“I wore your silence like a scar. Thought broken was just who I was.”
There are things a child can feel long before they have the words or understanding to explain them.
I know because I was that child.
When I was a little girl, my father sexually abused me.
Those are difficult words to put into a sentence, but they are part of my story. And if I'm going to explain the meaning behind Barrowed Shame, I can't leave out the very experience that gave those words their meaning.
For years, I carried guilt and shame that belonged to what he had done to me. I didn't understand where those feelings came from. I didn't have the memories or emotional understanding to make sense of everything I was experiencing.
I only knew how I felt.
Empty.
Unlovable.
Broken.
And for a very long time, I believed those feelings were telling me something true about who I was.
The Emptiness I Couldn't Explain
One of the things I remember most clearly about being a young girl is feeling an emptiness I couldn't describe.
It's difficult to explain because I wasn't without family or love. I had my mother and my brothers. There were people in my life who cared about me.
But there was still this deep feeling of being unloved.
Something was missing, and I didn't understand what it was.
As I grew older, that emptiness gradually became a belief that something was wrong with me.
I didn't simply feel disconnected. I began believing I was somehow different from other people in a way that made me less deserving of love.
I struggled with self-esteem. I wanted connection, but I often felt disconnected even when I was around other people.
I wanted to feel accepted, but I questioned whether I was worthy of acceptance.
And when things went wrong, I often looked for the explanation in myself.
What did I do?
What was wrong with me?
Why couldn't I just feel the way I thought I was supposed to feel?
I didn't understand that the guilt and shame I was experiencing were connected to sexual abuse.
I didn't understand that a child can carry feelings of responsibility for something they never chose and could never have been responsible for.
Instead, I turned those feelings into judgments about myself.
I thought I was broken.
When My Feelings Came Before My Understanding
As a teenager, I struggled with depression, anxiety, guilt, and shame. I was diagnosed with PTSD.
But I didn't have a complete understanding of the experiences connected to those feelings.
The way I've described it before is that my body remembered before my mind did.
That's how I experienced it.
I was living with emotions and reactions I couldn't explain. Later, memories began returning in incomplete pieces and flashes, rather than as one clear, continuous account.
I didn't suddenly remember everything.
And the memories that returned first weren't happy ones.
I had to work through painful experiences while trying to understand how they had affected the way I viewed myself and the world around me.
That was complicated.
When you have spent years feeling that something is wrong with you, it isn't easy to suddenly recognize that those feelings may have developed around something someone else did.
The shame had become familiar.
So had the self-doubt.
I had spent so much time questioning myself that questioning the shame itself required learning an entirely different way of thinking.
And that took years.
The Difference Between Feeling Guilty and Being Responsible
One of the hardest things I had to learn was that feeling responsible doesn't mean you are responsible.
I carried guilt for something I didn't choose.
I carried shame for something I didn't cause.
And because I had carried those feelings for so long, they became tangled with the way I understood myself.
But I was a child.
My father was the adult.
He was responsible for his actions. I wasn't.
There is no decision a child can make that transfers responsibility for sexual abuse from the adult committing it to the child experiencing it.
That responsibility was always his.
Understanding that intellectually and learning to believe it emotionally were not the same process for me.
I could recognize the truth of something and still struggle with feelings shaped by years of believing otherwise.
Healing meant learning to examine those feelings without automatically accepting the conclusions attached to them.
I had to begin asking myself difficult questions.
Why do I believe this about myself?
Where did that belief come from?
What do I actually know?
Am I confusing the way something made me feel with what it means about who I am?
I had to learn to question my own thoughts and interpretations while also learning to understand the experiences that shaped them.
That wasn't a single breakthrough.
It was a gradual process of recognizing patterns, learning from life, and changing beliefs I had carried for years.
And one of the most important things I learned was that a feeling can be real without the belief attached to it being true.
I genuinely felt unlovable.
But I wasn't unlovable.
I genuinely felt broken.
But I wasn't broken.
I genuinely felt responsible.
But I had never been responsible for what my father did.
What Shame Took From Me
The consequences of childhood sexual abuse don't necessarily end when the abuse itself ends.
For me, the effects continued through the way I saw myself, the way I approached relationships, and the way I understood love and trust.
I struggled with self-esteem and the desire for acceptance.
I wanted meaningful connections, yet I often felt disconnected.
I blamed myself for circumstances outside my control.
And I carried an underlying belief that I was somehow less worthy than other people.
Those beliefs influenced my life long after childhood.
But I don't want to describe every difficulty I've experienced as though it can be explained by one event.
Life is more complicated than that.
