This story is about my relationship with my body, my visibility, and my sense of safety in the world. It’s about how repeated harm taught me to disappear — and how I am slowly, intentionally learning how to come back.

Before we go any further, I want to name what this story holds. It includes references to sexual violence, abuse, and trauma. There are no graphic details, but the themes are real and tender. Please listen — or read — gently. Pause if your body asks you to. Come back later if you need to.

This is not a teaching piece. It’s not advice. It’s not a checklist for healing.
It’s a truth-telling.

When Being Seen Became Dangerous

For a long time, my nervous system believed one core thing: if I am seen, something bad will happen.

That belief didn’t come from nowhere. It was shaped early, through childhood sexual abuse, when my body stopped feeling like a place of safety and instead became something that attracted harm rather than protection. Being visible didn’t feel neutral. Attention didn’t feel benign. Even when it wasn’t overtly threatening, it carried a charge that my body learned to read as danger.

This is important to say clearly: this wasn’t a flaw in me. It wasn’t weakness or naïveté. It was adaptation.

My nervous system was doing exactly what it was designed to do — keep me alive.

When you learn too young that your body can invite violation, you don’t just “get over it.” You build strategies. You monitor. You adjust. You learn to stay alert even when nothing is actively wrong. Self-blame, silence, and shrinking weren’t personal failures. They were survival logic learned in a body that didn’t yet have better options.

If this resonates with you, I want you to know something now: you’re not broken. You were adapting.

When the Pattern Repeats

What made this belief so hard to undo was how often it was reinforced.

Over time, harm showed up again and again — pressured and coerced sex within relationships, being filmed without consent while serving in the Navy, authority figures violating boundaries, being drugged, being robbed. Again and again, my body was treated as something other people could take from.

I don’t need to offer details for this to be real. What matters is the pattern.

Over and over, my body was not respected as mine.

So much of this harm came from men, which added another layer of confusion, grief, and anger. How do you reconcile wanting connection with the reality that connection has so often been where the harm lived? How do you trust when trust has been used against you?

There is grief here — for what was taken, for what was never safe to begin with. There is rage, sometimes quiet, sometimes burning. And there is deep exhaustion from living in constant self-monitoring, always scanning, always calculating risk.

Naming this isn’t about reliving it. It’s about refusing to minimize it.

Disappearing as a Survival Strategy

At some point, I believed that staying small would keep me safe.

So I dimmed my light. I learned how to dress quieter, softer, less noticeable. I avoided attention, connection, and desire — not because I didn’t want them, but because wanting them felt dangerous. I confused invisibility with protection. I mistook shrinking for safety.

What that strategy actually did was keep me from living.

There were costs to disappearing. Opportunities I didn’t take. Connections I didn’t allow. A muted version of myself that became so familiar I forgot it wasn’t the whole truth.

There is no shame in this. Only clarity.

When you understand why you did what you did, the story changes. You stop asking, “What’s wrong with me?” and start asking, “What was I trying to survive?”

Witchcraft as Refuge

Witchcraft became a turning point — not as fantasy or aesthetic, but as refuge.

It was private. It was secret. It was mine.

In ritual, my body belonged to me again. There were no witnesses I didn’t choose. No expectations to perform. No need to be consumed by others. Magic became a language of consent, autonomy, and authorship. I decided when I showed up, how I showed up, and for whom.

Practicing quietly was powerful. Choosing myself quietly was powerful.

In that space, the divine feminine breathed again. My voice steadied. My body stopped being something to manage and started becoming something I could inhabit.

The Body Reckoning

Here is one of the hardest truths to name.

I love who I am internally — my mind, my values, my creativity, my depth. And at the same time, I have struggled to love my physical form.

I resented my appearance for the attention it brought. I learned to associate confidence with danger. I confused self-belief with narcissism because I was taught that believing in myself was unsafe or selfish.

That was a lie.

Believing in yourself doesn’t make you selfish.
It makes you sovereign.

That conditioning runs deep for many women, especially those whose bodies have been sites of harm. Untangling it is not quick work. But naming it matters.

From Survival to Choice

What I’m learning now is this: survival is not the same thing as living.

Fear drains creative and magical energy. It narrows the world until all that matters is getting through. I don’t want that anymore.

So I’m choosing visibility — intentionally, on my own terms. I let myself shine on purpose. I dress for joy, for color, for my besties. I make peace with the fact that visibility doesn’t guarantee harm, but invisibility guarantees absence.

I’m not claiming the world is perfectly safe.
I am claiming space for myself within it.

That choice is power. And I don’t care who doesn’t like it.

If you’ve been through something like this, please hear this clearly: you are not broken. The strategies you used made sense for the time you were in. You are allowed to grow beyond them — slowly, gently, in ways that feel right to you.