When I was 16 ...

I wanna share a story that I have told very few people.

When I was 16, I was a mess on the inside. Rape and physical abuse had broken me into pieces, and it was only because I was so good at running on autopilot that nobody really knew how bad it was for me.

In my head, I felt like I had a hundred voices - it was so bad I tried to create a mental "parliament" just so there was some kind of order.

Then I went to see the movie "The Wall." And after I left the theater, it occurred to me that I had walls too, and I needed for them to come down before i got as bad as the main character in the film.

There was only one problem I hadn't considered. I didn't just have a wall between me and others, I had an internal wall where most of the memories of my rape were hidden behind.

And I was in no way ready to face that horror.

So I went a little crazy - or maybe just slightly more crazy than I had already been.

I spent a day or so wrestling with a dark side of myself I never even knew I had before that, and I somehow managed to get it back into behind a barrier again.

The strange thing is afterwards, I no longer felt like I had hundreds of voices in my head, but only two or three instead.

But it would be decades before I found the courage to try and face that darkness again, and when I did, I was smart enough to know I needed help from a therapist when exploring that part of me.

Make of this story what you will.