Nadili Soman 🖊️

Luv u 7! is cat approved.

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1 month ago | [YT] | 9

Nadili Soman 🖊️

JUST A LITTLE TOUCH by Nadili Soman
On Minimizing Pain and the Dangerous Comfort of Denial


She said it was “just a little touch.”

The phrase still tastes like acid. A little touch, as if measurement could make violence smaller, as if diminishment could erase trauma. I didn’t think I had anything left to say after Luv u 7! I had already torn myself open on the page. I laid bare my childhood, my grief, my silences. I believed that writing it was the final purge. But pain, it seems, is patient. It waits quietly for the next betrayal to call its name.

My book pulled a thread. I thought I was unravelling my own life; instead, I found faults in the floor of an entire household: splinters of silence, varnished-over stories, and laughter passed off as acceptance.

Today, a family member called. She had read my book and wanted to order more copies as gifts. She told me how much she admired my writing. Then, just like that, she spoke fondly of one of my unnamed abusers.

I gave in. She didn’t know.

She continued her praises.

“I’d rather not talk about him,” I said quietly.

She persisted. I felt the vomit of emotion rising.

“I’m not comfortable with this conversation. End it now,” I said hoarsely.

She laughed.

“He feel all of us up too,” she said as if sharing a family joke.

I froze.

What terrifies me is not only that she recalls these things casually, but that she treats it as shared amusement. Even if she was older, even if she thinks her experience was different, that attitude reveals a deep moral numbness: the inability to feel the injury of a child.

This is the dangerous psychology of minimization. Calling something “a little touch” is a way to keep the story small so the shame isn’t yours to hold. It keeps pedigrees clean and reputations intact. Language that downplays abuse protects the abuser and abandons the injured.

What does my writing excavate? It digs out the coping mechanisms families build to survive shame and shows how those same mechanisms become armour for abusers. It reveals how trauma compounds: my mother’s suicide, the endless house-to-house shuffling, the wars within a broken home, the stamina of a little girl taking herself to exams with a secret she could not say aloud.

Imagine carrying all that before the age of eleven. Then imagine someone saying the harm was “just a little thing.” Have a heart.

How can paedophilia be normalised because it came wrapped in familiarity and Sunday scriptures? How can the violation of a child be retold with laughter? It isn’t ignorance; it’s moral decay disguised as humour.

If your memory of a man includes jokes about feeling up young girls, then your memory is stained. If your response to a survivor is adulation of the perpetrator, you are standing on the wrong side of truth.

And I am sick of it.

The deeper learning is this: empathy cannot be selective. Words matter. When we flatten pain with jokes, we keep the cycle alive. Laughter that excuses molestation is not nostalgia; it’s complicity. If you laugh while remembering an abuser, you have chosen comfort over conscience. You have chosen denial over decency.

When we name what happened and refuse to minimize it, we make space for something else: accountability, repair, protection...

I intend to set fire to the polite scripts that keep predators comfortable. I will incinerate the euphemisms that turn little touches into “boys being boys, men being men” and leave children with the long bill of memory.

I write not to reopen wounds, but to stop pretending they were never there. This is not about revenge. It’s about recognition. Every chuckle that excuses a predator, every shrug that says “that’s just how he was,” every amused explanation of “why yuh think all the boys in the family come out so wild?” keeps the next child unprotected.

Sometimes healing needs to howl. Sometimes it demands that we stop being polite about pain. I’ve learned that family isn’t just blood; it’s who can stand in the truth with you. It’s who sees your pain and doesn’t try to rename it, justify it, excuse it, or laugh it away.

Sometimes healing forces us to look at our bloodlines and say, “This is where it ends.”

This is not melodrama. If this piece makes you uncomfortable, that’s the point. Let that discomfort ask you why. Ask yourself which stories you’ve smoothed over and which tragedies you’ve protected. If you can do that, you are already beginning to change the next child’s story.

If my words make some of you flinch — good. Flinching is the first step toward change. Maybe that’s what healing really is: the refusal to carry other people’s denial any longer.

So yes, I will keep writing. To remind myself, and anyone reading, that silence is not peace. Peace is what happens when the truth finally gets its say.

3 months ago | [YT] | 7

Nadili Soman 🖊️

On her 50th, one bloom. Just one. From a sapling that could barely wait to speak.

Maybe love found new ways to say hello. It pushed through red clay and heartbreak...to offer her something like hope.

This space is for moments like that.

A place where she stores the pieces, scatters the petals, releases the ache, and shares the gold.

Written in brine, breath and bone,
This is where love…
becomes whatever it must...
to stay.

#TheUniverseSpeaks #ShowerOfGoldTree #LuvU7!

3 months ago | [YT] | 7