From the Ashes

By Erica Frye

I always thought I was normal. I was an average student, average daughter, average teenager. I had parents, siblings, a house, and a dog. I was handed the picket-fence life, yet something was terribly wrong.
I spent the majority of my teenage years remaining silent about my situation and my struggle, but when I finally cried out for help, God heard me. He gave me the incredible gift of music as well as people to help support me and give me strength through my trials. Now that Ive been healed, I find that I cant stay silent any longer. This is my story of how God turned my hardest trials into my greatest triumphs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514427705

Erica Frye

Erica Frye decided she would be an author when she was eight years old, and has been writing ever since. Her first publication was her poem “Wings” in A Celebration of Poets (2013) and is currently working on a bachelor’s degree at Brigham Young University-Idaho. She loves bread and wishes there were more bakeries near her home in the Rocky Mountains.

Book preview

Chapter 1

O ne of my earliest memories is of being sexually abused. That’s a bit depressing. Someone once told me I had a bag of rocks around my neck before the race even began and I can’t think of a more accurate analogy.

Just because it’s one of my earliest memories doesn’t mean I barely remember it. I can remember it in great detail. I remember exact words that were said, what room in my grandparents’ house we were in, my cousin who abused me, how he prepped me, and what kind of soup we had for lunch directly afterward. Although I didn’t completely understand what was happening at the time, that didn’t stop me from being affected.

I didn’t truly deal with the effects of being sexually abused until my senior year of high school. I felt some of the fear, but most of the pain hit me all at once. When I tell people my story, they sometimes think I lived with the pain my entire life, but that’s not true. My real suffering didn’t begin until high school.

I am not writing this because I feel like I had a horrible life. I am not writing because I had something as dramatic as being kidnapped or being held hostage happen to me and want to tell my story. I am writing because just being average is difficult. Just because your life isn’t as bad as other people’s doesn’t make it any less difficult to live, and many people seem to forget that. I want to share the cut-and-dry story of my own struggles and how I was able to overcome them with the help of incredible people.

There are a lot of analogies about change, especially changing your life – rebirth, trees with deep roots, leaving the nest, and growing wings. My own life was like a tower, and unfortunately, my foundations weren’t any good. I built my tower in the wrong spot with materials that wouldn’t support me. That meant my tower had to be destroyed, moved, and rebuilt. That process was the most painful thing I’ve ever done in my life, but it was worth it.

Like any child growing up, I built my tower based on people I loved as well as talents and interests I enjoyed. I leaned heavily on my family and friends, and for the most part, they supported me. My talents and interests never let me down, and I could never spend enough time doing them. My world was a wonderland of trials but also happiness. However, the higher and stronger I built my tower, the more I began to notice my foundations weren’t doing their job. They weren’t supporting me. They were failing me. They weren’t there when I needed them to be, and they were beginning to make my entire structure sway uncertainly, threatening not just my progress but also everything I had created up to this point.

I believe in God with everything I have. I was taught the foundations of my religion like reading scriptures, praying, and attending church. I definitely built Gospel foundations, but I left them unfinished as I turned my attention to the tower that was being built much faster, much higher, and much farther away.

Our lives are devastated by two things: the choices that we make and the things that simply happen to us. The first damage to my tower, before it had really gotten off the ground, was being sexually abused. This wasn’t a choice I made. It was something that happened to me, something out of my control. It created no fault in my foundations but was as damaging to my tower as weeds are to flowers. It was something that ate away at me subtly, creeping in to smother and suffocate.

The relationships in my family were my first building blocks, the first thing I ever leaned on. Family is the first and last thing we have, so it makes sense. I am not saying that we shouldn’t lean on our family members because we absolutely should. They are a powerful strength and support, but the harsh lesson I had to learn was that they were human. They are imperfect, and they cannot always be there 100 percent of the time.

Naturally, I would use friends to build my identity next. Everyone does. They help define who we are and shape who we will become, and can either hold us up or destroy us. In my case, I found some who did both.

I built that tower for the better part of twenty years. Tearing it down was a tragedy, but God did it out of love. If there was a fault in the foundation, it endangered the entire structure, and God cared enough about me to allow my tower to be destroyed in order to correct the foundations.

