My name is Sarah. I came from a good family, involved, respected in the community. My uncle was a senior law enforcement official in our county. In high school, I ran varsity cross country, won a state championship in speech and debate, made the honor roll, and threw myself into community theater.

At the same time, I was a victim of repeated systemic sexual assault and child sex trafficking.

I couldn’t name it, not because I didn’t know something was wrong, but because I didn’t know how, the shame was too crushing, and the fear was too loud. There was no roadmap for coming forward. There was barely any language for what was happening.

So I wrote. I kept journals the way some kids kept secrets, privately, obsessively, because it was the only place I could share the truth. Writing was how I stayed tethered to myself when everything else was telling me I didn’t matter. I didn’t know then that those journals would survive decades. I didn’t know they would become evidence. I just knew that putting words on paper was the only thing that kept me from disappearing entirely.

When I left that community, I used college as my exit. A reason that made sense to everyone. Like a lot of survivors, I went as far away as I could, as fast as I could. I built a career. I had children I love more than anything. I kept going. I kept hiding it, while it kept growing like a cancerous tumor, quietly consuming more of me every year until there was almost nothing left.

In October 2024 I reached out to law enforcement. Not because I was ready. I had arrived at a place where I simply could not keep going, where the weight of 20 years of silence had become unsurvivable.

What I didn’t expect was the officer who took that call. He believed me immediately and without hesitation. No skepticism. No script. He took me seriously in a way I had never allowed myself to imagine. That moment cracked something open that had been sealed for two decades. It did not fix the systems around me, those were slow and broken in ways I couldn’t control, but it broke something loose inside me that I hadn’t been able to reach on my own.

What came after was hard. I didn’t know where to start. Resources were limited. I had ten years in healthcare operations at a Level 1 Trauma Center, I understand how bureaucracies function, and it was still exhausting and demoralizing. Dead end after dead end. Agencies that didn’t talk to each other. Information that went in circles. I can only imagine what it’s like for someone without that background navigating the same terrain.

What carried me was a village. Mental health professionals, advocates, survivors, strangers who had no obligation to show up and did anyway. People who treated what I’d been through as something worth taking seriously, not something to manage or minimize. That village became my foundation in ways I never could have anticipated.

Then I made one of the hardest decisions of my life. I left Oregon on short notice to enter an out-of-state safe house program for survivors of sex trafficking. I gave up almost everything. I was required to cut contact with my support system, necessary for the safety of everyone in the program, which meant facing the hardest parts of my healing without the people I’d come to rely on.

I was terrified. I went anyway.

What I found there was the first real, sustained stability I’d had in years. Not managing symptoms. Not white-knuckling through. Actual healing. Six months that fundamentally changed what I believed my life could look like. I stopped just surviving and started thinking about what I actually wanted to build.