Trigger Warning of Trigger Warnings.
Just assume you will be triggered if you continue.
This is my #metoo story. Finally penned in 2026. Screamed into the Great Void of Existence my Entire Life in both loud and silent ways.
———
When #metoo was a thing, I didn’t yet fully understand my own story to be able to contribute anything beyond the VagueBook post of “#metoo” that I made. The hash tag movement began in 2017.
In 2017, I was married to a self-proclaimed monogamous man whom I loved, as a polyamorous/CNM woman, and was actively dating/madly-in-love-with my current Life Partner, and seeing a few others at various flirt to partnership levels. I came out loud and proud to my FAR RIGHT of RIGHT Conservative mother on video who said “yep, that makes sense” as if it wasn’t news at all but also encouraged “don’t tell dad, though.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA2RHCPxZkU (Unedited, live recording)
In 2013, my same mother who through desperate sobs confessed to her daughter her own #metoo, and the names of the men. The “family members”. A week later she ran back into one of his arms.
I cannot and will not share my Mother’s #MeToo story, yet, because today in 2026, with many family members including both parents gone forever, it remains an open but healing wound for myself and many others around me. It needs to be triaged, and the journey toward healing began with all involved and still living. The witnesses of the story need time.
But as I sit listening to “Goodbye Earl” on loop through gut-wrenching sobs remembering what ripples that song caused way back in 1999….Well, it is the context for this writing.
This is my #MeToo story.
I didn’t share in 2017 because of the context of my life. Mom died shortly after that movement’s start in 2018 from abuse, extreme neglect, and assault. I did not witness, but I am 1 witness of her phone-called sobbing confession testifying to what happened to her, again, by the same hands. I tried to get her out one last time. The social workers tried. We all had a plan to get her away from him once and for all and for her live. Live. Free and happy and loved. I called to tell her my flight was booked. I was coming and planned to stay as long as needed and be with her.
The next day they called to say she was gone. She was just gone.
I never shared a lot of this. And yet have shared so often throughout so many decades to so many people that I just don’t it share anymore. There is so little anyone can do about it now that she is gone. And he is gone.
But I remain.
I share today after purging my life of every single human I even doubted to myself could handle reading my True Personal #MeToo story and would come at me (as many historically have, which you will understand at least a bit better after reading this).
———–
In 1999, I was 12 or 13 in Middle School. A boy in my class assaulted me sexually in a public school auditorium 4 seats in to one of the rows.
I liked him. We had a good talk before the Assembly. He was a class member, my age, even in my after-school “Mediator’s Peer-to-Peer Club”.
But he didn’t ask. He just did what he did to me. I didn’t say “no”, because we were told to listen to the Assembly and be quiet. Be quiet. Be good. Hush…
I didn’t stand up and scream because… my god! during an Assembly with Holocaust Survivors who attended this school speaking….???!
I looked next to me for help but the student next to me shifted his eyes from the boy’s hand and where it was back to the front of the auditorium.
I looked for a teacher, I couldn’t find one around me.
I looked at the clock while his hand moved.
I froze. Time passed. Still frozen. He was still…. Was I still breathing….?
Then the bell rang.
I ran upstairs to my Social Studies teacher’s class. The class we came from, him and I, all the other students…
She had her next class inside already, the bell had rung. I knocked and beckoned from the door window. She came out. Closed the door.
I told her everything. Everything. Sobbing.
“Please help me”
“WHO?!? WHO did this!?!” Disbelief, shock, strong emotions.
He was coming down the hall.
She saw my eyes. She saw him. The other students coming. She started yelling at me for not doing my homework.
I never in my life had missed any homework ever. I was an A+ student. A teacher’s pet.
I kept crying. But we both knew what was happening.
After he disappeared, and the other students cleared, she turned back to me.
“I have English now… over there…. do I…? Do I…?”
“Sarah. Go to the Nurse’s office.”
“W….where…. do I… I’ve never… English class….”
“Go downstairs. I’ll call ahead. Go to any office with an adult and ask for the nurse. Tell them everything.”
I did.
