I never felt beautiful —TY Bello shares her experience

Nigerian songstress and photographer, Toyin Sokefun-Bello popularly known as TY Bello during the week relived some of her growing up experiences, one of which was the trauma of being sexually abused.

In an interview with ace film director, Kemi Adetiba on the ‘King Women’ series on Accelerate TV, said she was molested as a child.

She said that the experience affected her self-esteem all through her teenage years and that she never felt beautiful or girlish.

“I felt like there was something ugly about me that made me encounter this; that it was not the abuser’s fault, but mine”, she said.

“I used to see other girls as flowers and I saw myself as dirty cement, hard and ugly. I never felt beautiful, everything was wrong with me, I was hairy and it was a problem.

“I always attributed everything that was about me to be the reason someone took advantage of me. I thought there was something wrong with me because if others girls were like me perhaps they would be dirty like me but they were flowers,” she said.

She also spoke about her attempts at receiving salvation and what it meant to her.

“When a friend told me about salvation, she told me old things would pass away and all things will become new. It was as if God could wash away that stench and I would become a girl because I didn’t feel like a girl,” she said.

The Greenland singer was relieved when she found out that she was not the only one that was sexually abused as a child, saying,

“I was shocked when I grew up and found that one out of every three or four girls in my secondary school had suffered the same thing and I could tell them the same thing… that old thing can pass away.

“It was a relief to find that I was not the only one and a shock that nobody talks about it. That’s why salvation worked, I had a daddy and I was going to be a flower.”