Julie Hayes On "I Met My Younger Self and I Didn't Say a Word"

I thought about the question for a long time: What would you say to your younger self?

Friends around the dinner table answered easily. They spoke of warnings and wisdom, of advice they wished they’d taken, of paths they would reroute. Their answers were clever, compassionate, neat.

Mine was not.

Because if I ever stood face to face with my younger self, I would not speak at all. No warnings. No explanations. No attempt to rewrite the past.

I think I would simply wrap my arms around her and hold her. Not tightly. Just long enough for her to feel safe. Because safety was never guaranteed for her. She earned it, moment by moment, in ways no child should have to.

She grew up in a house where danger wore a familiar face, where harm was wrapped in routine, and where silence was not just expected but necessary for survival. From the age of five, she learned something devastatingly complex: that adults can know the truth and still choose comfort, convenience, and security over protection. She learned that the world could continue as normal while something deeply wrong sat at its centre. Life did not stop. The earth kept spinning. School bells rang. Meals were cooked. Animals were fed.

She did not think about what was happening as abuse. It was just her reality, her life.

For seventeen years, she lived with a paedophile in her home. Her parents knew; they caught him when she was five. He promised to stop, that he would never touch her again. They believed him, or perhaps they believed what they needed to believe, engulfed as they were in their own marital distress. Leaving would have meant loss: the farm, the animals, the life that, despite everything, was home. “We’re on too good a wicket to leave,” her father said. And so the child stayed.

She learned how to survive inside that world. She learned how to disappear into the cracks of everyday life. She learned how to angle the bathroom door to shield her body while getting ready for school every day. She learned how to avoid being alone in certain spaces. She learned how to accept a goodnight kiss from someone she never questioned as family, because questioning was never part of her job. Endurance was.

Her mother tried to protect her in the only way she knew how: keeping her close, almost fused to her side. But when you live with a predator, there are always moments when no one is watching. Her mother made it very clear that telling meant losing the animals she loved, the land, and life itself—her home. Love and loss were made conditional, and the child understood this with painful clarity. She adapted accordingly.

She told one person. And he betrayed her.

At fourteen, a trusted adult—the deputy principal of her school, her mentor—began grooming and then abusing her. He was careful. Methodical. His wife taught her health class. She taught his daughter to ride. The lines between safety and danger blurred completely until violation was woven into the fabric of her everyday life on so many levels.

She was a high achiever. She tried her best at everything she touched. She was loyal, steadfast, a good friend, a good daughter. She kept her humour. She kept her capacity to love animals, land, and people. With no counselling, no intervention, and in a time when these things were not spoken about, she did what she had always done—what every woman had to do, her mother said.

She got on with it.

At seventeen, she left for the city to attend university. She became a teacher. Later, she went on to start a school for young people at risk—children like the one she had been. Children who needed to be seen without pity. Children who understood survival but did not need their pain romanticised.

She does not need advice from the future. She does not need warnings.

What happened to her made her resilient, compassionate, and deeply real. This does not mean there were—are—no costs, no trauma, no scars. There were many wounds to untangle as an adult. There were tears shed over her parents’ choices, their complicity, and their failures. Especially later, when she became a mother herself. There was anger, but it did not last long. Perhaps because she never expected answers, and when they came unasked for in the weeks before her mother’s death, they were not the kind that healed.

Both parents are gone now. They loved her. They failed her. Both things are true.

Because of her, I do not remember my childhood as only terrible; I remember happiness. The farm. The animals. Freedom to ride my horses like the wind. A richness of experiences that shaped my life. Like people, a childhood is never just one thing.

So if I could meet that little girl now, I would not tell her she survived something terrible. I would hope that my arms convey, without words, that she survived exceptionally well.

That she turned endurance into empathy. Vigilance into wisdom. Survival into a life of meaning.

Because of her, there is love. There is a husband. There is family. There are hundreds of young people whose lives were changed by someone who understood them. There is joy. There is gratitude.

I would not want to say anything that could change a thing about her.

She is my hero.