Welcome to COURAGEOUS AF
Being Human Takes Guts
In this episode, Kyle shares about the aftermath of being sexually assaulted by a family member, and how that event's impact plays out in her behavior, her appearance, and her beliefs about herself. She also talks about yet another big life change that would open a whole new chapter for her, in a new state, with a new "mother."
Warning: This episode talks about sexual assault, suicide, and parental loss, and may use strong language. Please use care while listening.
To follow and learn more about Kyle, visit:
www.instagram.com/courageous_af_podcast
book with Kyle: https://calendly.com/kylecreative
Music and sound editing by www.tobykarlin.com
www.kyle-creative.com
www.kylecreativeart.com https://www.behance.net/KyleCreative11
Transcript of full Episode:
Welcome to the Courageous AF podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Hollingsworth. This podcast is not just about having courage. It's about the human spirit, creativity, resilience, and what's possible no matter what life brings in this space. I share my own journey of healing. of rediscovering my voice, my power, and my passion after four decades of living a life riddled with trauma, abuse, and pain.
In my heart, I believe we are all courageous AF. And being human takes guts. We're in this together. Hey y'all, I just wanted to hop on and give a little warning that in this podcast I do cover some very difficult subject matter, including suicide, drug use, abuse, and things of that nature. So I would ask that you take care while listening.
Hi, courageous friends. Wow. Okay. So this is episode six. Wow. Okay. Episode six, strange days and nights. I want to pick up from where I left off in the previous episode. And I trailed off sort of talking about being in a place where I was having a lot of nightmares and the sort of dynamics of my relationship with my stepmother and her and in our family.
So everything that was happening for me internally, everything that was happening in my world, I kept it to myself. I kept secret everything because in the place that I'd come from with everything that had happened and now in this new environment where I was not trusted for no reason at all, I didn't think I was safe to share anything that was real or anything that was happening or to ask questions or to even try to, God forbid, process something with one of I really, honestly, you know, I don't ever want to overdramatize.
And sometimes, because I've been through so much, I tend to minimalize. So I'm, I'm walking that line, right? But I genuinely did not feel at this point in my life that anyone cared about me. And that is the absolute truth. I remember, I'll be honest with you. So I'm, I'm just going to be real and transparent.
I tried to record this podcast episode last night, and I ended up in tears in bed because I just couldn't talk about it at night. These things, while I think it's really important to share, and I'm equipped to do so, and I want to do so, It can be kind of intense, so I just want to be authentic about that and real about that.
So during this period of time when we lived together, the five of us in the apartment, it feels like a lot happened even though I don't think it was all that long. I think it was maybe a year at the most or maybe a year and a half. Gosh, it's just time is such a funny thing, right? So the reason I call this episode Strange Days and Nights is because of the kind of stuff that I want to share about sort of what my days and nights looked like and what was happening in my world because it's so interesting.
We see children and we see what we see, right? But what's happening inside of them, what's happening inside of their minds, what they're processing and what they're holding is, in my case, it was huge, huge amounts of stuff. So just want to say that because. That sort of capacity, well, I didn't really have a great capacity for it because I'll share soon about how it was leaking out in all directions, but the need that I was sort of forced into holding all that I was became this thing that I built myself around.
So that I guess what I'm trying to say is, let's say you have a balloon and you put a little bit of water in it, right? And you put just enough water so the balloon does not stretch beyond its normal size. But that balloon, if continued to be filled under pressure, will expand and expand and expand. And I think about myself that way.
And it's funny because as I've mentioned, I was gaining weight during this time and I think about myself both physically stretching and growing in capacity in that way, but I also think about my internal world and how I had to keep building a big enough container for all of the shit that I was holding.
In addition to just what's normal for a child, just growing in the world, just growing up in a human body. So, yeah. It was a very awkward and strange time and at this point, by the time I'm recalling the things that I'm going to be sharing right now, I was such a tomboy, I rode a skateboard, I had short hair, it was kind of like the least flattering haircut I could possibly have had.
I wore knee socks and kind of ratty clothes and I just, that's who I was. That's what I, that's the stage I was at in my life. I'm fine with that. You know, I have no judgment of it. What I want to point to is that I had lost the little girl. I had let go of any desire to be pretty. I had shied away from any desire to be anything other than just like blend in and fade to the background.
I think that that played into the way that I presented myself to the world. I know that it did, of course. Yeah, I never even told my sister a lot of the stuff that was happening for me. So this is going to start to get a little bit interesting because I'm going to start sharing some of the early things that happened to me with regard to my intuition and my mediumship slash psychic, whatever the fuck it was.
I mean, look, I struggle so much with these words. So just right out of the gate, please understand that I am the biggest skeptic in the world. And I'm also being bone deep. Raw and honest with y'all when I tell you that even at this age, I started seeing stuff and I started hearing things and the story I want to tell you, I don't know if I've told you this or not before yet, but the story I want to tell you the preface why I held it the way that I did is because I lived in a family full of people who not only was this stuff never acknowledged or talked about, but it would have gone over like a lead balloon.
