Oh, the Shame of It All

I was about ten years old the night I first heard the station. I was sitting on the edge of my bed in Great Falls, Montana, turning the stiff plastic dial on my small radio the way I had done so many times before. The house was quiet in the uneasy way homes become quiet after tension has burned itself out. It was not peaceful. It was the kind of silence that felt alert and watchful. A silence where no one breathed deeply. I had already learned that nighttime meant uncertainty and that safety was never guaranteed.

I was not searching for anything specific. Moving through stations helped keep my hands busy while my mind drifted as far from the day as it could. Static, a flash of song, a clipped syllable, then nothing. Until suddenly, a voice came through clearer than any other signal that little radio had ever picked up. The DJ said the broadcast was coming from New York City.

New York City.

The words hit something inside me I did not yet have language for. My chest tightened with something electric and unfamiliar. Maybe hope. Maybe recognition. Maybe the sense that somewhere, somehow, there was a world I belonged to but had not yet reached. Outside my window was the darkness of the Montana plains and the occasional distant train. No glow of tall buildings. No rush of traffic. Just stars and a steady emptiness that made the world feel impossibly wide and isolating.

My room was small and unremarkable. My life felt small and unremarkable. But that voice from New York, that unexpected signal pushing its way through static and distance, felt like a doorway. A reminder that life somewhere else was bigger, louder, more alive. I listened with everything in me, holding my breath when the signal faded and exhaling when it returned. Soon I realized the station only reached me late at night after ten when the house sank into its rigid stillness. That timing felt intentional, as though the world needed to quiet before something meant for me could find its way in.

So it became a ritual. A secret. Something that belonged only to me.

I would sit with my knees curled to my chest waiting for the moment the voice cut through. In those nights, in the dim glow of a small lamp and the sound of distant Montana trains, the imagined world began forming in vivid color. In my mind, I was already there. Walking crowded sidewalks. Existing in a world where the weight I carried could finally fall off.

It began as distraction.

Eventually it became survival.

Reality inside our home was loud in a way that had nothing to do with volume. The emotional noise was constant. Sudden yelling, doors slamming, angry footsteps pacing the hallway. My father’s rage was unpredictable. His words sharp and targeted. They did not simply hurt. They cut like a knife going through your jugular leaving you to bleed out.

One night, during one of their fights, I heard him shout at my mother, “You never wanted her in the first place.” He meant me. The moment those words reached me, something in me collapsed. There was no shock. Only confirmation. A strange mix of relief and heartbreak. Hearing it said aloud felt like someone finally naming what my body had already known for years.

Shame entered before I ever knew the word. My mother ensured it stayed. Sometimes with explosive anger. Sometimes through subtle shifts in tone or expression that communicated more than words ever could. I became the problem. The reason. The target. My siblings learned this too. I was the one they could direct their misdirected pain toward. They followed the example given to them.

My oldest brother wielded a kind of power over me that felt calculated. He would tell my mother stories of things he claimed to see me do or hear me say, and none of it mattered whether it was true. My voice held no weight. His accusations shaped the narrative. I became the liar. The dramatic one. The manipulative one. Eventually, I stopped defending myself. I never knew whether telling the truth would protect me or destroy me. I never knew if silence would keep me safe or make things worse. I never knew which version of myself was safest to be.

Existing felt dangerous.

So I learned to shrink. I learned to stay small. I learned to silence myself because attention meant exposure. And exposure meant pain. And yet somewhere deep inside me was the faintest voice whispering something I did not yet dare believe: You are meant for more than this.

That whisper surfaced every time the New York signal made its way through the static. It was the only place where anything inside me felt true. It became the world where my spirit could breathe, if only for a moment.

As I grew older, my hiding places shifted. Physically, my first safe spaces were the basement storage room with sleeping bags and the warm furnace room where I tucked myself behind the water softener. Wrapped in blankets or pressed against warm machinery, I finally felt my body soften. As time passed, hiding became simpler. My safest place eventually became not being home at all.

Violence was not rare in our house. It came in waves, unpredictable yet inevitable. The night my father and older brother fought is etched into my memory with violent clarity. They were downstairs outside my brother’s room. The argument escalated fast. My father shouted, “You WILL respect your mother.” And my brother, finally bold enough to say aloud what everyone knew, screamed back, “Why? You don’t!!!!”

The house held its breath.

What followed was chaos. Fists. Shoving. Rage that no longer had a place to hide. And when it was over, my brother was thrown out. Banished. As if speaking the truth made him disposable.

He was not the only one hurt in that house. My mother endured his violence. My sister did too. And me, the smallest and most sensitive, the one who could not harden fast enough, became the easiest target. I recall being hit in the face repeatedly so hard that each blow knocked my vision black and the only reason I remained standing is my father was holding me up with one hand while pummeling me with the other. My mother stood behind my father. No attempt to stop him. No care to check on me when he left the room. My crime, getting home from roller skating with friends 30 minutes late. His accusation was that I must have been with boys. No amount of my truth would ever matter. No apology or accountability ever came from him.

