Kill the Silence

by Monika Korra

  I couldn’t accept that this slower was my new normal, not as an athlete and not as a survivor. Being “damaged” or a “victim” and having to accept that I was somehow altered by the experience wasn’t something that I was willing to accept as “normal” in any way—new, old, used, abused, didn’t matter. The only new I wanted to accept was better—better times on the track, better relationships with my friends and with my boyfriend.

  As the last of those repeats was about to end and my legs felt numb and my lungs seared, I also thought that I wanted the world to be better. I didn’t want anyone to have to go through what I had, not the initial terror or the aftermath and facing the larger question of Who am I now?

  In a way I can see that, off the track, maybe I was being a bit of a narcissist, thinking that everyone was looking at me or judging me. I hated the idea that anyone would look at me with any kind of pity and think, “There’s that poor girl. I bet that things are really hard for her. I feel so bad for her.” That was particularly true of how I viewed my professors. I didn’t want them to see me struggling in a class and think that the reason for it was because of my being raped. I still had some problems with focus, and despite people telling me in the past that I didn’t have to try to write down everything that a professor said in class, I decided that was what I needed to do to help me improve my powers of concentration. If I had been a bit of a fanatic about note taking before, I became absolutely maniacal about it that next semester.

  Even as I write this today, I can still feel the tension in my hands as they fiercely gripped my pen and nearly gouged the words into the paper. In thinking about those days, my brow, the set of my eyes and lips, the tightness in my jaw, all come back to me. As I sat there in classes, it was as if I was engaged in a battle for position on the track, the thrashing of arms and legs, my mostly taller opposition obscuring my vision a bit. I had to push past them, get into the free and the clear. Stay focused. Stay focused.

  I filled up notebooks like they were note cards; I lived in a spiral-bound world in those days. The English language was coming much easier to me, which helped, but the biggest factor was thinking of my issues with focus as an opponent to be beaten to prove to everyone, including myself, that I was undamaged by what had happened.

  Of course, as is true with training and overtraining, there was the possibility that there would be some injury along the way. If I failed at anything on my return to Dallas, it was in striking the kind of balance that I’d had after I’d met Robin. He had opened my eyes to a different way of approaching being a student and an athlete. Before him, my life consisted mostly of “have to” statements and actions: I have to eat right to keep my weight down so I can perform at my best. I have to study and do all the reading because I have to get the best grades. I have to get the proper amount of sleep. The “have to” list went on and on. Robin made me realize that there was some room for “want to.” He helped me see that though all my “have to”s had produced good results, I wasn’t really living the life that I wanted to. He showed me how to feel more energized, more alive. I loved him and how he accepted me, how he wasn’t a “have to” and I didn’t have to be anyone but my true self around him.

  When we first started to argue, I could blame it on the stress we’d both been under. We squabbled over the typical things: how much time I was spending studying instead of with him, what we were going to do when we did get together, how much time he was now spending with one of his guy friends. We struggled with bigger questions: Why he was comfortable sharing his feelings with his friends and not with me? Why was he trying to protect me and not let me into his world?

  Things had changed because of the rape. In the end I think we both wanted things to go back to the way they were before; we tried to pretend that everything was the old normal, but the truth, no matter how much we tried to ignore it, was more insistent. I was trying to deal with it my way, he was trying to deal with it his way, and we both stubbornly clung to the idea that we wanted to do what was best for each other, but that wasn’t always what the other one wanted or needed.

  I didn’t understand this at the time, but how I was behaving was a pretty typical response. I was taking an Exercise Physiology class, and I learned that movement was possible a lot of the time because of antagonistic pairs of muscles—one contracts and the other relaxes, and work gets done. A kind of pushing and pulling. I was pushing Robin away, and pulling close to me the things that would make it seem like I was okay, that everything was fine. Robin knew things weren’t fine—he was hurting and of course knew that I was, too—but I didn’t appreciate the reminders that I saw in him.

  I was trying to balance, and not always succeeding at keeping so many other things in proportion—preparing for the trial, competing at track, getting my education.

  I knew that I had to be selfish. I had to think of my interests and my well-being first. Though I was doing better physically, the enormous energy it took to focus on classes and keep moving forward took a toll on me. I only had so much energy and so much time. Worse, for as much progress as I seemed to be making, every two weeks, nearly as regularly as clockwork, I’d go through a down cycle that had me in torrents of tears. When we are threatened, we go into fight-or-flight mode, and I fled during those instances when I broke down. I didn’t want to let anyone see me, so I’d hole up in my room, say that I was studying, tell people that I was going to the library or some other site on campus to study, and like a wounded animal retreat to some dark corner of my world. This was both an act of self-preservation and a way to spare my friends the sight of me hurting, or hurting them if I lashed out in pain, frustration, and anxiety.

  I felt helpless when Robin’s or my good intentions went awry and I ended up hurting him despite my efforts to spare him. I kept thinking about New Year’s Eve back in Norway. Robin was still there visiting me. Instead of the two of us having a night together, I took him to a party that my sister was hosting—a few close friends, none of whom Robin had met before. I wanted to go to prove to myself that I could handle a social situation where other people knew what had happened to me. Besides, I’d promised myself that the holiday was going to be as normal as possible, and I was going to keep that promise. I was exhausted, but I wasn’t about to admit that. Robin and I had our first fight that night. He kept asking me why I was acting that way, and what was going on with me? I couldn’t understand what he meant.

