Essays
The Yellow Pot
The pot always sounded older than the house itself.
Not loud, not dramatic. Just the thin rattle of enamel
against cast iron when the water began to tremble.
At night, the kitchen carried noises differently.
The refrigerator hummed low like a warning,
pipes shifted behind the walls,
and the yellow pot sat beneath the weak stove light
with its blackened underside and chipped white rim,
holding together despite the damage done to it.
I used to think survival would look cleaner than this.
Something holy. Something untouched.
But survival, I learned, looks more like worn enamel,
heat stains, hairline fractures spreading beneath the surface.
It looks like hands wrapping around something broken
because broken things still carry warmth.
The house was small enough that sound traveled without effort. Cabinet doors closing in the kitchen could be heard from the back bedroom. Water moving through the pipes announced itself in the walls before it reached the sink. At night, after everyone had gone to bed, the refrigerator compressor kicked on with a tired mechanical hum that seemed to settle over the entire house like weather. I remember the sounds more clearly than I remember faces. This strikes me now as either significant or entirely meaningless. I am never certain which.
The kitchen light was the color of weak tea. It flattened everything beneath it. Bananas left on the counter browned too quickly there. Newspapers looked yellow before their time. The enamel pot sat on the stove year-round, chipped along the rim where the metal underneath showed through in dark crescents. Someone had once dropped it hard enough to crack the enamel near the handle, although it still held water perfectly fine. In our house, usefulness carried more value than appearance. Things were expected to continue long after elegance had left them.
I used to stand in the kitchen barefoot long after midnight without turning on another light. The linoleum floor retained cold differently than wood. Even in July it shocked the bottoms of my feet awake. I would fill the pot at the sink and watch the water come out clouded at first before clearing. There are details the body keeps because repetition makes them permanent. The stiff turn of the faucet handle. The metallic smell rising from the drain during summer. The click ick-click of the burner trying to ignite before the blue flame caught.
Outside, Hitchcock Lake never became fully quiet, even late at night. Sound moved across the water without obstruction. If the screen door was left open, you could hear the loose knock of aluminum boats against the dock and the uneven chorus of insects buried in the reeds along the shoreline. Sometimes there were voices farther out near the rock on the north side of the lake, where kids swam after dark every summer despite parents pretending to disapprove of it. It was the kind of tradition nobody formally passed down. People simply arrived at it. Older siblings did it, then younger ones followed. My mother once told me about swimming there at night when she was young, describing the lake as though it had been harmless, almost warm. I was six when she told me, and afterward I could not stop thinking about the distance between shore and the rock. Not drowning exactly, but the exposure of it—the fact that beneath the body there was only dark water and depth you could not measure by sight. For weeks I lay awake listening for things: the ice maker shifting in the freezer, tires passing on the road beyond the trees, water moving somewhere outside where I could not see it. Years later, I swam to the rock myself because eventually curiosity overtakes inherited fear. The water smelled faintly of mud and vegetation near the shoreline, colder farther out where your feet no longer found the lakebed. Someone laughed behind me from the dock, but mostly there was the sound of breathing and water separating around moving bodies. Halfway across, I realized fear does not disappear through repetition. You simply become more familiar with its proportions.
Nobody ever called those nights lonely, although I suspect they were. Loneliness implies a certain drama people like to assign to childhood, as though sadness must arrive loudly in order to be real. What I remember instead is a quieter condition. A sense that everyone in the house had retreated into private territory from which they had no intention of returning. Doors remained closed. Conversations happened in fragments through walls. People moved around one another carefully, preserving distance the way strangers do in waiting rooms.
The pot would begin to tremble lightly before boiling. Not enough to rattle the burner grate, only enough to make itself known. Steam lifted slowly against the yellow light and blurred the edges of the room. Sometimes I made tea. Sometimes instant noodles. Sometimes nothing at all. There were nights I let the water boil simply because the sound filled the silence with something steady.
