Reunion Online

Earlier this year, Parul Sehgal wrote an essay examining “compulsory survivorship”—the tendency to label everyone who has had an abusive or unwanted sexual experience as a survivor.

I found an old photograph recently. It’s a flimsy, bent Polaroid print of myself as a child.

I found an old photograph recently. It’s a flimsy, bent Polaroid print of myself as a child.

I don’t normally associate hotels with great works of art. Yet there I was, standing quietly, intently staring at a tree in the makeshift gallery on the mezzanine of the Washington DC Hilton.

For the past ten years I have spoken openly and publically about my emotional, physical, spiritual, and sexual abuse, something I only did in the past in the way of justifying my behavior. I would tell my wife and friends, “If what happened to me happened to me happened to you, you’d be drinking or acting this way also.”

I was reminded recently of an important lesson about trauma recovery. The teacher was the son of a friend, a young man who spoke at his bar mitzvah about the competing motivations of fear and hope.

As we and our community mobilizes with the renewed commitment to change these statistics—and create a world free of this violence—I wanted to share with you some of the exciting, hopeful, important work that’s happening at Joyful Heart this month.

Never in my wildest hopes would I have imagined sitting in a rental car, at the intersection of 45th and Broadway, watching an electronic billboard on the Viacom building announcing “NO MORE that doesn’t happen to guys,” “NO MORE he just needs to get over it,” “NO MORE we don’t talk about that,” and so on…

Both Trav and I can say that while child sex abuse will always color our shared life, it will never exclusively define either of us.

I already knew the story of the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team’s investigation of the Archdiocese of Boston’s cover-up of sexual abuse by scores of its priests. I knew most of the characters. I even caught a glimpse of the name of the priest who sexually abused me back in the mid-1960s. But what moved me most was two boys sitting near me in the theater of the Spotlight film recently.