Only one sibling escaped it entirely: the golden child. My mother’s untouchable. The lost boy. Unseen in one way, but protected in another. The dynamic was clear, even then. One child to idealize, one to neglect, and one to blame and my sister; the one to have as a friend.

So how could I not absorb the shame directed at me. How could I not believe I was the cause, the flaw, the defect. I was the scapegoat, the emotional dumping ground, the container for everything no one else wanted to face. In families like ours, the guilt, the rage, the unprocessed pain has to go somewhere.

When I was thirteen, my father moved out to attend treatment for alcoholism. When he left, I felt two opposing truths at once. Part of me felt relief, like finally being able to breathe in a room that had been locked shut for years. The other part of me felt abandoned and confirmed in a belief I had carried silently for as long as I could remember, that I was not worth staying for.

Months before he left, he asked if I wanted to go roller skating with him. The invitation surprised me. For a moment, something inside me lifted. I thought maybe he wanted time with me. Maybe he was trying. Maybe beneath all the distance and sharp edges there was a version of him who wanted to be my father. I remember getting ready that day as if I were preparing for something sacred. I imagined us skating side by side, laughing, maybe talking, maybe connecting. I imagined being seen, not as a burden or a problem, but simply as his daughter.

But when we arrived, the truth showed up instead.

There she was.

A woman with over-processed blonde hair and tired eyes, standing near the rink with her three children orbiting her like they had done it a thousand times. The familiarity was undeniable. The way they greeted each other, the way he positioned me near one of her daughters, the way they spoke in hushed tones while pretending everything was casual. I stood there waiting for my place in the moment, waiting for meaning, waiting to still matter.

Eventually I understood.

This was not a father trying to connect with his daughter. This was a lie wrapped in a field trip. A cover story. A performance meant to make an affair look harmless if anyone questioned it. I was not invited because I mattered. I was brought because I made it look innocent.

In the months that followed, more truth surfaced. She came into his bakery regularly. His staff knew. Everyone knew. They watched him disappear with her on long lunches, the kind that stretched well past believable. The affair continued, and every time another layer revealed itself, something inside me collapsed just a little more.

I wasn’t angry. Not then. I was devastated.

Because there is a particular kind of wound that forms when a child realizes they were never chosen, only used. Being overlooked hurts. Being abandoned hurts. But being a prop in someone else’s deception leaves a mark that burrows into identity.

And the most painful part was not the affair itself, but the moment I realized I had let myself believe, even briefly, that he wanted me.

When the marriage fell apart, I became the scapegoat again, blamed simply because I had been physically present at the rink. No one cared that she was a regular at his bakery. No one cared that everyone knew he slipped away with her for far too long on breaks. None of it mattered. Conveniently, painfully, predictably, the blame landed on me.

Following my attempt at ending my life, something inside me shifted. The girl who hid became the girl who fought. Detentions, in school suspensions, and office referrals became routine. Teachers braced when I walked into a room. I defended the kids who were bullied and did so with fists. On the surface, I was fearless. Underneath, I was disappearing.

Drama class was the first place where truth was allowed. For the first time in my life, emotion wasn’t something to hide, mute, or apologize for. Onstage, grief wasn’t inconvenient or dramatic, it was human. My voice wasn’t something that needed to be softened, silenced, or reshaped into something easier to digest. When I spoke, people listened. Not because they were waiting to correct me or catch me, but because they felt something.

Onstage, I was not too much. I was not wrong. I was not the problem. I was magnetic.

I poured emotion into every role because, even though I was acting, I wasn’t pretending. Every line, every silence, every trembling breath was drawn directly from wounds I never had permission to name at home. I didn’t need to imagine heartbreak or fear or loss. I had lived it. So when the script asked for pain, I didn’t perform it, I released it. When it asked for rage, it came like fire. When it asked for longing, it felt ancient. And when it asked for vulnerability, something in the room shifted, because it wasn’t character, it was confession.

For the first time, my intensity wasn’t a liability. It was a gift.

Teachers who barely tolerated me in their classrooms sat quietly in darkened auditoriums with tears in their eyes. Students who avoided me or whispered behind my back leaned forward, unable to look away. Onstage, people saw me. Not the girl who hid in furnace rooms. Not the scapegoat. Not the fighter. Not the problem child. They saw the person underneath all the armor and fear and survival.

And maybe the most life altering part was this: When I stepped offstage, nothing bad happened. No one punished me for feeling. No one mocked me for crying. No one told me to stop being dramatic. For a brief, extraordinary window of time, the truth wasn’t dangerous. It was welcome. Drama became the first place I belonged. The first place I breathed without bracing. The first place I felt even the faintest possibility that there might be something in me worth keeping. It wasn’t escape. It was recognition. A remembering of something I wasn’t allowed to know yet. Onstage, I was becoming someone I hadn’t met, but already somehow knew.

Offstage, poetry became the only place my feelings could live. It started quietly, scribbles on loose paper, torn notebook edges, margins of homework and the backs of envelopes. But very quickly, it became something bigger. Necessary. I filled notebook after notebook with ache and longing and rage I had no safe place to put. I wrote softness too, tenderness that had nowhere to land in real life. I wrote truths I could not speak aloud without punishment, truths my body held long before my voice knew how to shape them.

