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I have been pondering something lately…about who I am and how I came to be that person.

The Background
As a child I was sexually molested by my stepbrother who was 7 years older than me.
I was 5 when it started and 11 the last time it happened.
Contrary to what people who have never been through anything like this imagine, it was not an entirely negative experience.
I wasn’t forced into anything, I wasn’t threatened and there was no vaginal penetration.
It was entirely inappropriate and profoundly affected my sexual development and along with a host of other things, my self esteem.
It cultivated my desire to please men in exchange for attention, It cultivated my sexual promiscuity, It cultivated a feeling of being different from everyone else. Deviant.

The Foreground
Fast forward a couple decades. I’m older and wiser. I’ve been through a bunch of therapy. I’ve worked through the shame and embarrassment of it all. I am still a very sexually open person, with rather non-traditional views on and preferences for sexual activity. And I am happy with all that I am. I am comfortable with me and there is nothing about my attitudes, desires or tastes that I would change, given the chance.

But I wonder how much of my sexual attitudes and experiences would be different had I not become a sexually aware being at age 5.
If things had turned out differently, who would I be today? If I am happy with who I am now and my childhood experiences directly led to me being who I am today…then I should accept what happened as simply one of the events that carved my psyche and made me who I am.

There have been many times in my adult life when my “issues” have had an effect on my life and I’ve always carried a certain amount of resentment about it. My ex husband likes to blame my stepbrother for the dissolution of our marriage. Heh. Nothing is ever really that simple. I could blame my step-brother for the lack of self-love that led to my decision to marry my ex in the first place, but he’s not responsible for the end.

So, if my molestation led to my choice to date and marry the man who is father to my child, if I had not been molested would I have not had my daughter? That alone, for me, makes the experience worth it.

In other words, I think if someone offered me a choice to go back and change the past, I would refuse because of all that I have today that is a result of that past.

I don’t know if I can really effectively communicate how profound a revelation that is for me. It changes everything I think about what I went through as a child and makes it so much less a “tragedy” and so much more just an unpleasant period in my life that led to greater things down the road.

And so, no, I would absolutely not change my past, given the chance.

Would you?