Chapter 2

I was born into a traditional family and third of four siblings with two parents, a house, and a dog. I had friends down the street, went to the LDS church, took piano lessons, and had an army of stuffed animals. I fought with my little brother, tagged after my older brother and adored my older sister. I walked to kindergarten, ran in the sprinklers, and for the most part was a bubbly, imaginative little girl. Describing it with words, it sounds like a picturesque childhood.

It wasn’t. It wasn’t terrible by any means, but I was forced to grow up too fast. The word innocence means little to me, and all my life, I’ve felt older than all my peers. Even when I was small, I felt off compared to the rest of them, so I’ve always believed there was something wrong with me. When they wanted to go run and play outside, I stayed indoors, sitting quietly at my desk. That was where I wanted to be. When the girls braided their hair and painted each other’s nails, it felt childish and immature to me. I didn’t make friends easily, which often meant I was left out or felt out of place. I always felt embarrassed when I was little playing in front of adults because I felt too old to be playing make-believe. I felt responsible even when I was too young to truly know what that word meant.

When I look back at my childhood, I don’t see the bright colors and happiness of a care-free youth. I see a confused little girl trying to deal with depression too early in her life, even though I wouldn’t be diagnosed with depression until a few years later.

Although what my cousin did to me affected me right away, it didn’t bring any pain or anguish until I was much older, when I could really understand what had happened to me. The first time I felt afraid that something like that would happen again was the summer before 8th grade. I was in a ballroom dance class, which I still have mixed feelings about. I loved dancing, but I hated practicing the same routine over and over. I wanted to learn how to dance, not how to mimic for a song.

I might have stayed with it despite my disappointment if it hadn’t been for the boys. They were immature eighth grade boys, so I shouldn’t have expected anything less, but after a performance one night I overheard them making bets on who could kiss me first. I shouldn’t have worried because eighth grade boys are all talk and would never be able to get up the courage to do anything, but at my age, I didn’t know that. It was the first attention I had ever received from boys, and it frightened me because up to this point, I had a lot of negative experiences with men. I got scared every time I saw one of them, and the idea of them catching me alone downright terrified me. They weren’t the only reason for quitting the dance class, but they were important because it was the first time I realized that I was actually frightened of boys my own age.

Junior high was also when I became afraid of confiding in people. I told a friend about what my cousin had done to me, and word spread. Rumors of that nature started to filter out. They weren’t accurate or true, but they were very hurtful. I’ve been called a slut, a second hand virgin, used goods, and dirty. After people reacted to me that way, I never wanted to tell anyone ever again.

I was required to take a health class in my sophomore year, which isn’t worth any significant mention except that we watched a movie about a girl who got raped. It was the first time I had seen a movie that was based solely on rape, and even though it remained PG, it still implied a lot.

It was the first time I felt emotional pain for what had been done to me. As I watched what was happening to that girl on the screen, I was emotionally living through it myself. I felt her fear and desperation when she was being attacked and the humiliation, shame, and anguish that followed. I couldn’t keep from crying when she confessed how she felt shameful and dirty because I knew exactly how she felt. After the movie was over, everyone else seemed to forget about it and moved on. That film has always stuck with me though. I still think about it every once in a while. That was just the beginning of my pain, the beginning of my wonderings and thoughts, the beginning of my fears. Everything added to them from that point and not simply for paranoia. I had many experiences with my dad and with friends who added and developed my fears.

Mostly, my fear was based on the fact that men wouldn’t stop when I said no. My imagination ran with that concept and spread to the general population of men except for the select few I knew were good. I was afraid of being alone with them in case they tried to do something.

This was the beginning of my day nightmares, a symptom of PTSD I didn’t know I had yet. My vivid imagination would picture men hurting me or doing something sexual to me, and I would scream no, but they wouldn’t stop, which was one of my greatest fears. I am small, weak, and I can’t even run fast. If they don’t stop when I say no, there is nothing I can do to defend myself against them, and that terrifies me.

Other than my health class, I can only remember one time I cried late into the night with my sister, pained because of what had been done. Now I began to think about it more, I began to remember bits and pieces I had forgotten, and it hurt.

It never made logical sense to me. I had lived a decade already without feeling much emotional pain, and now, out of the blue, I was beginning to feel it. The level of pain for what had happened didn’t match up either.

Sexual abuse covers a wide range of actions, and even though what happened to me was on the serious end, it had also happened a long time ago. It was over. But the emotional pain I felt was crippling.

There was sadness, grief, anger, injustice,