8 out of 10

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study was created by the Center for Disease Control and Kaiser Permenente, a Southern California health research company. The test itself is only ten yes or no questions and is free to take online. Reducing oneself to a mere point of data is at once comforting and frustrating, yet when I realized how few people I knew had received a score of more than four out of ten, I decided to detail my own abuse in a way more personal than a number. These words that have been said to me over and over again as a child, how they have shaped me, and how the ideas of American darlings like Bing Crosby have shaped our perception of masculinity and nullified the validity of abuse survivors in our country and around the world.