For the past twenty years, I have fought for other survivors. I’ve helped them tell their stories, find justice, confront institutions, and reclaim pieces of their lives that were taken from them. I’ve stood beside clergy survivors, Mormon survivors, scouting survivors, and families whose worlds split open without warning. I learned how to be steady in other people’s storms.

But beneath all of that work lived a truth I rarely acknowledged: I discounted my own story.

I wasn’t abused by a priest. I wasn’t eight or ten years old. My trauma didn’t come wrapped in the familiar narrative arcs that the public understands. I was a teenager. Fifteen, then sixteen, then seventeen. I was manipulated in ways that, from the outside, look like “bad decisions”—a phrase my father still repeats, and one that carved itself so deeply into me that for years, I believed it.

I worked with male survivors and told them—truthfully—that their trauma is unique, that shame silences men in ways society refuses to see. But I kept my own shame locked down. I told myself: Your story is different. Your story doesn’t count the same way.

That self-erasure didn’t happen alone. The movement erased me too—subtly, quietly, in the way systems erase women whose trauma doesn’t fit the “expected” pattern . I became essential to the work, but invisible in the story. At times, people have even labeled me an “oldtimer,” as if the years I’ve spent fighting, learning, evolving, and building this movement somehow disqualify me from shaping its future. It’s the same quiet dismissal women of a certain age know too well — becoming invisible, treated as irrelevant, pushed to the margins just when we’re at our strongest. That isn’t true. My age doesn’t diminish my voice; it deepens it.

In 2018, I wrote a Me Too letter about the man who abused me. I brought documentation of the cover-up. The college allowed him to retire “quietly,” not because he was innocent, but because he had a union to protect him—just as it had shielded him for nearly fifteen years after I first came forward. It was a devastating confirmation of the thing I most feared: My story didn’t matter enough.

Then, this year, while rebuilding the NCSESAME website, I read every survivor story on the old site as I transferred it to the new one. Story after story of teenagers. Story after story of educators who groomed, exploited, manipulated. Story after story that sounded like mine.

It broke me open.

And as the pieces shifted, I realized something I had never articulated before:
This part of my life was not defined by the trauma itself.
It was defined by the absence the trauma created — the quieting, the self-minimizing, the belief that I had no category, no vocabulary, no home. It was defined by decades of thinking my story had no rightful place among the others I fought so hard to amplify.

And then, this year, that long-held silence finally cracked.

For the first time, I saw my own experience reflected back with clarity, compassion, and without the minimization I had internalized. There was no shame in being 15. No shame in being groomed. No shame in the silence that followed. These were not “bad decisions.” This was abuse.

Why I’m sharing this now:
Because rebuilding this site forced me to confront something I had avoided for years: that my work has always been personal. I’ve spent two decades helping other survivors reclaim their voices. I am finally ready to reclaim my own—gently, safely, and without self-blame. I’m sharing this now because so many survivors of educator abuse feel “different,” invisible, or unworthy of being counted. If my voice helps even one person see their experience without shame, it’s worth saying out loud.

I finally know where my story belongs. And I’m ready to carry it with me as I continue the work ahead.