And, on my dad's side, my grandmother had two twin brothers who were hospitalized when they were children. And at the time, they just labeled them as retarded. That's not a word we like these days, but at the time, that is what they would tell me. Those two boys then turned into men and then into old men.
They died there in that hospital. For me, that was my only reference to, um, quote unquote crazy. as people around me would call it. And I thought anything that was happening in my head, if I shared it with anybody, if I, if I told people about this, that I would end up in the hospital with them and I would never get out.
So another reinforcement to do not talk about anything. Do not share. It is not safe. You'll go far, far away and you won't have literally anybody. That sort of kept me in this place of feeling very trapped within myself. Meanwhile, as we were living in the apartment together, the increasing obviousness of Rachel's preference for her own daughter, Sophie, and her disdain for us became more and more apparent.
It's something she demonstrated both subtly and blatantly. Daily, you know, there was never a time when I felt on equal footing with her daughter. I always knew I was not as special. I always knew I was worse. I always knew that I was not a good kid in her eyes. And that sort of spilled over into everything.
So meanwhile, this is a very short period of time between my mother's suicide, my uncle molesting me, us being taken out of, all these things happening. This was not, this was within two years. I, as I mentioned several times, I had gained weight. So. My stepmom, Rachel, made it real clear to me that she was embarrassed by me.
She poked fun at me. She messed with me all the time about my weight. And at the apartment, there was a pool and I love to swim. Always love to swim. Mama and I, and my sister, we used to go to the beach when we were kids. And I just loved the water. As most kids do. We would go to the pool. And one of my most sharp memories of that time was Rachel and her girlfriend, don't remember the woman's name.
We're going to go to the pool. I wanted to go. I think maybe my sister was there. I was there, and I had a bikini on, and I had a round belly at this point. I was like many prepubescent girls. I was thickening. It's just, I struggle with words around this because I'm so fucking pissed off talking about it.
So, Rachel was this very beautiful, very thin, you know, perfect body, whatever label you want to smack on someone who's genetically gifted. And, she was in this blue royal blue string bikini and her girlfriend was in her whatever she was wearing and they were sitting off to the side of the pool and I was, you know, doing my thing swimming and whatnot.
And I would look at myself and I'd look at my belly and I'd look over at Rachel and I'd feel bad about myself. And I remember standing at the edge of the pool and I was sort of just thinking and I heard a sound and it was Rachel taking a photo of me. And I said, and I, I, I must have said something, but anyway, she just smiled and that was the end of that.
The next memory I have was days later, she had gotten that film developed. And she made a big point of coming up to me and showing me the photo of me. And she says, look here, you see that? And I said, yeah. And it was me standing by the edge of the pool and I had my bathing suit on. And she said, that's what fat looks like.
You need to lose weight. She shamed me so hard in that moment that that, it just went through me. I, I can't explain it. It, like right now my body's tightening up as I'm talking about it. I'm feeling like my fists are clenched and it's just, there was no reason in the world for her to do that. No reason in the world other than to shame me and maybe in her twisted way, think that that would make me lose weight at ten years old?
I don't know. It's just absurd when I talk about it as an adult. So I want to say that this kind of thing had begun and would continue for a very long time. And at this age that I was, it was just such a harsh blow. And so completely impossible for me to understand what I was supposed to do about it. I haven't really said this yet, but Rachel was a nurse and she worked in the ER.
And my dad, while we were in this apartment, he bought a gas station. I'm going to talk about that more in the next episode, but I'm just going to plant that seed right now. Basically to say that they were gone all the time and we were home a lot alone. This is a theme in my life. And so during the days we would just play with the neighborhood kids.
We'd play Nancy Drew and the Hardy boys. And there was a brother and sister who were on their own a lot too. Martin and Molly. I remember them so very well because Martin would do the weirdest stuff like drop his pants in the middle of the street and run around and strange kids. But I was a strange kid too.
And Molly and I became very good friends. And I think that the common factor between us was that we both came from really screwed up families and really screwed up pasts. I remember one day she came over to visit me at my place, in my apartment. We were sitting out on the porch. I have a photo of us, actually.
I think when we were having this conversation, there's a photo. Gosh, I should post photos on the show notes. Anyway, she came over and she told me about one of the other neighborhood girls that the little girl had gone out in the woods, um, for a walk and that some man had come and raped her. And that's awful.
And, I have to say, At that point, I didn't know what that really meant. I mean, I knew some sexual stuff, obviously, and I think I understood what it meant to a certain degree. The casual way that she told me, as if this was not the first time she'd ever heard of it, and as if she knew exactly what it was, had me sort of feel the same way, like, Oh, okay, this is just something that happens to girls.
Oh, that happened to her. Hmm, okay, better not go out in the woods alone. Just a pin in that, just a note, just a thing that happened to sort of continue to cement this idea about like how little agency I had over my body and how, quote, normal, I guess, molestation, rape, all that stuff, was in my world. So strange.
It was around this time that I absolutely was struggling with a couple of things and the first of them is I, oh, so strange to talk about. I started developing some behaviors I think that were compensating for the trauma and the stress that I was under. And one of them was I at this point started doing kind of repetitive movements and like picking at my hair, twisting my hair.