The Shape of Silence
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” — RumiThere are parts of childhood that refuse to stay in the past. They settle into the body like old scars beneath skin, invisible until touched. For a long time, I believed growing up meant learning how to disguise those scars well enough that no one noticed them. I thought maturity looked like composure, independence, the ability to move through life untouched by grief. Yet the older I became, the more I realized adulthood is not measured by age alone. It is measured by awareness. By the painful moment a person recognizes that survival and living are not always the same thing.Philosophers often describe identity as something continuously shaped through experience, memory, and perception. But trauma complicates that process. Sexual abuse alters the relationship between the self and the body so deeply that even ordinary existence can feel fractured. The mind learns to separate from pain in order to endure it, and eventually that separation becomes habitual. I learned very young how to exist in pieces.What I did not understand then was that coming of age is not simply becoming older. Sometimes it is learning how to survive yourself. Sometimes it is learning how to live after someone has convinced you your body was never fully your own.When I was younger, I learned silence before I learned trust. The abuse taught me that fear could exist quietly, that pain did not always announce itself loudly enough for others to hear it. It lived in ordinary moments instead. It appeared in locked doors, in footsteps approaching down a hallway, in the instinct to shrink inward whenever someone stood too close. Trauma altered my understanding of safety long before I was old enough to understand the word trauma itself.Children are not supposed to carry secrets heavy enough to reshape their identity, but many do. The hardest part was not only what happened. It was the loneliness that followed it. Abuse isolates people not just from others but from themselves. It teaches them to distrust their instincts, their emotions, even their memories. I became skilled at emotional absence while remaining physically present. I could sit in classrooms, hold conversations, laugh at the right moments, and still feel detached from my own existence.Looking back now, I realize I spent years performing normalcy instead of living it. There is a philosophical loneliness in that realization, the understanding that a person can appear fully alive to the world while internally feeling disconnected from their own humanity. Trauma taught me how easily identity can become performance.Coming of age with a history of sexual abuse means learning adulthood through contradiction. You crave intimacy but fear vulnerability. You want to be understood while believing no one could possibly understand you. You learn to question your own memory, your own emotions, even your own worth. There is a particular kind of grief in realizing that the person you might have become without trauma is unknowable. Abuse steals more than innocence; it disrupts the formation of identity itself.As a teenager, I often mistook self-destruction for freedom. I believed recklessness could somehow erase the past. If I stayed busy enough, loud enough, numb enough, perhaps the memories would lose their power. But trauma does not disappear simply because it is ignored. It waits. It surfaces unexpectedly through panic attacks, nightmares, broken relationships, or the unbearable feeling that your life is happening at a distance from you.There were years when I hated my own reflection because I associated my body with betrayal. Survivors often carry shame that never belonged to them in the first place. That shame becomes internalized slowly, almost invisibly. It appears in the inability to accept love, in hypervigilance, in apologizing constantly, in believing your boundaries are inconveniences rather than necessities. For a long time, I believed my value existed only in how useful or agreeable I could be to other people.What no one tells you about healing is that it is rarely graceful. It is not a straight line toward peace. Healing often begins in collapse. Mine began the first time I admitted to myself that surviving was not the same thing as living. I had built an identity around endurance, but endurance alone leaves little room for joy. There comes a moment when survival instincts that once protected you begin harming you instead.I started noticing how deeply trauma had shaped my perception of the world. I anticipated abandonment before connection. I distrusted kindness. I interpreted affection as temporary and pain as inevitable. The nervous system adapts to danger so completely that peace can feel unfamiliar, even threatening. There is an unsettling realization that occurs in recovery when you understand you have spent years preparing for harm even in moments that were safe.Still, healing taught me something essential: people are not defined solely by what was done to them. Trauma may influence identity, but it does not have to become identity itself. That distinction took years to understand. Existential philosophers often argue that meaning is not discovered passively but created through conscious choice. In many ways, recovery demanded that I decide who I wanted to become beyond my suffering.I began slowly reclaiming parts of myself that fear had buried: creativity, softness, trust, anger, desire, and hope. Especially anger. For years I suppressed it because I feared becoming difficult or unlovable. But anger, when understood properly, became evidence that I finally believed I deserved dignity. It became proof that somewhere beneath the shame, I still believed my life had value.There is a specific loneliness that exists in coming of age after abuse because so much of your development happens through self-reconstruction. While others may remember adolescence through friendships, parties, or first loves, survivors often remember survival strategies instead. We remember learning how to read rooms quickly, how to predict moods, how to make ourselves smaller when necessary. Hyperawareness becomes instinctive.Yet there is also strength in reconstruction. Survivors become deeply aware of the emotional architecture of other people because they have spent years studying danger. That awareness can become empathy when it no longer controls you. Over time, I began recognizing that sensitivity was not weakness. My ability to feel deeply, to notice subtle emotional shifts, to understand suffering in others; these qualities survived alongside the trauma.One of the most difficult parts of adulthood was realizing that healing could not happen through self-hatred. I could not punish myself into becoming whole. For years, I believed recovery required perfection: perfect composure, perfect relationships, perfect control over my emotions. But healing began only when I allowed myself compassion. Not pity. Compassion. The understanding that what happened to me mattered, and that the frightened younger version of myself deserved tenderness rather than blame.There is a quote by the poet Rumi, a 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic, that says, “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” For years, I misunderstood that idea. I thought it romanticized suffering. Now I think it speaks more to transformation. Wounds alter us, but they can also deepen our understanding of humanity, resilience, and love. Pain changes the shape of a life, but it does not have to eliminate the possibility of meaning.Coming of age after abuse means learning that healing is not forgetting. It is remembering differently. It is being able to look at your past without allowing it to consume every version of your future. There are still moments when fear resurfaces unexpectedly, when old memories return with startling clarity. Recovery does not erase the nervous system overnight. But those memories no longer define the entirety of who I am.I think adulthood finally began the moment I stopped asking, “Why did this happen to me?” and started asking, “What kind of life do I want despite it?” That question changed everything. It shifted my focus from surviving the past to participating in the present.There is no single moment where trauma disappears and life suddenly becomes uncomplicated. Healing is quieter than that. It exists in boundaries spoken without apology. In learning rest without guilt. In allowing yourself to trust someone slowly. In discovering your body can belong to you again. In recognizing that softness is not the opposite of strength.Philosophy often asks what it means to live a good life. For survivors, that question can feel almost impossible at first because survival itself once consumed all available energy. Yet over time, I began understanding that a meaningful life is not one untouched by suffering. It is one where suffering no longer dictates every decision.For many survivors, coming of age is delayed because trauma interrupts the natural process of becoming. But perhaps there is also something uniquely profound in rebuilding yourself consciously. Survivors often learn adulthood through deliberate self-examination. We become architects of identities we were once denied the freedom to form naturally.The past remains part of me, but it is no longer the entire story. I am not only the frightened child who learned silence too early. I am also the adult who learned how to speak again. And maybe that is what coming of age truly means, not the absence of pain, but the decision to live fully even after it.