@ZoyaAnsari 4 December 2022

Lesson learned. “You may feel foolish crying over events that happened so long ago. But grief waits for expression. When you do not allow yourself to grieve, it festers. It can limit your vitality, make you sick, will decrease your capacity for love...Grief needs space. You can only really grieve when you give yourself the time, security and permission to grieve.” As I look back on this life-changing journey I wish that my life would have turned out differently, but unfortunately for that to happen, I needed a different childhood to the one I actually lived and survived as that child. We need to remember that adult survivors, who have finally found the courage to speak up, don’t lie about their painful childhood. Many live in exile and are shunned by their own family for speaking up, treated as crazy by an ignorant society of people who live in denial. Yes, at times I wish that I were crazy, so as I wouldn’t have to feel the pain a victim of child rape endured, and as the adult observer, have had to relive it all, I see myself pregnant at age nine, cry the tears of a child mother heart breaking when she was discarded in a swallow grave and left there for dead. The remaining members of this incest family and their friends who follow them live in denial, as if those past atrocities committed by them against innocent children never happened, and for them to live life in denial I must be crazy. Adult survivors are not crazy and they don’t need validation, what they do need is to be treated with respect and helped to regain their value and worth in society. We all need to learn to respect other people’s choices, regardless if we agree, respect other people's choices, as we would like others to respect ours.