He told me I was 11/10 ( I was 11 years old )

 

How does a 21-year-old person get over the fact that they were immensely sexualised as a child?

This story belongs to Pragati, Pragati was an 11-year-old child who lived in a well-to-do household and was immensely ambitious. She was a student studying in grade 6 and loved playing hangman with her friends, eating chips for lunch and going on long walks with her grandfather. She was an extrovert with her primary interests being astrophysics and rocket science. She had always dreamt of being a scientist and loved watching shows like Art Attack, Spongebob Squarepants and Horrid Henry. Her days were bright and filled with dreams of touching the moon, travelling the world, and making art. She was one of a kind and was a very special and delicate child.

As a 21-year-old Pragati is a very different person, she is lost in the monotony of her life which is moving at an unforgiving pace. She is stuck in the routine that keeps her busy from thinking about things that burden her. She now no longer feels the comfort that she felt as an 11-year-old, doing things like swimming, playing video games or even painting.

Now everything she is good at reminds her of memories from when she was 11 years old and was clicking pictures for men on the internet. At twenty-one, during a conversation she had with a friend over a cup of cinnamon tea at Snowman Café, fragments of that long-buried memory began to surface. While the pieces fit together it also revealed a painful truth that had shaped her entire life. The realization was both liberating and devastating. She understood that the event she had barely remembered had cast a long shadow over her existence, influencing her every decision and relationship. It almost gave her the clarity for the chaotic blurs of images she had been seeing every day.

She still thinks very intensely about the situation but rather than reservation, she's constantly confused about why men viewed her the way they did. She feels scared every time she clicks pictures in the kitchen, opens the fridge, or even uses her iPad now. Everything that happened left behind a gaping wound that never fully healed, perhaps it never will…

 The once carefree Pragati, who loved herself was now a girl paralyzed by disorientation and anger. The trauma was buried deep within her young mind, a dark secret that screamed at her subconsciously. Over the years, she excelled academically, masking her pain with achievements and accolades. Yet, an inexplicable emptiness gnawed at her, a void that no amount of success could fill. She simply felt like an empty vessel now, that only made noise when touched.

One particularly intense night, after a binge, she found herself standing in front of a mirror. The reflection staring back at her was not the accomplished scholar or the ambitious scientist; it was a woman who now could barely recognize herself. She realized that life had taken something precious from her, but it had also given her an incredible strength to endure. Determined to reclaim her life, she embraced a new perspective. She sought to find joy in the small pleasures of life. Now she pursued her hedonistic desires unapologetically while learning to love and respect herself. The conversation at Snowman Café had been a catalyst, a moment of epiphany that changed her outlook on life.