Story by Alyssa Crutcher

Photo by Sarah Wittenburg

With the #MeToo movement becoming more and more apparent, I am constantly hearing stories of strong, amazing women who have experienced horrible acts of sexual abuse throughout their lives. I see other people standing up for them, praising them, calling them survivors. This gets me thinking about my story. Am I a survivor too?

My experience started and ended at a younger age.

My mom’s family lives in Texas while we live in Oklahoma. When I was younger, we would go up to visit a couple of times a year. My grandparents had a pool in their backyard. So, in the summertime, my brother, cousins, and I would frequently go swimming.

Sometimes the adults in my family would get in too. But sometimes they wouldn’t.

I think I was about 9 years old the first time it happened.

I started to notice he would only get in the pool when my younger female cousins and I did, or even just when I did.

I remember this one time, we were all in the living room and my little cousins urged me to come out to the pool with them. After I had said no, they asked him. He said no. So, after they urged me further, I gave in and said okay. Suddenly he had changed his mind and wanted to come too. I found this odd but didn’t think anything of it at the time.

Wearing my pink and purple striped tankini that I had gotten from Justice, he would come up behind me in the water and put his hands in places that I barely even knew as a nine-year-old.

He would violate a body that hadn’t even begun growing yet, a body that I hadn’t gotten the chance to grow into.

This happened every time I went in that pool, for about four years.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t even realize that what he was doing was wrong until my mom came into my room one Wednesday night when I was 13 and asked me if Pa-Pa had ever touched me inappropriately.

It was at that moment that all the memories flooded into my head and I realized I had been violated in a way no little girl should be.

Shaking and avoiding eye contact, I told her everything he had done. She said “okay” and left my room. I remember laying in my bed that night, ready to go to sleep but not being able to. It was like that for several weeks afterward, too.

A nightmarish reel of thoughts would play through my mind. I’d think about how I’ve heard of this happening to other people but never thought it was happening to me.

On May 6, 2016, he turned himself in and is now doing 15 or so years in jail, charged with one count of sexual assault of a child and four counts of indecency with a child’s sexual contact.

I think that while it was happening, I knew there was something wrong, but I never told anyone because I didn’t fully understand. I thought he was just trying to have fun. Looking back now, I know he would try to hide what he was doing by holding me and playfully swishing me around in the water — as any grandpa would do.

For years after this, I would think about him every day, constantly, and I would feel deep anger and hatred, not only for him but for the situation he put me through and the long-term effects he forced upon me.

I am 19 now. It’s been six years. And although I have healed, I have not forgiven, and I will never forget.

I still feel anger towards him. I never got an apology; I never got anything from him but hurt.

I ended up in therapy at 15 years old. I fell into a deep depression and harmed myself. I was put on Zoloft and Hydroxyzine by my psychiatrist.

And yet, even with all these after-effects, I still think back on these events, this abuse, and I invalidate myself. I was young, I didn’t fully know it was happening until after it was over, and he never went further than a touch.

I think about how there are women out there who have faced so much worse than I have. I almost feel like I invalidate them when I try to think of myself as a survivor.

But that is not true. As I get older, I realize there is no competition. Yes, many women’s experiences are worse than mine. One in three women have experienced some form of sexual abuse in their life, and there is so much we have in common.

We have all been hurt, we have all felt anger, we have all stayed up until 3 am crying and thinking “why me?” We have all blamed ourselves and wondered if there was anything we could’ve/should’ve done to stop it. We have all had to deal with the lasting effects it has had on our mental health and our ability to trust others.

I am a part of a very large community of brave women. I will not think less of myself because someone had it worse, and neither should you. Because, the fact is, someone somewhere will always have had it worse. But that is no reason to think your story is any less important than someone else’s.

It is unfair of us to put each other, or ourselves, down for experiencing something that should have never happened, something so many people go through. Nothing you have experienced, no matter how small you think it is, is invalid.

It does not matter if someone else’s situation is worse. It does not matter if it happened a long time ago. It does not matter if someone who went through the same thing doesn’t feel as affected as you do. Your experience is valuable and your feelings are justified.

Lift yourself up. Tell your story and tell it loudly. Because you are strong, you are amazing, you are a fighter, and you are valid.

So, with that, I end with this: My name is Alyssa Crutcher. And I am a survivor of sexual abuse.