This was the year that a sadistic boyfriend set me up to be raped by his foster father. That was one rape which never happened, though I fought and clawed for a good hour before the perv (a nasty looking little monkey of a man with greasy hair, and a deaf wife) finally gave up. I wasn’t so lucky that year on several other occasions. After having finally broken free from my stepdad’s clutches, I seemed to find myself again and again drawn to the wrong type of situations and individuals. My inner radar which should have warned me of imminent danger just wasn’t functioning. I believed that no one would deliberately wish me harm, because that’s what I needed to believe in order to continue living at all.

Today, hearing Led Zeppelin, I grieve for my teenaged self so adrift in a world of predators. I didn’t know then that I could protect myself, or even that I was worth protecting. Seemed to me that things just happened willy-nilly, and when they did my only means of coping was to blank out. Dissociate. I thought then that I was just really good at forgetting heinous acts against me, but of course that’s not it. I had parts who bore the pain for me. And I am reminded today that they haven’t really forgotten any of it at all.