I was blown away: “How do you know all the right things to say?”
It was very rare to have that reaction, except from my female friends. Guys were on the bottom of the list of people who know the right things to say.
He always tells me that was the night he fell in love with me. I feel the same. I tell him, “It’s because of how safe and supported you made me feel when I was most vulnerable.”
I still get angry sometimes, but now I recognize that anger and channel it: “What’s a better use of this energy?”
I’ve gone back to school. I’ve started my master’s in social work and public administration. I want to be a director of a nonprofit or rape crisis center. Anything’s possible. I think, “Look at what you’ve created from that experience.”
I consider myself lucky to have met such supportive people in my life—my family, my loving partner, and my college friends—the friend who came up to me while I was reading my testimonial and crying. She held my hand so I could finish.
This is part of what I read:
Knowing
These are things some people know about me:
I like pretty dresses and wearing makeup.
My favorite pastimes are eating, talking, and dancing.
I like having a plan, but I need spontaneity.
I can be really loud and share more information than most people want to know.
I trust too many people.
I trusted him that night. I trusted that he knew that no meant no. After one time. After two times Even after one hundred times.
I told people, but I treated it like just another funny story from a night out. I didn’t realize it was a problem until the definitions of rape and consent were on a giant screen in one of the bystander intervention trainings I was leading. I never thought that I would have to use the resources we provided to survivors. They weren’t for me. They were for those “one in four women.” Not me.
Some people know that I can’t refer to him, or what he did, by name. But people don’t know that’s because I still believe it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have drunk so much. I shouldn’t have left with him. I shouldn’t have taken off my dress.
People don’t know about my constant battle within myself to practice what I encourage others to believe. They don’t know that I’m still unsure of how to define what happened, or if I even want to. I mean, I should know, right?
I’m afraid to scream about my pain because I’ll have to explain it. I am afraid that people will think I deserved it.
These are things no one knows:
I scrubbed my skin raw and cried on the shower floor the morning after it happened.
I haven’t been able to wear that dress since that night.
I take a detour to my first class to avoid passing him.
I had sex with a “friend” because I wanted to prove that I could be in control of my body.
I’m tired of feeling dirty, angry, scared, and ashamed. I don’t want to feel guilty and undeserving. I want to love myself again.
I’m learning to trust myself again.
* * *
If It Happens to You1
A Chorus
Remember, you don’t have to go through this alone. Some people may point fingers, but many more want to support and embrace. There are people who will support you. It’s not your fault. And it’s going to be okay.
It’s not too late to heal. It doesn’t matter if the assault happened five years ago or ten.
Speaking out, even if it’s to a friend, reclaims your power.
Confide in a friend or someone you trust. Release that poison. Release it in some kind of outlet. Because time does not heal these wounds. You have to deal with the trauma.
Do whatever you’re comfortable with. Don’t be embarrassed or ashamed. There’s so much scrutiny that comes with talking about sexual assault. Some people understand and some people are assholes about it.
If you can, report the incident. Tell someone, anyone, because it’s not right and the perpetrator probably should be punished for what they did.
You’re not alone. It takes guts to not feel that way. Open up to at least one person, like a therapist or family member. ’Cause there are times you will still feel alone and you just have to work with that.
Get an animal; get a dog. That helps a lot.
Surround yourself with people who care about you. Take time to take care of yourself. If you don’t take care of yourself, the trauma’s going to be a lot harder to get through.
If you’re reading this and you’re a survivor, I would like to say, “Just trust how you feel.” And know that you are right. That’s the only thing that matters.
It can be really hard. Sometimes people won’t listen, or won’t acknowledge how you feel. At the end of the day, whenever I have doubts I always go back to how I felt that night and how I still feel about it, and all the anxiety and the trauma that I have now because of that night, and that’s how I know I’m right.
It’s okay to report, or not report, to write about it, or not. There are all these expectations. I always thought if I were assaulted I’d be one of those who’d report immediately. And I couldn’t.
