What is my secret? Only this: my parents had been abusing me ever since I could remember. I was an only child, an “accident,” as my mother so lovingly referred to me.

The abuse came in all definitions of the word. But worse than the open-handed slaps, worse than the well-aimed punches, worse even than the terror of sleeping with one eye literally open, waiting for him to open the door and creep into my room, were the hate-filled words that my mother flung at me like so many bullets.

Ugly. Fat. Monkey-face. Cry-baby. I hate you. I wish you would die.

On my tenth birthday, I decided to tell my secret to my 5th grade teacher. I knew they had labeled me as ESE in school and that my mother had the school counselor believing I was something called a pathological liar. When your mother’s a psychiatrist and your father’s a doctor, it’s so easy to pull strings and let files remain unopened. Unexamined.

So the day after I revealed my secret, they punished me by putting me in a dungeon and throwing away the key.