail.com.

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Scammers are best known for living the high life until they're forced to trade it all in for handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit once they're finally caught. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the host of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of some of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once a facade falls away.

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