Andrea Skinner's story helped me transform shame into solidarity
Sydney Hegele is the author of "Bird Suit", longlisted for the 2025 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature, and "The Pump" winner of the 2022 ReLit Literary Award for Short Fiction and a finalist for the 2022 Trillium Book Award. Their work can be found at sydneyhegele.com, or wherever books are sold.
I was recording the audiobook for my debut novel, 'Bird Suit,' when I started to remember my childhood sexual abuse for the first time.
It was March, 2024, in a padded sound booth at a studio in Toronto. I had a nasty chest cold, worsened by Long Covid, and was chugging throat coat tea with honey between each take to stifle my cough. The sound engineers delivered cues through my headphones from one room over. We were on track to finish ahead of schedule when we reached a chapter where one character confides in another that she was sexually abused. When I read the section aloud for the first time, something shook loose in me: I could remember my own abuse in more detail than I ever could before. Light through blinds and from under the door. The bedsheets, and the pillow cases. I was separate from my body, watching myself from the other end of the room, when I was raped. I looked small, and very tired.
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