I Don’t Know How I Survived That: Online Abuse that Slowly Became a Nightmare
Content warning for sexual grooming, child abuse, and sexual assault.
I was 12 when I told my mother that I felt depressed – a word I had recently learned in health class. I knew there was something deeply wrong with me, a tumor that I could not excise with prayer and meditation. The red maple tree outside of our house looked muted, a world lived in greyscale.
“I’ll get you some St John's wort; it will make you feel better.” We were lying like spoons in my bed. Her cool fingertips brushed my brow, and she drew circles on my temples. I wanted to stay wrapped up in that moment, my skin like pliable dough that my mother massaged as if she was turning me into a pizza. I wanted the tenderness of her touch to heal me, but soon she was gone. She was a single mother with bills to pay; there was always work to be done.
A few days later, I found the bottle of pills beside our desktop computer in the spare bedroom. Whenever I remembered, I’d take a pill with a glass of water. But just like my desperate, unanswered prayers to God, the magic pills did not heal me.
I continued to escape into the computer, a world where I felt seen and comforted and paid attention to. On the computer was where I visited Monty, a youth pastor I met at a retreat. He gave me his email address and we corresponded nearly every day. His voice beckoned, soothed, excited me. He told me to believe in myself. He reminded me that I was special. Unique. Chosen. He shared things he had never shared with anyone else before – like his own sexual struggles.
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On the computer, I joined Christian chat rooms for teens. I made virtual friends who felt closer to me than my real-life friends. We talked about living for Jesus and what it meant to sacrifice yourself, your life, your wants, your desires, everything that made you, you – for God.
My virtual world felt lively and exciting, but my real life was dark, dreary, and pathetic. I looked at myself in the mirror, pale, sad, reptilian. I was worthless and alone unless I was sitting at the computer with the friends who kept me alive, plugged into a pulse of connection I couldn’t access in the real world.
By the time I was 15, I’d moved on to other websites and discovered new ways of filling my want and soothing my broken, bruised soul. It was on a dating site that I met Deacon, a much older Christian who loved Fox News, was obsessed with the end times, and devoured every word Jack Van Impe had to say. I convinced my mother that he was a pastor’s son, only 18. I took a train to see him.
“Girls who wear black pants are hiding something,” Deacon told me when he met me, implying that I was trying to make myself look smaller, my choice in clothing some kind of witchy voodoo trick. “You should run, it’s good for you, and it will make you smaller.”
Instead, I took my clothes off. “See, I’m not playing a trick,” I wanted to say, my eyes on fire. I started running, anyway.
Deacon lived in a rural area, his house surrounded by a thick forest of pine, poplar, and maple trees. We spent our days together snowmobiling, hot-tubbing, hanging out and watching old televangelists, and doing other things that I definitely wouldn’t tell a soul. Deacon loved God, I reminded myself, over and over again.
When he told me that he liked simple, cotton underwear, “none of that lacy, old-lady stuff”, I reminded myself. When he told me I couldn’t go on the birth control pill because it would make me fatter, I reminded myself. When he left a bruise on my arm, a little thumbprint like a blot of ink, I reminded myself.
When I found out he was 38, and not 27, I knew he had crossed one too many lines. I wanted to run, flee, scream, rage. Instead, I backed away slowly, gently, our relationship tapering off like a drug that could unleash havoc if I stopped cold turkey.
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For a long time I blamed my mother for what happened with Deacon. If she didn’t have to work so much, maybe I would have been safe. I tried to undo the trauma of my childhood by staying at home with my children. Working was a sin that children paid for, I believed. If my mother had just stayed with me, soothed me with her gentle hands, in those most vulnerable, volatile moments – maybe she could have saved me.
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I was 26 when I found out I was pregnant with my third child. By then, I had stopped blaming my mother. Instead, I blamed myself for being weak, stupid, easily convinced, naive, desperate. I hated that 15-year-old girl who hopped on a train to meet a man who could have easily killed her. I didn’t see her resilience, her survival instincts, her strength.
Earlier this year, while on a road trip, I drove past the area where Deacon lived. “Somewhere in there is Deacon’s house,” I said to my husband, who squeezed my hand and didn’t say a word. The snow was falling, like a blanket hugging the earth, a soothing, soft embrace. “I don’t know how I survived that,” I said, barely audible. She was so close, I could touch her. I could feel her near me, all around me, and finally, inside of me – a fluttering beneath my beating heart. So close that I could touch her, my fingers rubbing soothing circles on her temples. I pushed the gas pedal harder, whizzing past the road that nearly took my breath away. You’re safe now, I breathed.
Brianna Bell is a Canadian journalist and survivor advocate. Brianna's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Globe & Mail, The Washington Post, CBC, BBC, The Guardian, and more. Brianna is currently working on a memoir about sexual consent and religious control. You can find her on Substack, Instagram, and TikTok.