Sometimes the words came out fast, like a dam finally giving way, flooding the page before I even fully understood what I was saying. Other times they surfaced slowly, pulled upward from a depth I didn’t know existed with the kind of honesty that felt both terrifying and holy. My handwriting changed depending on the emotion. Some pages were tight and sharp, pressed so hard the pen nearly tore through. Others were soft, curved, just barely inked, as if the paper itself needed gentleness.

Writing made space inside me. Space I could not find anywhere else. A space where I could tell the truth without being punished or dismissed or blamed. A space where I existed outside of the roles forced on me, the labels thrown at me, the silence expected from me.

Sometimes after finishing a poem, I would sit with my notebook pressed to my chest and feel something loosen. Something exhale. Something let go, even if only a fraction. For a moment, I wasn’t drowning. For a moment, I wasn’t invisible. For a moment, I could breathe.

Poetry wasn’t just writing. It was relief. It was witness. It was the closest thing I had to being held. And even then, even as a child, some part of me knew: if my voice was ever going to survive, it would be because I first learned to write it down.

And then one day, all my notebooks were gone.

Not misplaced. Not accidentally thrown away.

Gone.

My mother never admitted to it, but she did not have to. She was the only one who ever commented on my writing. She would shake her head and ask why I couldn’t write something positive. As if joy could grow in a place built on denial and cruelty.

When I realized the notebooks were missing, something inside me broke in a way that felt final. They weren’t just poems. They were pieces of me. Losing them felt like having pieces of myself ripped away. After that, writing did not stop immediately, but it dimmed. Slowly. Quietly. Until eventually, the words disappeared too. It was years before I practiced writing poetry or short stories again,

During this time, my mother married the first man who flashed a big enough diamond to make her feel chosen. There was no conversation about how it would affect me, no consideration of friendships, stability, or familiarity. One decision, one ring, and suddenly my life was uprooted. She moved me and one of my brothers to a farm in a tiny rural town where we knew no one and nothing felt familiar.

It was salt in a wound that was already bleeding.

There wasn’t a single moment where my needs were weighed or acknowledged. No one asked how I felt about leaving the only home, school, or social world I had ever known. No one paused to consider what it meant for a teenage girl who already felt invisible and unwanted to be moved even farther from any sense of belonging. The decision wasn’t about family or future or stability. It was about her, and the illusion of being desired.

The farm was quiet in a way that didn’t feel peaceful. It felt isolating. The silence there wasn’t calming, it was suffocating. The man she married had a hardness to him that made the air feel tense even when no one spoke. There was no warmth. No tenderness. Just rules, discomfort, and the unspoken message that we were guests in a life we had not chosen and were not welcomed into.

School was worse.

I was the outsider overnight. The new girl in a small town where everyone had known everyone since birth. Their families intertwined for generations. Their social structures sealed long before I ever walked through the doors. I wasn’t just new. I was foreign. Wrong. Misplaced. I didn’t belong there, and everyone knew it.

The loneliness was sharp.

It wasn’t the kind of isolation where someone is simply alone. It was the kind that makes you question whether you exist at all. The kind where being unseen feels safer than being noticed.

Meanwhile, my mother seemed infatuated with her new life, or at least the image of it. The diamond. The farmhouse. The illusion of being wanted. She didn’t notice the shift in me. She didn’t notice anything beyond her own storyline. The more I shrank, the less she saw. The less she saw, the more I understood that I was on my own.

The marriage did not last. Eight months. That was all it took for the cracks to become too visible to ignore. He was cruel. Controlling. And in many ways, similar to the man she had just left, only packaged differently.

By then, something inside me had grown stronger than fear.

I recognized I could not endure one more moment of her impulsive choices or be dragged through another destructive storyline that had nothing to do with my well-being. I understood, even at sixteen, that if I stayed, I would disappear—not emotionally this time, but entirely.

So I made a decision.

At age 16, I moved back to Great Falls, not to my family, but to the one person who always saw me. Shonna. My closest friend since third grade. Through every conflict, every silence, every shift in life, she remained a soft place to land. Her family welcomed me without interrogation or performance. They simply made space.

Living with them allowed me to graduate with the same kids I began life with. To someone who spent her childhood emotionally displaced, that meant more than anyone knew. It was a sense of completion. A sense of finally standing somewhere solid.

When the dust settled and the noise quieted, something familiar returned.

The whisper.

It is time.

I reached out to a nanny agency in New York. They placed me with a family in Freeport, Long Island.

At seventeen, I bought a one way ticket.

I remember singing quietly to myself as I boarded,

“I’m leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again.”

In my mind, I was stepping into a new life. A place where I might finally be seen, appreciated, wanted, and possibly loved. I had spent years imagining New York as freedom. A doorway to possibility.

What I did not know then was that I was stepping from the frying pan into the fire. The fantasy I clung to was built from dissociation and survival, not reality. And no matter how far I traveled, shame was already packed neatly inside me. It would follow me until I learned to face it.