When I'm saying hard stuff, my throat starts closing up. My goodness. So yeah, so I was doing these things and I'm trying to kind of figure out how to explain it to you so you can understand what was happening for me. So aware of my uncle's, you know, twin uncle's hospitalization, I was containing the fact that I was hearing voices in my head.
My immediate thought is I say that right now is you're probably thinking, Oh, okay, so she's a schizophrenic. Um, no. I think what was happening for me is I was having a couple of different things. I think one of them was that I was so open and so young and I had been through so much that a lot was coming through and I'm, I'm really clear now that some of it was spirit and a lot of it was dark.
So during this time I started having more nightmares and the nightmares that I had were so unbelievably terrifying that I don't even know that I want to share them with you right now. Not for my sake, but for yours because they were horrific, some of them. At the same time, I would be sitting there talking to my sister or doing something and there'd be a voice, voices just coming at me from different directions and drowning out what she was saying.
And I was so absolutely terrified and so afraid to tell her or tell anyone. And I can remember one day really vividly sitting in the living room and I was on my hands and knees and curled up in a ball with my hands over my ears. And I just was overcome with this feeling. It was like I was in a room with people and one of them, at least one of them, was screaming at the top of their lungs.
Now, I will also say that sometimes that voice sounded like my sister, even though she was not saying anything. So I was really going through a lot around this trauma and really going through a terrific amount of what I would describe as just terror. And while this was happening, I was also becoming closer with Molly and she and I would hang out.
And one night my stepmom, Rachel, agreed to let Molly come over and spend the night. And this is another memory that stands out very, very strongly in my mind. Now, first, I want to preface this by saying she and I were around the same age. We had both had pretty awful experiences with life so far. Both of us had been through a lot.
And I think we felt safe with each other. And it was around this time and around this age, and certainly on this night that I started to realize that I liked girls. So that might be a brand new thing for some of y'all. And I don't think I've ever shared this before, ever, anywhere. But it was this particular one night when she slept over that I realized that.
There was something. I didn't know what it was. I couldn't name it. It wasn't sexual. It's just that I think, if I'm going to be perfectly frank about it, I think it was because there was something so incredibly missing for me around female connection. I didn't have a mom. I had a step mom who I wasn't safe with.
My sister and I, we did not get along very well. There just wasn't, I had this big empty space. And I think I started craving it from anyone I could get it from and so I felt connected to her in ways that I can see now were sort of leaning toward that, sort of leaning toward showing me what I now know is just my, my bisexuality, which I'm completely at peace with, but I think it's important to share because it was an ongoing sort of thing that kind of started building on that evening.
And I don't mean ongoing with her, I mean just ongoing within myself and something I struggled with quietly for a long time. While I was having this friendship with her, while I was hearing these stories about this girl getting raped in the woods, and while I was being shamed for being fat, I was also, you know, in school, struggling like crazy, having a very difficult time.
One of the things that began to happen around this age as well is that Rachel, my stepmother, started to decide that there was something wrong with me mentally, that I wasn't very smart. It was also around this time that I started getting kind of picked on by teachers. Now, maybe I was a brat. I don't have any reference or specific incidents that I can point to, but I can tell you that it was around this age that I also started challenging authority and I wouldn't just, you know, A teacher would say something to me and I wouldn't go, yes, ma'am, and write it down.
I would go, but why? Or I would ask questions. And, you know, in the South at this time, that was not welcome from a little girl. And so my teachers and my stepmother just saw me as very sassy and difficult. And so then began this campaign to let's find out what's wrong with Melissa. And that began this journey of me being locked out of the classroom by one of my teachers, a male.
He literally pulled a metal desk into the hallway and made me do my work out in the hallway because I challenged him on something. My stepmom had my IQ tested, had me sent to special education. I was not doing well in school. I was struggling. Big fucking surprise. Traumatized child not doing well in school.
No one ever thought to even question any of that. It was just like, what's wrong with you? And so I ended up in special education classes, which I was bored to tears in. And just being told in every way, shape or form, you don't fit, something's wrong with you, you're difficult, you're not smart. Then started the threats to send me and my sister off to boarding school or some kind of camp or somewhere to get whatever we needed.
I'm going to stop there because I'm going to try to keep these I said around to the same length and there's so much more to say about this. It's just, it's wild, but I will do so in the next episode. Thank you guys so much for listening. I appreciate you being on this journey with me. This is deeply cathartic for me, by the way, just so anyone knows who wonders and asks me as people are doing about how hard this is.
Yeah, there's moments it's, it's challenging, but it also feels really important to me. And so. Yeah, I'm going to keep showing up every Wednesday for you. Again, if you can please follow, subscribe, give me a rating and review, share with people, it would mean the world to me because this is the way we get our word out there.
There's so many people in this big world of ours and I'm just one person. So your help is really incredibly important for me and I'm incredibly grateful for it. Thank you. Thank you so much. And I will see you next Wednesday. Stay courageous. Love y'all.
