The Courage to Heal Out Loud: Post 3
Storyteller – Nadiyah Roberts
In my previous post, I shared how I created a virtual world where I could finally be someone other than the girl carrying so much pain. Online, I had confidence. I had beauty. I had the courage to talk to boys—courage I didn’t have in real life because of the sexual assault I experienced at a young age.
When I was around 14 or 15, my mother found my secret Facebook account where I had been talking to a boy. After the punishment of physical discipline, she decided to take things even further. She called me into the kitchen. The clippers were already plugged in, a chair waiting in front of her. She asked me a question about the situation; I don’t remember if I answered or if I took too long—but suddenly I saw my hair falling to the floor.
I held back my emotions because I had learned early on that crying only made things worse. I learned to manage everyone else’s emotions and bury my own. If everyone else was happy, especially my mother, that was the one thing that mattered.
When she finished shaving me bald, she leaned down and said, “I bet you won’t try to sneak out to see any boys now that your hair is gone.” Then she looked around the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of ketchup, squirted it into her hand, and smeared it all over my face. She made me sit there with it dripping into my nose and eyes.
Growing up, I loved ketchup. Then suddenly, I couldn’t stand the smell or taste of it. I didn’t understand why until last year. The mind protects you from certain memories until it believes you’re ready. When that memory resurfaced, it hit me hard.
A few years ago, my mother, sister, and I were sitting at the kitchen table, and the topic of my head being shaved for “being fast” came up. My mother casually mentioned that she was upset because even bald, I still looked beautiful and the whole point had been to strip me of any beauty I had. That comment finally connected the dots. The ketchup wasn’t random. It was another layer of humiliation.
Some sisters may remember times when I came to sister parties and kept my hijab on the whole time. I did that because I had no confidence in my hair or my inner beauty. Therapy helped me unpack all of this, but it was painful. Losing my hair that day made me feel hopeless and ugly, and that feeling followed me for years. It shaped how I carried myself, how I dressed, how I saw my own body. I know people have made comments about my weight gain around the time I got married or about how I dress. Well, here is some of the context behind that.
I’m sharing this because so many of us are fighting silent battles. Be gentle with your words. You never know what someone is carrying.
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