My Kavanaughs weren’t named Kavanaugh. One of the earliest was my mother’s second husband. I can’t remember how or when the sexual assaults started, because the brain has this amazing capacity for protecting itself. Remember that elementary school art project where you’d scribble a bunch of swirling colors in crayon, then scrub black crayon over the whole thing? Bright colors, gone. The brain can perform the same trick. So while I can’t tell you how this childhood molestation routine was established, I can share the swirls of memory I still see clearly: six-year-old me going to my mother and saying, “My vagina hurts.”

My mother replying, “Go tell your father. He’ll help you.”

I remember her husband closing the door to the bathroom, me laying down on the gunky, never-washed bathroom rug, and him opening the cabinet for the Vaseline.

That’s where my memory goes black again.

But maybe it was kosher, this Vaseline-y help. When Rachael Denhollander, the first of the USA Gymnastics girls to report Larry Nassar’s abuse, told her female coach about the “vaginal adjustments” Nassar had performed on her, her coach’s cop husband couldn’t find any complaints filed against Nassar. Putting a voice to the universal understanding of where blame belongs, the coach asked Denhollander “how she could have let this happen to her.” In case you’re keeping track: a girl seeking help with her vagina from a trusted older woman? Also not enough to stop it.

When puberty hit, I grew some ovaries and got some courage. Instead of quietly lying down on the bathroom rug, I started loudly fighting back against my mother’s husband. To shut me up, my mother signed me into the controversial “troubled teen” program Straight, Inc. There I’d spend 12 hours a day, for the next 16 months, having the physical and psychological shit beat out of me.

The group in Straight, Inc. was hell-bent on making you admit you were a drug addict. Which I wasn’t. Hoping the group would lay off if I told them what my mother’s husband had done to me, I described the Vaseline. And the beatings. And my mother standing back, watching. In return, they Kalashnikoved.

“You’re a druggie whore!” my peers spit-screamed in my face. “You were a six-year-old slut! What did you do to tempt him?!”

The group finally stopped brutalizing me when, one night in Open Meeting, in front of some 300 kids and 600 parents, I picked up the microphone and apologized to my mother’s husband for “making him hit me. And other things.” I told him I was sorry. That it was all my fault. The crowd of hundreds clapped and cheered.

I was 15 when I got out of there. To survive, I’d convinced myself I was an addict. Except I’d barely done drugs, so that was kind of confusing. Thankfully, I figured out it was food I was addicted to. So I quit eating. And the less I weighed, the closer I felt to being enough. When my weight got so low I stopped menstruating, I was put on the pill to force my period. “It doesn’t matter,” the doctor said, “that you’re a virgin.”

My mother was especially proud of my weight loss. She was divorcing her second husband by that time; she’d lure her new suitors over by describing me to them over the phone.

“My 16-year-old daughter has lost so much weight, all that’s left of her is boobs! You wouldn’t believe how small her skirts are.”

I’d have to wait until freshman year at college, after a seminar called “Alcohol, College Life, and You,” to realize that I had been raped.

I started avoiding my mother’s house, and her man-friends, by attending every “Anonymous” meeting I could find. Overeaters Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous. Narcotics Anonymous. Co-Dependents Anonymous. I had sex for the first time after an AA meeting one night. I was with a prep-school boy who had a vintage Chevy Suburban and a packed social calendar. He had a girlfriend, too, but I really, really liked him, and his hand felt really, really good. It was when he tried to push into me that I got scared. I said, “Stop,” and “Don’t,” and “I’ve never done this before,” but he really, really wanted me. And I really didn’t know how to say no to that. The third time he tried, I just didn’t say anything at all.

A minute later, when he was back in the front seat, he said, “Are you sure you’re a virgin? Because you’re really good at that.” Finally, I was enough.

I’d have to wait until freshman year at college, after a seminar called “Alcohol, College Life, and You,” to realize that I had been raped. I’d have to wait until Kavanaugh’s appointment, 30 years later, to realize how disturbing it is for a girl to be proud that her rapist thinks she’s a good lay.

Throughout my childhood, I’d been the lonesome loser. That black-crayon cloud and the secrets it tamps down can turn a kid into a weirdo. Like magic, when I started having sex, people wanted to spend time with me. And it felt great. The attention felt great. Making out felt great. Third base felt great. The only problem was, I was still afraid of actual sex. When the next few boys and men tried to push into me, I’d tell them to stop. When they told me to shut up, they didn’t say it with words.

Sexual predators have a radar for those who are vulnerable to abuse. Jeffrey Epstein sought out girls with backgrounds like mine: whose fathers had died, who were living in single-parent homes, who didn’t have enough money for basic needs. Many had experienced abuse; others were in foster care. The need, in kids like us, is palpable. It begs for human connection. It does not demand respect. It can’t even fathom respect. Would a girl who’d been raised with love and dignity have been violated by the guys who date-raped me? I don’t know. I had been groomed to understand that my body was all I was worth, and violation was what I deserved.