I told everyone. Nurses, counselors, adults with bad advice, adults with advice I don’t remember anymore, cops, principal, teachers, other school Admin, then my parents and cops and principal, then again to make an “official school report” remembering to leave no graphic detail out…. then again in the precinct over and over and over in precise graphic detail over and over so they could transcribe it all then transcribe it again then repeat it back then answer the follow-up ask follow-up questions and refine the story and repeat and refine and again from the top…. in front of parents and father and cops and the person transcribing my words in that precinct. Then to church, to Pastors’s and their wives, more counselors…. to everyone I dated over the next 5 years…. over and over….
There was a point in my life when I said no more. That my trauma was just who I was and there was no erasing or undoing it. That this is just me.
But I went back to school the next day. Home was scarier and I wanted to be where home was not.
I told my “girlfriends” before school started but they said “he did the same to me, and I liked it” and “he did more to me, and I loved it.” I didn’t like it or love it or wanted it or… I didn’t understand what they were saying. They asked what I was wearing. I decided that moment to never wear that same top or shorts ever again anywhere ever ever ever….
And he was there still. In class, in school, in my afterschool class that I was so proud of being in and doing so well and learning so much about mediation…. my friends… I don’t remember much more. I went nonverbal to protect myself very quickly for weeks. I can’t remember how long or what broke the silence.
Back to the nurse. Back home…. I didn’t speak to anyone for so long. Who would I? What would I say? What could I? He was still there like nothing happened… He was everywhere… my safe places… nothing changed around me except what had changed and was changing within me.
In 1999, “Goodbye Earl” came out. Me and mom were glowing listening to it. Over and over. My dad, not so much. The church, not so much. The ripples from that song that I witnessed….
I remember sometime soon after, that year or the next, I was in the back of dad’s car. He was listening to talk radio, as usual. This time “Focus on the Family.” They were discussing abuse and divorce. I remember hearing the exact words that “being beaten by your husband” was “never an excuse for divorce. There is no excuse for divorce. Maybe spend some time with your mom, get your nails and hair done, buy some nice dressed, but go back when….” I remembered those same verbatim words from my own Pastor. My own father’s cousin, the Pastor of the Flock… I had heard them so often that I do not remember all their names but I remember the words I have heard on repeat as clearly as I remember my own s.s. # and this story.
In May of 2001, I graduated from Middle School. He was behind me in the graduation ceremony…
In September 2001, I started smoking cigarettes (Newport) on the front lawn of Schenectady City High school in a circle of “friends.” And I loved it. That feeling and small “high”, my god yes I loved it. I was told by 1 friend “one hit won’t get you hooked, just try it.” Nice try and also very hilarious, my friend…
We all know what then happened. You all know. All of you were alive in 2001. Not in NY, my school, my family, my church… but you were where you were.
I went on to fail 9th grade at that school. I dropped out when My favorite Aunt, who had given me so much wisdom and fought my father tooth and nail, died. Slowly. Over months from that hospital a walk away from where I lived. Instead of walking to school every day, I walked to the hospital to see her and the family gathered around her every day. I dropped out of school. And we all, everyone of us gathered and not yet flown/driven in, mourned, grieved, screamed into the void in our own ways at the loss of a young beautiful human to the horrors of Cancer.
Any then I was whisked away from that school, that city, and everyone I ever knew except my parents, my brother, “my Pastor”, and my “church family.”
I graduated in time, by the way, in 2005, in that small but big country-bumpkin-ass school, by doubling my class burden and sheer fukking effort… but the rest? The not yet shared stories? The connected dots? Is my history and my story… but another story.
Now you know what you didn’t, Reader. And you know a lot of whys, I hope, that you didn’t before about your Author. I haven been screaming my story into so many voids for so long in so many ways. For my entire life. For, at least, the 25 years since what happened to me in that Middle School.
Maybe I am 10-years late, but this has been my MeToo story.
Maybe some of you will “get it” now. Maybe now you can see a little better that: Yes, every woman. Every woman. In more fucked up ways than you can possibly imagine because no one is privy to all the details. Believe women. Believe The Women. We’re all screaming. We all have been. For too long. And too many of you have not been listening to any of us.
I didn’t have to share my story but I am now.
If you need reasons why I waited so long, first of all Fuck You and secondly *gestures broadly*
SBeth
Site Title 