Sexual Assault Awareness Month: A Narrative
Image by Simon Migaj.
By: Anonymous
The night it occurred, I decided I didn’t want my body anymore. The bruises and scratches didn’t belong to me, they couldn’t. I wasn’t in any accident that left me battered and bruised. This was something that he had chosen to do. Instead of taking care of my body, I sat in the shower with the heat turned all the way up. I thought that if I could burn him off of my skin I could somehow cleanse myself of the invisible germs I saw covering me from head to toe.
The day after I couldn’t even say the words out loud. I knew exactly what had happened, but couldn’t admit to the world what had occurred because – I suppose – that would have made it real. All I could mutter through the phone to a friend on the other side of the country was; “I think something really bad happened”. It took me months to be able to say the word out loud. Most of the time I could only spit it out after a few drinks had loosened me up.
In the weeks that followed, I decided I didn’t want my brain anymore. Convinced myself that I would be better off if I could turn off the cyclic thoughts that inhabited my brain at night. Those thoughts didn’t belong to me. They were the result of someone else’s actions, and therefore, not my responsibility to deal with. I was so angry that he had caused me so much hurt. So many hours of sleep lost. I wanted to make him understand the way that I had started living simply to exist. I ate because I knew that I had to, showered because I thought that’s what I was supposed to do.
Four months later, the first time I said the word out loud was in a therapist’s office in the city I grew up in. I had struggled through a retelling, made up mostly of tears and weak attempts at humour. With some yelling and anger that I had yet to understand.
“Have you ever actually said out loud what happened?” she asked me.
“No.”
“So what happened to you?”
“I was raped.”
Three months after that was the first time I let myself feel the impacts of it all, I was sitting in a new room, in a new house. I hadn’t slept through the night in days, and in the midst of my efforts to finish a lab report something in me snapped. It was like flood gates opening; I felt everything all at once. On the surface, I was so angry that I couldn’t focus on some irrelevant physiological phenomenon. But just underneath, I was so frustrated with the situation and with the way I handled myself, I felt rage, sadness, terror, shame. I had let myself get pulled under by the riptide and all I knew was a state of high alert. My body always ready to fight, or flee. I was overwhelmed – and had been for months. I got to a point where I didn’t realize there was any other way of being. But the body always knows better, and in that moment I was told to sit down and feel it.
More than a year after that night, I sat down and told my story again. Although I have told the story a handful of times before, telling my closest people is always the most challenging. It’s hard to let those you love know that you’re struggling, and it’s even harder to tell them why. I sat in a chair in my room and shared a part of myself I had hoped for a long time I could disown. Could box up and put away in a corner. Only opening it up once a year – or longer - when I had forgotten what was in it and curiousity got the best of me. And after I had opened up the box, full of darkness and feelings, light shone in. My people sat silently beside me on the floor, held me in their arms and told me they believed me. Because that’s how the cavalry can show up. Not with a bang, but a whisper.
Today, what I have come to know – albeit rather begrudgingly – is that you can only run for so long before you realize you’re on a treadmill. There is no future where I can box up my trauma and forget about it. I will never forget about it. But darkness can only stay dark if you don’t let any light in. It’s taken me a lot of time and hard truths, and I know it will take much more, but I’ve concluded that the only way through it is through it.
Healing is not linear, nor is it easy by any stretch of the word.
It is messy and convoluted and hectic and it can feel like trying to count backwards from 100 with people shouting random numbers in your ears. But it is worth it. It is always worth it because there will be times when you sit on the floor with your roommates and you will feel whole. There will be times when the sun is shining and you completely understand what your prof was lecturing about. There will be pancake breakfasts, runs, swims, jobs, dogs, museums, books, people who have yet to love you, people you have yet to love. This is what healing looks like, in the hard moments you must remember the ones that make it worth it. They are all around you.