The first time I saw porn, I was eight years old.
I should have been taking a nap. But the joke was on my well-meaning, albeit completely oblivious college-age nanny, who should have known by that point in our relationship that my definition of taking a nap was seeing exactly how many times I could climb from one side of the bed’s headboard to the other, hurl myself down onto the mattress and slip back underneath the covers, all before she opened the door to squint her kohl-lined eyeballs at me.
On this particular day, we were spending the afternoon at her other nanny-friend’s house, and I was languishing in the absence of a headboard to crawl over when I came across a magazine I never should have found. I can still hear the blood rushing in my ears and feel the bright red stain creeping over my neck and cheeks as I dropped the images to the ground at the noise of the door handle turning.
I was too little to understand what I had seen, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of pervasive shame.
The next time I heard about porn was a few months later. A friend from my private school asked me if I wanted to act out a scene from their dad’s Spice Girls-inspired porn stash, and then I was laying on a quilt with a Princess Jasmine dress pulled down around my shoulders while they put their hands on me and kissed me, because “that’s what friends do”.
And since I was in sixth grade, I’ve struggled with a pornography addiction.
A part of me still can’t quite believe that after ten years of hiding in shame, I’m willfully writing this on a public media platform. Seeing the words in typeface, instead of listening to them condemn me from inside my own head, is an opportunity I once swore I would never give myself. I would die with this one tucked under my arm. No one would ever know. There was a time in my life, not so very long ago, when I would have rather stuck my hand in a blender than tell anyone that I did these things, that these things happened.
Now – I say “a time in my life” as if I’m loftily flipping my imaginary Rapunzel hair off my shoulder, pensively gazing off into the middle distance with a sigh of nostalgia. Ah, those were the days.
Noooooo.
A few months ago, I couldn’t deal with people stepping foot inside my bedroom, lest they judge the altar of dirty laundry that has existed for so long in one place that by now, it must have it’s own zip code. Perfect people don’t have laundry altars. Perfect people don’t look at porn. No. I wanted to be perfect.
And if I couldn’t be perfect, well, at least I was going to die with people believing that I was.
I was legendary. I was indestructible. I bent to every request with a smile, was driven by altruism to a fault (“You need money? A ride? A kidney? Take it, be blessed”) and quoted Old Testament Bible verses while all my friends were quoting Drake. I was winning. I was a saint.
I wasn’t real.
I had even my best friend – my best friend, my safe person – convinced that I’d never had a drink, had only ever kissed a guy, and publicly condemned the consumption of McDonald’s chicken nuggets.
Then at night, I’d go home, sit on my bed with my chicken nuggets, stare at my pile of dirty clothes, and wonder why I always felt so alone.
Our generation loves to glorify the mundane, to mask the ordinary and the difficult with the appearance of perfection. Don’t believe me? Some of the loneliest, bored people I know have the most beautiful Instagram feeds. The trouble with this dichotomy is people are left feeling isolated in their everyday battles.
You’re lonely? Here’s a throwback to the times you wish you were actually having!
You miss someone? Here are constant Facebook updates that you hope that one person will see and maybe perceive your life interesting enough to warrant a curious text!
You feel that your life is actually falling apart, that no one will ever love you, that your foreseeable future is a bottomless black hole leeching the luster from your dreams and that everything you will ever do will be but a shout into the void? Reblog! Reblog! reblog!
We make things hard by pretending that they are not hard. In real, organic elbow room, when phones are slid into pockets and hands are clasped tight, there are no filters that you can put on struggles.
While I was preparing to share all this with my family and close friends, my mind was working overtime to come up with six million different reasons why confessing to anything was not a good idea.
“People are going to hate you.”
“What you dealt with is disgusting.”
“It’s not really that big of a deal.”
“This is a guy’s problem.”
“No one needs to know.”
Instead of dismissing these perhaps not-so-far-fetched concerns, I just started going through them one by one, forcing myself to think about what the implications of making this a part of my testimony would be. And what I realised was this: I would rather you never speak to me again and pass extraordinary judgement on me, than love me for something I am not. I used to live for the, “I look up to you”, the “you’re such a good role model”, the “Kayla, you are so smart/godly/insert-positive-adjective-here”. But you know something? God never called me to be any of those things. He called me to love Him, not to be a collector of accolades.
When I am striving to do or act a certain way in order to achieve a positive result or affirmation, who is really getting the glory? God? Or me? I am called to be honest, loving, and to point people toward Jesus. I can’t do that when I am putting on a show for you.
On page 6 of her book Carry On, Warrior, Glennon Doyle Melton writes,
“I found my thing: openness. I decided, based on firsthand experience, that it was more fun to say things that made other woman feel hopeful about themselves and God than it was to say or omit things to make people feel jealous of me.
After reading a few of my essays, my dad called and said, “Glennon. Don’t you think there are some things you should take to the grave?” And I thought hard for a moment and said, “No, I really don’t. That sounds horrible to me. I don’t want to take anything to the grave, I want to die used up and emptied out. I don’t want to carry around anything that I don’t have to. I want to travel light.”
All of the sudden, my biggest secrets aren’t secrets anymore. This is all it took -speaking up.
For the first time in ten years, I’m going to bed tonight a free lady.
Final thought: this life thing, it’s a process. I’m only 23, with science promising me at least double that time before I start to get weird and crunchy. And because of that, I can’t possibly pretend to understand what it’s like to wrestle with the deepest forms of fear. I simply don’t have the life experience yet.
What I do know is this: struggle is universal, but so is love.
At 12:45 am a few weeks ago, I was laying at a park in one of my favourite trees. Every six months or so, I inevitably have a series of days where my heart seems to lose all ground I’ve gained, where things I’m convinced I had dealt with begin to ache again, and I find myself back in old places – both physically and emotionally.
And as I lay there, watching the stars come out from between the branches and thinking myself into a pit, the song Emmylou by Vance Joy started playing. And when it got to the part where he sings, “You are loved, you are loved, you are loved, you are loved…”, for the first time in a long time, I really believed it.
I am loved. I am loved, and so are you.
You are loved, you are loved, you are loved.
Freedom is available.
You are not alone.
