I recently came across Amanda Nguyen. She always wanted to be an astronaut. Unfortunately in her last year of studying astrophysics at Harvard she was raped. So she had to put her dreams of becoming an astronaut on hold to fight for her rights as a sexual assault survivor & passed numerous bills in the US for the rights of survivors. She is now going to be the first Southeast Asian woman to go to space in 2025. When asked about that space mission, she said that it was done to honour the dreams of the person she was before she got hurt, before her assault, because those dreams still mattered.

It made me think what about me? My Nparents started to violently abuse me with every type of violence possible from as early as I could remember. Any dreams I had for my life when I was a child were completely crushed by the daily grind of having to survive the horrific violence and abuse. I’m also a woman POC queer and grew up with violent misogyny, homophobia and racism. I spent my life just trying to barely survive and make it through - I’m 6 years NC with Nparents, I’m NC with my entire enabling and terrible extended family as well, in therapy, have a loving and supportive partner, I kicked out every toxic person out of my life and am only surrounded by supportive people. All of this trauma has left me no time to dream about what I want in life or pursue what I want in life. I spent my whole life either trying to survive or trying to heal or trying to just make my life better. Even my career is related to fighting oppression and abuse and fighting to the most marginalized and mistreated people in society. But it was never my dream or my passion or my ambition in life to work in that, it was because of sheer necessity. I genuinely felt like if I didn’t fight back against those things, I would drown and my life would be over.

For me, there is no going back to who I was before the abuse and violence started, no honouring the dreams of that person, because I can’t remember a time without the abuse and the violence.

I’m now 27 years old and I wonder who I am outside of the trauma, abuse, violence and oppression. I shouldn’t be defined by those things.