When I was 7, two 18-year-old boys hung me by my ankles out the window of an 8th-floor apartment. One month later I was raped by a stranger in a shopping mall. A month after that, on my 8th-birthday, I was accidentally hit in the head with a swinging baseball bat. It split my head open, gave me a concussion, cracked my frontal bone, and nearly killed me.

When I was 12, my scout troop ganged up on me, stripped me naked, and handcuffed me to a tree in a pasture in the middle of the night. It was apparently under the direction of a 17-year-old Eagle scout who was left in charge of us for the night. It was a premeditated plan in which he first told a campfire story about a ghost horse. While I was alone, naked and handcuffed, they turned a white horse loose from the barn and left me there for two hours.

When I was 13, the third baseman on my junior high baseball team held me off with one hand while he sexually assaulted my girlfriend in front of the whole team. The next year I sustained a second concussion when an errant fastball hit me in the same spot over my left eye that was struck by the bat when I was 8. I don’t know how long I was out, but when I finally came to, the centerfielder was relaxing on the bench with a cup of Gatorade.

I was 4’ 7” tall and weighed about 60 pounds when I started the ninth grade. Two weeks before my 15th birthday I was raped by three grown men in the locker room at a school located in a neighborhood called “The Hole.” Five minutes after it happened, I tucked it away, buried it deep, and kept it there for nearly 45 years. Until I recently sought trauma therapy, it has affected my relationships, especially intimate ones. I held it so long because it is the one traumatic incident for which I felt the most shame and guilt. I was a week away from my 15th birthday. Why wasn’t I able to defend myself?