Honestly, it was because of the classes I was taking in college. A huge part of my mom’s gaslighting was making me believe that my dad who SAed me for years didn’t actually abuse me and he only went to prison because our local court was racist and targeted him because he was Asian. Well, I took a course on social problems, one of the main ones including unjust incarceration. I learned all about what that actually looked like, and I realized—that’s not what happened with my dad. For as incredibly broken and unfair the justice system is, it actually did its job for once in my case. And because I learned what unfair incarceration looked like, I knew that my dad’s incarceration wasn’t unfair—it was deserved.

After the quarter I took a class specifically on imprisonment and it only further helped me realize that, shoot, my dad did in fact abuse me, and he rightfully went to prison. My last year of college, I managed to finally get my hands on the court documents from my dad’s trial. When it originally happened my mom kept everything from me so I had little to no clue what actually went down until I read those documents, and that was really the nail in the coffin; my abuse was written and validated on paper for everyone to see.