I don’t have any recollection of a time when I was touched without consent. I’ve thought about it. I’ve really looked. Nothing.

I know that’s not the story many women carry, and I don’t take that lightly.

But when I dug deeper, what kept coming up for me wasn’t touch. It was language. Nonconsensual language. Words that landed without permission, looks that said something before anything was spoken, messages that shaped how I saw myself long before I had the awareness to question them.

I liked being touched. During intimacy, I could adjust my body and redirect what didn’t feel right. I didn’t communicate that verbally; that came later. But the place I didn’t know how to redirect was what was said to me, and what I made it mean.

As a young girl, I felt good about myself. I was happy and confident, until I wasn’t. I went to a Catholic school across town and already felt different. The neighborhood kids made sure I knew it.

I liked boys. I wanted to be liked. I paid attention to how I moved and how I showed up. I didn’t want to be the girl who got laughed at. So, I tried. I tried not to be clumsy, not to be slow, to be the girl that wasn’t picked last.

One day, we were playing a game, matching animal names to our own names. Without thinking, I said “Warthog” to match my last name, which also started with a W. The boys laughed, and two of the boys I liked repeated it. “Ha, ha… Warthog.”

That was it. Something shifted. All the effort, all the trying, all the protecting collapsed into that one moment. I wasn’t me anymore. I was that.

I didn’t think I was a fat girl, maybe a little chubby. But my mom didn’t see it that way. She struggled with weight, just like her mother had, and what she carried, she passed on.

She would look me up and down. That look. If you know it, you know it.

She would say, “You look thin today.” And I would respond, “It feels like you don’t think I look thin every day, just certain days.” She would smile and nod, never correcting it, never softening it. I kept waiting for her to say, “No, that’s not what I mean.” But she didn’t. She meant exactly what she said, and I learned exactly how to receive it.

There were so many diets: the egg diet, the chicken diet, the whatever-the-next-thing-was diet. Slimming clothes, structured outfits, anything to hold me in. I didn’t want that. I wanted jeans and T-shirts to be like everyone else. Instead, I stood out more, and the teasing followed.

At school. At home. Even from my brother, who would call me “fat ass bitch.” That one landed because we were close.

By ninth grade, I had had enough. I found speed, little white pills that took away my appetite. I had a job, so I could afford them. The weight came off, and everything changed.

I made a dance team. I became “one of the cool kids.” I bought jeans and T-shirts. I felt free and accepted, as I had finally become someone.

But I was also becoming someone else. Agitated, edgy, not myself. My light was fading. Eventually, my body made the decision for me. I crashed hard, and I stopped.

The obsession didn’t end there. It followed me into adulthood, into marriage, into motherhood. I told myself I would never do to my boys what had been done to me, no up-down looks, no criticism. And yet, I hear them talk about their bodies, about weight, about food, and I wonder, did I pass it on anyway?

In my 50s, something shifted. I stopped dieting. I got off the scale. I ate when I was hungry. Simple, not easy, but simple. The weight dropped, and more importantly, the pressure dropped. Every day wasn’t dictated by a number anymore. Every day could just be a day.

At 59, my body looks different. My skin doesn’t fit the way it used to.  Gravity has taken hold. But I love my body. All of it. It has carried me, held me, stayed with me through everything I put it through. And now, I finally feel at home in it.

Even now, something lingers. That protective layer, the part that doesn’t want to be laughed at, the part that still absorbs it instead of calling it out. Sometimes it still hurts. Sometimes I still cry.

Now I watch my 14-year-old granddaughter, happy, confident, and she’s being teased. And I feel it all again, the shame, the protection, the wanting to disappear, the wanting to be chosen.

I didn’t have a story of unsolicited touch. But I did have a story of words that stayed.

It wasn’t the touch that shaped me. It was the words, the looks, the tone, the things that were said, and the things that weren’t, and how I learned to carry them.

I spent years trying to change my body. What I really needed was to change how I took in others’ words and how I spoke to myself.

Some of that has softened. Some of it still lingers. But now, I notice it, and it no longer gets to decide how I see myself.

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