Chelsea Sanchez
Chelsea Sanchez is a psychology major at UCI in the class of 2024. Despite trial and tribulation, she has continued writing and has a published anthology, AETHER, from her creative writing studies at her high school, SDSCPA. She lives in San Diego, longing for a dog, an iced coffee, and a sense of purpose.
Please read with care, the below piece includes some details and thoughts of sexual abuse.
Dalaga
Two years ago, my creative writing teacher told us to write about an occasion that changed who we were. There was only one that brought me an immediate stab to the chest, his hand around my small waist with his left arm, his other hand reaching up, through that Hello Kitty t-shirt and white tank top underneath. But rather than writing that story, I chose to be safe and wrote about my grandfather dying to prevent myself from slipping away. At the time, I was too committed to a mask I had created with pervy jokes and half-truths to go any further than that.
I submitted the assignment like it was nothing and ran off, backpack on my back and fled to the solace of my bedroom, where only those four walls had heard multiple times of my tear-stained retelling. The old reflex of running away came first; to take the fight out of my fight-or-flight feeling and just flee.
Like most children with trauma, I pushed it down to the pit of my stomach in an effort to seem normal to everybody else. I went along with that concept because that’s just how I worked; staring down at the ground and allowing the gray concrete to lead me to destinations in an effort to avoid conflict. After living on this earth for a little longer, I realized that fighting this trauma drained me, but fleeing it disappointed and depressed me. Two evils that always stemmed from that memory I should have written—it has always been with me since I was a child.
For years, I’ve been sorry for the half-assed effort I had offered to my creative writing teacher—sorry to myself, and sorry to everyone—I should have given an explanation to.
It's been seven years and I’ve already exhausted my last breath on running. Hiding is unlikely, so I’ll share this. I’d rather have it go down in writing.
I was sexually assaulted by my uncle.
These seven words strung together gave me such suicidal thoughts, sexual confusion, broken relationships, and missed opportunities that came from his grubby hands.
And because I was baffled, terrified, and all the emotions a ten-year-old didn’t understand, because nobody ever taught me, it took me two years to distance myself away from his advances.
Yet, in those two years, I went back to my aunt and uncle’s house as if it was nothing.
Multiple times.
Allowing myself to continue on with my misunderstandings because I was too scared.
I’ve written about it twice in my lifetime, worried about the implications of putting a truth like this out there and wondering when it would be safe to regale it. Once, in an excerpt that strangers have read and another in a poem that was more direct, yet as time goes on, I realize there will never be a time when it will be “safe” to share.
It was a summer afternoon in 2012 and the heat, like most summers in San Diego, was almost unbearable. To prevent me from overheating, my mother forced me to wear my white Hello Kitty shirt and booty shorts. I remember her telling me that I was her dalaga—maiden in literal translation—though meaning so much more in Filipino culture; essentially telling me that I was a “catch” and that now I was old enough to be considered sexy, which by its own meanings was even worse for a ten-year-old.
We drove to my aunt’s house so we could deliver money to my grandmother from her pension and it should’ve been a ten-minute affair, though Filipinos are incredibly talkative, and could spend days chatting with a relative. In this case, it was my aunt and mother gossiping, with my grandmother interjecting occasionally. Rather than joining in the conversation, I was told to help my uncle with the internet. He had sixty-six years under his belt and had a lack of interest in the worldwide web. In any case, I agreed to assist him with the promise of ice cream as a reward.
He sat on the right, with a pull-out table that was a part of the armoire that held the HP desktop. Beside him was a stack of lottery cards, the shavings of the UV ink all over the table, indicating that a lot of them were recent. I had no understanding at the time of what exactly his purpose was to such an addiction, but by all means, I was given a direction and I was going to follow it. I explained to him how to log onto the website, getting through each step like an adult telling a child how to add simple numbers.
Being so caught up within my expert explanation, I hardly realized his right hand was on my inner thigh, stroking up and down as if the spell would break if he went any faster. Perhaps it was my mind already shielding me from disgust, but I didn’t notice everything was wrong.
He handed me a lottery card, watching me attentively as I leaned over and typed in the serial number slowly in an effort to show him how to do it.
Sometimes, I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t leaned forward, allowing him to simply do what I had said and just watched him follow the directions. They weren’t even that difficult, read the serial number and type it in. A simple, two-step job.
His two-step job involved slipping his hand around my small waist with his left arm, his other hand reaching up, through that Hello Kitty t-shirt and white tank top underneath, leading to his voracious groping of my prepubescent breast. Like it was nothing. Like it was something that we just did normally. Something that could be done without consequence.
The violation of trust, respect, and love came as a surprise. I was always told by my mother, dalaga ka na, which meant that at my age, I was now old enough to understand my own body, and because of that, I would know not to let any strangers touch my private parts until I was even more dalaga and had a boyfriend or husband in my life.
That being said, she hadn’t spoken of family members doing such a deed.
There aren’t enough trees in the world that could be cut down that would give me enough pages to describe the amount of violation I felt from someone I trusted. It wasn’t rape in its technicality. I’ve always been afraid to call it rape; there was no penetration physically, but there was a sense of penetration into my psyche, changing who I was for the rest of my life.
