We Can’t Change Our Past
My name is Boriana Todorova. I live in Bulgaria, and I am a survivor of child sexual abuse. Perhaps I should start with the fact that my father was an abusive alcoholic. He was the reason that my mother was in hospital several times to recover from severe beatings when I was still a baby. Eventually one day in his drunken delirium he grabbed a knife and went to my baby bed saying now he is going to kill me – the baby he believed it wasn’t his. Then my mother ran away with me and finally decided to leave him and get a divorce. My mother moved to another town with me. A few years later my father died of liver cancer, which followed naturally after many years of alcoholism. The new town is where my sad story began. I was safe when I was still in kindergarten. But later when I was six years old I went to school, which was two minutes away from our block. So when I finished school about noon every day I was supposed to walk home alone. I had a key to our apartment on a necklace. And then home I was alone till my mother comes back from work. Every day. This is when the abuse took place. We had this wonderful neighbors family in the apartment next door. The parents were my mother’s colleagues. They had two teenage kids, a boy and a girl. They were supposed to check on me in the afternoon if I needed something, help with my homework or else. The boy, I believe by then he was 15-16 years old. He usually invited me to their apartment or stayed in ours to make his deviant fantasies come true. By then I didn’t realize what was going on. And somehow I even agreed to all these “doctor-patient games.” I don’t remember much of the abuse or many details. I have been trying so hard to forget about it all. I blocked the memories so deep in my mind that sometimes I wonder if it ever happened. But then a scene of it surfaces and I realize that nobody would make this up. Nobody would lie that this horrible things happened to him. Nobody wants to be a victim. And I was. I learned a lot about child molestation recently and I know there should have been a grooming process when the molester wins your trust. But the truth is that I believed and trusted this guy because I’ve been told not to trust strangers, not to speak to strangers, not to take candies from strangers. So I never expected that the boogeyman is the guy...
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