  I was fine. Couldn’t he see that? I couldn’t be sad all the time.

  In spite of the tension in our relationship, our physical intimacy wasn’t greatly affected. I trusted Robin implicitly, and he was my first sexual partner. In hindsight I’m grateful that we had become comfortable with each other sexually before the rape occurred; it would have been far more difficult for me to trust a man if the relationship had been a new one after the attack. Not every survivor feels this way, but I never saw that what Robin and I did together sexually had anything to do with the assault. What happened in that truck was a horrible crime motivated by control and power. Robin and I were twenty-three and twenty years old respectively, enormously attracted to each other, and over the holiday, we slept together again for the first time since the attack. Robin was more hesitant than I was. He was concerned about doing something wrong, being too assertive, moving too quickly to resume what had been a wonderful part of our relationship. It was much like our first time again; I loved him and needed his companionship and support, and the kind of physical intimacy that helped reinforce all the very real and treasured aspects of our life together.

  Eventually, though, our disagreements about other things became too much.

  We broke up.

  This was too hard.

  What was the point of being together when we clearly didn’t see things the same way, when no matter what I did, I ended up feeling some form of bad? It was like I was reliving those frustrating nights in bed when sleep wouldn’t come, when no matter what position I shifted to I couldn’t get comfortable. Eventually,
I’d just get up, give up on the idea of sleeping.

  After we broke up, I was devastated. I’d gone from thinking that this was the man who I was going to spend the rest of my life with to not having him in my life at all. SMU is a relatively small place, but still you could get “lost” there if you wanted or needed to. I didn’t see or hear from Robin for two months. Robin had given me a white jacket as a Christmas present. The night I came back to the apartment after we’d agreed to part, I put the jacket on and lay in bed crying.

  I’m fine. Why can’t he see that?

  Kristine was my refuge and my recovery again. As much as I was hurting, as painful as the breakup was, I gradually began to feel better, a little bit at a time. The track season being in full swing helped. I had plenty to do. My mind was full. It’s just that my heart was empty.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Measuring Progress

  Throwing myself into the work of recovering from the breakup, healing from the rape, and devoting myself to my classes and my training, I barely noticed the time flying by before it was springtime. I felt torn about what I was accomplishing. I was proud of making progress—I saw that my grades on assignments, papers, and tests were pointing me toward my best performance yet at SMU—and sad that I’d let go of someone I cared about so much. While I understood that all of the emotional work was important, it was much easier to think about the progress that I could measure with a stopwatch and a grade point average. I liked that. Yet getting an A on an exam, a quiz, or a paper didn’t really please me—it just made me not disappointed. I wasn’t reveling in my success in the classroom; I was a grade-earning machine, relentlessly and methodically churning through all the necessary work with that goal in mind.

  That was true to a lesser degree on the track. I did start to enjoy running again, and as my times in the four-hundred-meter repeats, for example, began to drop by a second or two, I did feel some satisfaction. That was proof that I was progressing, moving in the right direction. If those times were slower than they’d been during a previous workout, then I was angry and disappointed that I’d “proved” I wasn’t making progress.

  Anything that showed that I wasn’t improving, wasn’t making forward progress, grew all out of proportion in my mind. If I felt low energy, or if I struggled to really understand a concept that I was studying, I would be devastated. I can see now that if I looked at the big picture, the trend was definitely upward. I knew something of bell-shaped curves and incremental progress, but I was looking for straight lines and steep angles up. I’d always taken pride in being able to attack the hills and dig deep for a strong finish in my racing life, and I wanted to do the same in the rest of it.

  One measure of my progress was my relationship with Dr. Soutter. On my return from Norway, we agreed that meeting once a week would be sufficient. To me, that was good news. I’d been seeing her at first nearly every day, and now I was down to once a week. Way to go, Monika.

  The first session after I was back, we mostly just talked about my trip home. I didn’t go into a lot of detail; mostly I emphasized how good it was to be back there with a supportive family and how much richer and deeper my relationship had become with my sister and mother especially.

  Dr. Soutter told me that she could see a difference in me. At first I didn’t know how to react to her statement. How could she tell there was a difference? What criteria was she using? Unlike the measure of number of sessions per week, which was a quantitative assessment, this was more qualitative and didn’t offer me a whole lot of comfort. I wondered if it meant that I was becoming too good at fooling people, that even a professional like Dr. Soutter had fallen for my act. She didn’t see what other times were like for me, and I didn’t always volunteer what I was experiencing outside the safety of her office.

  —

  LATER THAT DAY, I decided to take a long walk after dinner. I was trying to puzzle out just what Dr. Soutter had seen in me that was so different from before. I knew that I didn’t feel the same. Before the holiday break, I had sat with her wondering if I was dead, worrying about that crazy dash I’d made across the street to get away from the black SUV I saw.