And the problem was, I liked it.
So, I came back for more. Each time I placed a card down onto my side of the floor, I’d pick up another, leaning forward and typing in the serial number into the paper. Allowing his hand to consciously touch me in places I knew were wrong but still felt good to my body. I could hear my aunt, mother, and grandmother laugh away over some conversation and it felt as though I was the one being laughed at. Laughed over my lack of resolution to pull away and scream.
I didn’t understand why.
I was confused why my lower half felt wet and sticky whenever he would touch me like that, rough hands from an aged gardener taking a hold of my breast and running his index finger around my areola each time I leaned forward. I was confused why when I told him it tickled, he only said that it was supposed to, that he was glad I was enjoying myself. I was confused why he was bringing his other hand closer and closer over to my lower half, grinning like he had just won the lottery with each touch. I was confused why I couldn’t replicate this feeling at home, so I had to keep coming back for more in an effort to feel those same sensations. I was confused why he didn’t stop, why he didn’t spare his blushes and just continued to take advantage of me, a ten-year-old girl that was, by all conventions, his niece. Was it because I was adopted and technically, his wife had no blood relation to me? Was it because his wife nor the scratch cards were no longer satisfying his desires? Was it because he thought it was fun?
It may not have done anything to him because I was too scared to ruin the life he was living because I had morals. I felt bad that I was going to ruin someone’s life because of my sexual confusion, especially because it’s hardly talked about within my culture. Anything remotely sex is always kept quiet, beneath layers of built-up problems that they don’t want to acknowledge.
So as my culture dictated, I stayed silent.
But inside, that miserable memory had cracked up every fiber of my being and threw me out into a deep and infinite space where I couldn’t breathe. Such an occasion has fucked me up harder than finding out I was adopted, that my birth parents couldn’t take care of me because they were on the verge of divorce and dirt poor, and that I was the compensation for my adoptive parents’ dead son. It removed every last idea of trust I had within me for all adults in my life and it wasn’t long before I had altered my own perceptions of the whole world.
Rather than being open to meeting new people, I only saw the ramifications of creating those friends. Would they hurt me? Would they throw away my trust? Would they abuse me? This assault removed me from the last bits of that childhood I should have had. Rather than trying makeup or cute clothes like any other girl, I was more preoccupied with covering my skin and trying to understand what made the experience enjoyable to me, since I was taught that such unwanted advances should have felt awful.
It didn’t help that I was alone, a shell of the child I used to be. On occasion, I wonder where the girl prior to the assault ended up. I hope she ran off into a meadow where the grass is greener and a mere sunburn would be the only pain she’d ever feel. Sometimes I think she lingers within the mask I cover my face with, peeking out to see how her new self is doing.
In many cases, trauma tends to jump back and forth—just when you think you’ve evaded it, the tectonic plates of your world rearrange, creating new chasms for you to fall into because it’s funny. In the case of this rearrangement, I feel as though I’ve been taken away from my younger years too early, unable to arrange my world back to what seemed right. Fragments of enjoying my early childhood are hardly visible anymore, though the impressions I remember all surrounded the friends I had made in school. Even if those friends didn’t understand why I couldn’t remove my jacket in 90° heat or why I didn’t want to try to look cute in shorts, skirts, or dresses. There was no more attempt to become dalaga like my mother wanted, but rather an attempt to shield the abiding feeling of sexual confusion and unbearable recollection of hurting in my heart.
I often say that writing was the light at the end of the tunnel that gave me the opportunity to be at peace with myself. It is, by its own right, partially true. All I did was create twisting and turning pathways without any real answers. But people took my writing as the new gospel, believing in every word I said because of how I wrote it. So I used that to my advantage, whether it be to remove myself from the painful memory or prevent myself from falling into the bottomless pit of suicidal thoughts and self-loathing. I chose the easy way out; to write myself into oblivion. I buried the assault by creating stories of characters that had lives that I wanted and with each story, the mask I built grew stronger until I no longer twitched at the mere mention of anything about assault. Rather, I made jokes about sex and death, made myself seem like I knew everything in the Kama Sutra, and forced myself to pretend none of it happened.
Quite honestly, it was probably the most determined I had been in years.
Freud can tell you that a mask is nothing in comparison to trauma, that will eat you alive if not confronted properly. He was right. My nightmares still continued, the constant self-doubt bled through when I was alone in my bedroom, and the ideation of ending everything remained at every juncture. Just because I used writing fictitious stories to create lies didn’t mean I was victorious in my battle to regain myself.
I still wear that mask, cracked slightly and worn as it may be from other struggles. It’s been my most formidable and useful ally, providing me with the feel-good sensation I’ve needed.
Old habits die hard, but I’m breaking this one after seven long years—properly.
It took me that long to write my tale as it is. No jokes, no bullshitting, no metaphors meant to misdirect, no attempts to shield the truth.
Just plain and simple: I was sexually assaulted by my uncle.