The thing about remaining quiet—it will only get louder and louder inside of you.

Keeping quiet, was unknowingly, damaging me.

I was becoming a damaged little girl.

A damaged soul.

For such a young soul, I began to feel numb to everything around me. Not even the visits of the little old lady, the love of my nan and gramp from just down the street, and the fleeting presence of my father; could stop that damage.

Too much had happened and too much keeping quiet, made me different.

At first, my young mind thought that maybe I was just born different, that's why I was treated differently. But my inner strong spirit knew that not to be the case. So, the inner voice within me, would tell me that it was what had happened to me, that now made me different.

My relationship with my mum.

My relationship with my dad.

The Catholic school.

Where we lived.

The spiteful kids.

Ivan.

Maria and Mario.

Them, they all caused my being different.

They all caused the damage.

I was seven, and I was already differently damaged.

By nature, I was an inquisitive child who wanted to ask many questions. But the damage, stunted everything.

My questions.

My thoughts.

My feelings.

They were all numbed.

Numbed or obscured.

What kind of little girl accidentally would kill goldfish because they were wet, and she simply wanted to dry them off?

Me, the damaged and the numbed little girl.

Or what about the little girl, who would hold her feet up against the fire until her socks would melt and burn her feet?

That would be me again, the very damaged and numbed little girl.

I remember such things with such sadness. At the age of seven, I was silently crying out for help. I wanted to tell so much, ask so much, but was too afraid to do either.

I was so withdrawn, that it eventually came to the attention of the headmaster of the Catholic school. He knew my mother, he also knew her four brothers, because he had taught them all earlier on in his teaching career.

Unlike his judgemental teachers, Mr McManus had noticed how withdrawn I had become. He had noticed me retreating into my own and different world. So upon his kind suggestion to my mother, I was invited to join a French trip to Saint-Malo with some of the older children. He was trying to rebuild my self esteem and lift my confidence from out of the educational dirt. In a way, it did. For just that week, I came out of my different shell. My inquisitiveness and my crushed spirit was beginning to rise from out of all that had been suppressing it, but....Saint-Malo soon came to an end.

That little trip taught me many things—that another world existed beyond my own, that there were some nice, older children who attended the Catholic school, that I could survive better away from my mother, and most importantly, that I really was different.

On that trip, I nearly drowned in a large and deep tide pool. I had slipped on a rock that was covered in some kind of seaweed and fell into it. With panic, I just kept going under. An older girl was swimming about two metres away from me, and I don't know how, but I leapt from out of the water and onto her back. Luckily, she was a strong swimmer, and she managed to safely swim me to the edge of the tide pool, where there were huge rocks that I could quickly climb onto. I remember sitting on a rock, just thinking 'I survived that'.

The thing is, at just seven years old, I seemed to have survived so much already. There were so many times during my early childhood, where I felt like my world just wanted me dead.

I had survived my mum's beating.

A brick being thrown at my head.

A bad case of Croup and The Mumps.

And all of the molestations of my small and innocent body.

Then nearly drowning in a tide pool.

Yet, I had somehow survived them all.

It all laid the foundations to me that I really was different.

I had never been treated like a normal little girl, so how could I be expected to think and feel like a normal little girl?

People and circumstances had changed me.

They had also damaged me.

They kept the quiet, quiet, and numbed more of the numbness inside me.

No, I would never be a normal little girl.

Normal, it just didn't exist in my world.