Open Wound

This is not an essay about my rape.

I’ve been asked a few times to write about the “real” story-the gritty, violent parts. There’s an underlying implication it’s a topic for a serious writer and that, someday, I’ll need to open up the bandage so everyone can gasp if I want to be respected.

Sure, I’ll sell tickets if you want, but there’s not much to see. If I were to paint you a picture of the abuse itself, it would be one without depth by default. His motivations were not profound. He was scared, felt no control over his own life, and wanted to hurt a girl to feel strong, so he did. End scene.

Maybe it’s the wound that’s so interesting. People love to see a girl destroyed. This is probably the most obvious way that society resembles the rapist in terms of ideology. I’ve watched people step on honeybees just to hear the crunch of a broken little creature, killed for reasons that can hardly be called reasons. As a teenager, I sensed the public urge to bend my back until it snapped. To hear me tell it, over and over, in hopes I’ll reveal something grotesque.

On the other hand, I know many people who want to hear my story are women who have been through something similar. I have a long-standing habit of consuming media that portrays a girl like me dealing with sexual assault for similar reasons. We need to see anygirl survive. We cling to whatever hope we can find, even when it’s provided by the placebo of a fictional girl and her pseudo-fictional trauma. We’re going to be okay because anygirl is okay. At least she is when the book ends.

This is my story. I have told it many times. I will probably tell it again. This time, though, there is no interviewer. There is no editor. This is not a slasher movie, nor is it a fairytale. This is for me. Prepare to be disappointed.

I was raped for the first time when I was eleven. It was summer, just before the beginning of my first year of middle school. I think it ruined summer for me. When I think about late July in North Carolina, the honeysuckle sweetness I loved has twisted into a bitter blackberry that I can’t spit out.

I don’t remember much from this period, but there are a few things that still linger. I remember feeling as if I had been hit by a car. I kept waiting to wake up in a hospital bed with a police officer standing over me like I had been in some sort of accident. Except it wasn’t an accident. It kept happening, over and over, and nobody ever broke the door down to pick me up and save me. I eventually figured this was because I just wasn’t worth saving. Princesses get saved. Awkward, dirty, poor little girls just don’t make the cut. The world moved forward at breakneck speed while I stood in place watching.

Middle school started, and I still hadn’t moved. It felt like there was a wall between me and everyone else. I drifted through the world in a daze. My teachers complained that I wasn’t paying attention. I fell asleep in class. Few people talked to me because I was, simply put, weird. I became convinced everyone could sense what happened to me and that they were shunning me for it. I spent most of my time reading, drawing, or listening to music. I focused on getting better grades so my guidance counselor would leave me alone. At the end of eighth grade, a few teachers encouraged me to apply to a magnet high school program for gifted kids. I decided to humor them, and I was shocked when the program accepted me.

By the time I entered high school, I was well-versed in disassociation. Classes and socializing felt like a distraction from the very important task of distracting myself. It was, obviously, still hard to make friends. I was angry, tired, and highly unlikable. Only one other girl saw me, and we soon became close. She was still struggling to deal with her parents’ divorce. As two troubled, angsty, secretly sweet girls, we understood each other. I almost told her when I got pregnant.

I wish I had told her when I miscarried. I’ll never forget hearing her ask the receptionist to call my mother after I bled through my skirt because I was “having a really bad period”. As I tried desperately to process the trauma of a grown woman, I felt profoundly alone. Who, out of all the 14 and 15-year-olds around me, was going to relate to losing a baby?

I’ve thought a lot about all the “what if” scenarios and different timelines in which I get to keep my daughter. Still, even if it was inevitable and I was destined to lose her in any universe, her existence had a few positive impacts that I’ll always be grateful for. One of those is how discovering my pregnancy formed a little crack in the wall I had put up between myself and my abuse.

At this point in the story, I have to stop and explain something. It may be very obvious to anyone who has experienced this sort of ongoing trauma, and it probably sounds insane to everyone else, but the hardest obstacle I faced in reporting my abuse was realizing it was happening.

To protect itself, my mind built up a barrier around the idea of my rape. I couldn’t think about it directly for a long time. I would shut down. I panicked, cried, tired myself out to the point I fell asleep, and then woke up having only a vague memory of what had upset me. I needed some way to slowly open up the concept. I found it in my second-semester English class.

We were assigned a book report and allowed to choose from a list of books our teacher provided. I chose Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. I had always loved reading, but, as my teachers noted, I became unusually fixated on Melinda and her story. I read the book several times in the three weeks I had it, covering it with neon sticky notes and my scrawled annotations. I read interviews with the author in which she described her process for writing the book. I spent every day working on my project after school.