I've had other experiences, relationships, challenges, and choices that have shaped me.
I've made mistakes of my own. I've had to take responsibility for them, learn from them, and grow.
That's part of being human.
But there is an important difference between accepting responsibility for my own decisions and accepting responsibility for what someone else did to me.
For a long time, I didn't know how to separate those things.
Learning that distinction became an important part of my healing.
“Take It Back”
The chorus of Barrowed Shame is direct.
“Take it back. Every lie. Every burden I survived.”
Those words express something I couldn't have said when I was a child.
They name the burden and identify where it belongs.
When I wrote them, I wasn't trying to create a story about revenge.
I was putting words to the realization that I had spent years carrying guilt and shame that were never mine.
The song gives a voice to feelings that once had no explanation.
It also expresses anger.
And I think that anger has a place in the song.
There is something deeply wrong about a child being sexually abused and then spending years believing she is the one who is broken.
A child should never have to carry the emotional responsibility for an adult's actions.
But I want to make an important distinction between what the song expresses and where I am in my life today.
I'm not living in anger toward my father.
I'm not bitter.
I don't spend my days wishing for revenge or waiting for him to acknowledge what happened.
I recognize what he did.
I recognize how it affected me.
And I recognize that the responsibility belongs to him.
I don't need to carry his shame to acknowledge the truth of my experience.
And I don't need to remain angry to know that what happened was wrong.
Compassion Is Not Responsibility
My experiences have taught me a great deal about compassion, empathy, and the importance of respecting other people's journeys.
I genuinely want people to find healing.
I understand that human beings are complicated. People have their own histories, struggles, choices, and circumstances.
But understanding that someone may have their own pain doesn't excuse the harm they cause.
And compassion doesn't require me to accept responsibility for their behavior.
My father's choices are his.
His shame is his.
The consequences of what he did are his responsibility.
I can recognize those things without allowing them to consume my life.
I can hope that people find understanding and growth without believing it's my responsibility to make that happen.
I can't choose healing for someone else.
I can't force accountability.
And I can't make another person confront something they aren't willing to confront.
Those are their choices.
What I can choose is how I live my own life.
I can be compassionate while maintaining boundaries.
I can respect another person's humanity without minimizing the harm they've caused.
And I can continue growing without carrying responsibility that was never mine.
For me, that's an important part of what it means to lay down borrowed shame.
It isn't about transferring my pain back to someone else and waiting for them to accept it.
It's about recognizing that their willingness to accept responsibility no longer determines whether I can move forward.
I Was Never Broken
When I think about the little girl I once was, I don't see someone who was broken.
I see a child who was trying to understand feelings and experiences she wasn't equipped to make sense of.
She didn't have the perspective I have today.
She didn't know how to distinguish someone else's wrongdoing from her own worth.
She didn't understand why she felt empty or unlovable.
And she certainly didn't deserve what happened to her.
For years, I looked at myself through the shame I carried.
Now, I can look back with understanding.
I can recognize that I was a child who deserved safety, love, and protection.
I can acknowledge the ways those experiences affected me without allowing them to become my entire identity.
And I can recognize the work I've done to become the woman I am today.
I would never thank my father for the lessons I've learned or the strength it took to get here.
I don't believe abuse was necessary for me to become strong.
My healing is not his accomplishment.
The choices I've made, the work I've done, and the life I've built belong to me.
I'm proud of the woman I've become.
Not because of what happened to me.
Because of what I've chosen to do with my life.
The Meaning Behind Barrowed Shame
Barrowed Shame is about recognizing that the guilt and shame I carried from childhood sexual abuse never belonged to me.
It's about the beliefs that developed before I could understand their origins.
It's about the years I spent feeling unlovable and the gradual process of learning to question that belief.
It's about understanding that I can be compassionate without accepting responsibility for someone else's actions.
And it's about reclaiming the right to define myself.
The song ends with the words:
“I carried it long enough.”
For me, that isn't a declaration that every difficult feeling has disappeared or that healing is something I've completed.
It's a recognition that I no longer have to accept shame as part of my identity simply because I carried it for so many years.
I can still have difficult days.
I can still learn things about myself.
I can still recognize the ways my experiences have influenced my life.
But I don't have to return to the belief that something is fundamentally wrong with me.
I was a little girl who experienced something no child should experience.
I grew into a woman who spent years learning to understand herself, questioning the beliefs she'd carried, and deciding how she wanted to live.
Those are both parts of my story.
But they aren't the same thing.
What happened to me was not my choice.
Who I continue becoming is.
And the guilt, the blame, and the shame?
They were never mine.
With love,
Ashley Gail Miller 🖤💗