  I still was startled by traffic sounds every now and then, and as I walked along, my earphones in but the volume of my Pink album low enough so that I could hear what was going on around me, I jumped when I heard tires skidding. My heart raced, but when I looked around, I saw that it had been just a car that had nearly collided with another vehicle in the middle of an intersection.

  One of the drivers sped off, cell phone raised out the window as a kind of explanation/apology. I remembered how frightened I had been of driving over the Christmas holiday back in Løten; at first, just being in a vehicle had brought back that night in so many ways—the odor of a car interior, a mix of stale food odors and dirt and a pine air freshener, the sense of confinement and motion. Slowly, though, as I walked along that night in late February, I recognized that I was able to handle the surprises of traffic and roadside activities without panicking. My senses still felt heightened, but the feeling wasn’t anywhere near the blinding fear or panic of before. Maybe Dr. Soutter was right—something was different.

  I began to look at my sessions with Dr. Soutter like visits to a professor during office hours. We talked about the specifics of how I was doing in my recovery, but we spent a lot of time discussing more general principles of mental health and recovery from trauma. Surprisingly, post-traumatic stress disorder never came up. In looking back, I realized that PTSD was responsible for those periods when my best efforts to stay positive and not let things get to me failed.

  Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a diagnosis given to people who have particular symptoms after witnessing or experiencing any kind of traumatic event.

  In order for a person to be diagnosed with PTSD, certain criteria must be met. First, you must have some kind of recurrent bad thoughts associated with the event—either flashbacks, nightmares, distress when faced with something that reminds you of the event, or just an inability to stop thinking about it. I had all of the above.

  You must also have symptoms of avoidance and of numbing, which can include avoiding talking or thinking about the trauma, avoiding things and people that remind you of the trauma, a loss of interest in activities you used to enjoy, a feeling of detachment from people, a dampening of your feelings, and doubts about your future. I didn’t feel a dampening of emotions or lack of interest in activities, but I certainly avoided things that reminded me of the rape. A whole list of other possible symptoms fit me, too, like sleep difficulties, irritability, trouble concentrating, hypervigilance, and an exaggerated startle response. From the beginning, Dr. Soutter did tell me that everything I was feeling was normal. But I think it would have given me some comfort to know that there was a whole tribe of survivors like me out there who had gone through the same symptoms, that there was a name for what I had been experiencing, and that it almost always got better.

  Another diagnosis, called rape trauma syndrome (RTS), a complex form of PTSD, isn’t in the official diagnostic manual for psychologists, but it made a lot of sense to me when I learned about it later. Online, I read that RTS was described after researchers Dr. Ann Burgess and Lynda Holmstrom studied adult women who’d come to a Boston hospital’s emergency ward reporting rape. They found that the women shared many common symptoms and patterns. The researchers divided the symptoms into four stages: attack, acute, reorganization, and resolution or integration.

  During stage 1, the actual attack, lots of women freeze up like I did. Every woman thinks she would fight back and run away, but in reality, it rarely happens that way. Our bodies just freeze up on us involuntarily, and we become disoriented or disconnected. For some time soon after the rape, I was beating myself up for not fighting back physically; I kept wondering, What would have happened if I had tried kicking and screaming and jumping out of the car?

  It’s impossible not to wonder, but in reality I probably would have been killed
if I had tried to escape. I don’t think I made the wrong decision. My response was both instinctive and conscious. I told myself in the moment that the only way to get through that night alive was to not struggle against those men. When I learned about just how brutal a person Arturo was, and how much fear he instilled in family members and friends, I felt better about not having tried to run or fight. But in the immediate aftermath of trauma, that’s what your mind does to you—it questions everything. It wants to go over every little detail and figure out how to “fix it” so it never happens again.

  The acute stage takes place immediately after the attack, when a rape survivor might feel shock, pain, and a whole range of emotions, from shame to rage. Where I was that first semester back at school was in stage 3, the reorganization phase—the time when the survivor tries to make sense of life again and understand what happened. I just wanted to skip right ahead to stage 4, when the rape would be only a small part of my life instead of its major focus. I was trying to act as if I was in that fourth stage, but in doing so I was clearly showing that I was in an earlier phase of my recovery. That’s because I was consciously making an effort to put the event behind me. I was still focused on it, so it wasn’t a natural state of progress. I was very often aware of my responses and behaviors in terms of the rape. That kind of monitoring made the attack more prominent in my mind rather than less. I would eventually get to the point where I was behaving naturally, but I wasn’t quite there yet.

  Fortunately, one subject never entered my mind. Rape survivors often have suicidal feelings, too, but I never thought about that. I had plenty of good things in my life worth living for, and I had wonderful people surrounding me—my friends, boyfriend, family, and even my coaches and the school itself.

  Having Kelly step in to provide a maternal presence in Dallas was a big help. I so looked forward to spending time with her. Lunches and teas, hanging out at her home putting golf balls on the green on their property, Kelly offered me a glimpse of another world, one far removed from what I’d grown up in and one so different from the nearly unimaginable place the Worst One, the Boss, and the Weak One came from.