In this piece forĀ The New Yorker, Junot Diaz reflects on the impact of his experience of childhood sexual abuse and the ways that therapy helped him heal.
“That violaciĆ³n. Not enough pages in the world to describe what it did to me. The whole planet could be my inkstand and it still wouldnāt be enough. That shit cracked the planet of me in half, threw me completely out of orbit, into the lightless regions of space where life is not possible. I can say, truly, que casi me destruyĆ³. Not only the rapes but all the sequelae: the agony, the bitterness, the self-recrimination, the asco, the desperate need to keep it hidden and silent. It fucked up my childhood. It fucked up my adolescence. It fucked up my whole life. More than being Dominican, more than being an immigrant, more, even, than being of African descent, my rape defined me. I spent more energy running from it than I did living. I was confused about why I didnāt fight, why I had an erection while I was being raped, what I did to deserve it. And always I was afraidāafraid that the rape had ‘ruined’ me; afraid that I would be ‘found out’; afraid afraid afraid. ‘Real’ Dominican men, after all, arenāt raped. And if I wasnāt a ‘real’ Dominican man I wasnāt anything. The rape excluded me from manhood, from love, from everything.”
