Impossible by Stan Walker

Author:Stan Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

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After the experience of telling Reece, and then my parents, I felt so empowered and excited that I couldn’t stop talking about it. The biggest secret of my whole life was now, ‘Yes! This is my badge, everybody! I was raped! I was raped! I’m good now.’

It was weird to tell my cousins. I told two of my cousins I’d grown up with, one my age, one two years older.

The older one started laughing. ‘Shut up, man. No you didn’t.’

I said to her, ‘Cousin, why would I say that? Why would I, as a falla, say that I was raped by another man? What does that do for me? Where does that get me?’

And then I reminded her of something I’d seen happen to her, when the same guy who raped me was touching her up. We had never talked about it before. And she just went quiet.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I remember.’

We were all quiet then.

She had that first reaction because of shame. She would rather push it from her mind. My people, they come from everything that is shame. Don’t stand up, bro. Don’t shine. Don’t be awesome. Don’t try. No, no. Everything’s shame. She didn’t want to believe it. It was too hard to accept.

When I told my brothers about my rape, I was sixteen, but they are a few years older and were just becoming parents. If I had never said anything, they probably would never have said anything about their own experience. Would that have altered the course of their life? Would they have brought up their kids differently? Because I was able to tell my secret, I feel like it opened the door for all our lives to change for the better.

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