One night, I set the book down and called my new boyfriend. Slowly, in between long pauses, I told him everything that had happened to me in the last four years. He relayed it to my best friend, who dragged me in front of my English teacher the next morning and begged me to tell him.

Everything happened very quickly. My English teacher, the principal, the school psychologist, police officers, detectives, and social workers all buzzed around me as I answered the same questions for hours. I had to leave school to make a police report. The social worker drove me to a children’s reporting center, where they gave me a stuffed cat and let me draw while I answered more questions. Any other day, I would have reminded the psychologist that I was 15 (which is too old to hold a stuffed cat or draw flowers with crayons), but I suddenly felt like a little kid and was perfectly fine being treated that way. I was very tired of being brave.

I still find myself feeling this way sometimes.

Having four years of rape hit you all at once isn’t something anyone prepares you for. I doubt they could if they tried. Sure, I had gotten up from the side of the road and limped away. I’m alive. What now?

The worst part of rape is the way it keeps happening even after he gets up and leaves. I wished for years that I could go to a doctor who would scan my brain, point to a greyish blob on the X-ray, and surgically cut the memory out of my head. I felt like he had embedded his violence into my physical existence, and no amount of scraping off my skin in the bath would ever make me clean again.

I tried a lot of things to make the hurt a little less oppressive. I tried drinking until my kidneys hurt. I tried isolating myself, and when I eventually felt like I might explode, I started talking about what happened. Eventually, I talked about it on social media, and suddenly I was talking about it in front of thousands of people. It helped some, but it made me angry. It also opened me up to a lot of abuse that I wasn’t ready to deal with.

I tried Jesus. I became Christian, then really Christian, which culminated in a very messy breakup with the Catholic Church. I went to therapy on a grant before the funding got cut. I tried to remember what my therapist told me as I suffered another sexual assault and horrific bullying. I fell through endless apps, books, religious programs, diets, and whatever else I thought might help. I somehow made it out of high school and everything that went with it. Now I’m here.

Where is here?

I’ve grown pretty accustomed to being a sort of role model. I recognize that, in many ways, I’m regarded as a spokesperson for rape survivors in this movement. I filter anything I say publicly about my experiences through intense scrutiny. I don’t want to say anything that gives the wrong impression of survivors. I want to be a success story. I’ve had so many people message me to say my recovery has inspired them, and I don’t want to let them down.

I’m sure you all can understand why it’s been so hard to admit I’ve never been more lost.

I’m still depressed. I’m still anxious. I still have awful PTSD flashbacks and nightmares, and the other day I yelped because I thought my skirt brushing up against my leg was someone touching me. If anything, it’s gotten a lot worse now that I don’t have a constant crusade to distract me from feeling everything.

I spent years making up narratives for myself. I figured if I could make a compelling enough story out of the scattered pieces of my life, it would be worth it. It would mean something, which would justify an unquantifiable amount of suffering I had endured for no discernable reason. I wanted to believe the dragon had to trap me so my prince charming could swoop in and carry me off to California, or that maybe it happened because it was the perfect testimony to save the souls of lost young women like me.

Unfortunately, my life with Prince Charming didn’t work out, he doesn’t look a thing like Jesus, and every story eventually unraveled-leaving me alone at the center yet again.

In writing this, I’ve realized there’s something a little comforting about that.

It’s always been me.

When I started therapy, I learned something pretty surprising. My therapist remarked that I was very brave for speaking up, and when I rolled my eyes in true teenage fashion, she insisted. “Most people can’t tell anyone else for years”, she explained. “It’s pretty rare for someone in a situation like yours to report while it’s happening. You should be proud.”

Everything I’ve ever survived-abuse, miscarriages, bullying, several failed relationships (including my engagement), and all the other stuff- it’s all because I refused to give up. I didn’t fail at being Christian or working in politics, or any of the other things that have changed since I was 15. I just realized those situations weren’t good for me and was brave enough to leave instead of clinging to something despite knowing it would never serve me.

I’m gonna keep it real. I’m 20, this is my first rodeo, and I have no idea what’s going on at any given time. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, or the day after, or five years from now. All I know is that I’ll be here to help myself through whatever this is, for as long as it takes, like I always have. There is no hidden message, no lofty purpose, nor an impossible quest. This is my story, and I get to choose the meaning.

Today, the meaning is being nice to myself. She has been through a lot.