I don't really know where to go with this but I need to get it out. I got very, very ill for a while a few years back. I was a legal adult, but the illness incapacitated me in a pretty severe way. I couldn't stand for more than a few minutes at a time, and I kept getting sick and would have to clean the bathroom every time to prevent re-contaminating myself. I went to my father to take care of me, which he told me he would do.
He left me alone while I was severely sick. I had to force myself to get up and make myself something to eat, having to stop repeatedly throughout the process because I was just too exhausted, but if I didn't cook then I wouldn't have anything to eat. When he was around, because his girlfriend was busy, he would sleep or watch TV, and he didn't bother to help me. I was getting so weak.
It finally became too much when I walked in on him touching himself. The door was open, and was only a few steps away from my room, where the door was also open. He had the lights on. I fully expected to see him reading or on his phone, so I walked in to ask him a question. When I realized what he was doing, I panicked, grabbed my stuff and my dog and drove all the way to my mom's house, six hours away.
My mom let me stay with her, and I quickly recovered because she cooked dinner every day. That was all I needed. I tried to call my dad out on it, but he got annoyed that I made it sound like he had to be a nurse the whole time. I asked him what he was doing in his room and he spluttered and tried to talk his way around it. After that, I did my best to put it all behind me and move forward.
I was twenty five at the time. It's four years later. I read a book about the same illness I'd been suffering from and got confused, because I didn't remember anything. Then it started to come back. And all these little things that seemed completely innocent at the time now give me this very sinister feeling, like if I hadn't left when I did things would have gotten much worse.
He groomed me as a child but never sexually assaulted me. I don't know if this counts as sexual assault either, since I wasn't physically touched, but I'm stunned, overwhelmed, and scared. I called him and told him to never speak to me again, and when he tried to reach out I blocked him immediately.
At work tonight I was dealing with a situation where I touched something gross. I immediately remembered that time of being sick and cleaning up after myself, and had the horrible thought that dad was actually going to rape me if I got sick again. I live in a different state, with my own money and home and life. But I had never said that word with association with my father, and it made me really scared to think about it. And now I'm just sitting in my car, on the verge of tears, feeling exactly like I did all those years ago when I was trying to gather the courage to run in the middle of the night.
What the hell do I do now? How am I supposed to keep going after this? I told some of my family a bit of it, but I really don't want to get anyone involved. I think they feel bad that they didn't know this was going on in the first place. I have a therapy appointment on Tuesday, but I have to keep my shit together through another two days of work until then.
I don't know if this is a situation where someone might have advice, but if you do, I think I could really use it