You do you.
Do what you think is best for you.
* * *
Accepting Entropy
HOW MY DAD USED THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS TO TEACH ME HOW TO SURVIVE
LIZ WEIDERHOLD
When I was in sixth grade, my dad retired from the army after spending twenty years thriving as a faithful disciple of aerospace engineering. His passion for this field was as limitless as space itself. At bedtimes during my childhood, I would ask him which star he liked best, and he would regale me with facts about Betelgeuse, the red supergiant, the Goliath of the night sky, whose surface is shrouded by a complex, dissymmetrical, cancerous cloak, an outgrowth of incalculable mass loss. He emphasized how this crimson runaway’s stellar evolution will end in a triumphant death as a supernova within the next million years, and how this twinkling Leviathan’s winds are piercing the circumambient interstellar medium.
My enigmatic dad almost continuously groomed my affection for science with his romantic insight into current research, but this behemoth of a bard did not know that, although I loved his intergalactic vignettes, I rarely—if ever—fully understood him. My dad’s emotional latitude coupled with his boundless wonder made him a difficult person to know. He rarely talked about himself and rarely asked me about myself, choosing instead to swaddle me safely in a blanket of concepts—protected there from our infallibilities, fears, and failures.
But by my freshman year of college, I was entrenched in suicidal melancholy, unable to stop reliving the details of a rape. This rape had too recently launched me from a sprightly, naive undergraduate ready to find my place in this world to a mere nebula of that glowing girl, now cool, dying, and swollen, culled into a vortex of antipathy for myself and for men. I was scared. I was angry. I was reduced to a fractured skeleton of my former self. And, worst of all, I was alone. The educational ecosystem in which I had flourished and into which I had been ushered by my dad’s careful, intellectual company was now polluted with deathless shame, a certainty of self-defeat, and a simmering resentment of authority. A barrage of questions, which I never voiced, orbited within me as the magnitude of my pain reached its apogee. Could I have done anything to prevent this? Did I do something to provoke this? How could I fix this?
But sound doesn’t travel through space.
I felt I had lost so much. I had lost opportunities to relish the last days of my childhood. I had lost friends, and I had lost fights. Worst of all, I had lost my vision of my future, and I had lost my once-close companionship with my dad, who seemed as distant, as impossible, and as unattainable as outer space. Once my dad had proffered biographies of the visible heavens that lifted me into an untroubled sleep; now I was too choked by my misery to ask my dad about my own biography. Why had a man raped me? My dad sang his lullabies no more.
Aft
er my rape, it took nearly ten years for me to realize that my dad could not teach me how to heal. No finite string of warm words could ever articulate the amalgam of inexorable distresses, relief, bewilderment, burdens, and fury that, for years, governed my pursuit of self-actualization. I am certain now that my dad knew that, and that his own questions haunted him and his own grief stayed unacknowledged in the ether of our cragged relationship.
* * *
After my rape, it took nearly ten years for me to realize that my dad could not teach me how to heal.
* * *
Although my dad knows about my rape, he and I have still not had a conversation about it. And we likely never will. But he is not the enemy. He is my buried hero. He was the first good man I ever knew, the antithesis of my rapist, and the one who gave me eighteen years of unencumbered and unconditional love before the perversion of my virtue and virginity. His love winnowed the mass of truths I couldn’t face yet. It distanced me from the depravity of the act, and it is the nuclear fuel for my endurance through life still. Only now, as a teacher myself, do I recognize that my dad translated the data he aggregated from his vast knowledge of space into a narrative that reflected themes of life and death, love and loss, sickness and health, injury, persecution, injustice, and faith. Though he spoke of the stars, he had all along been answering those questions I once thought he had ignored. No matter how corrosive and insidious some truths, the narrative of the night sky can be my compass after all.
My dad helped me grow up. Grow past. Move forward. Heal. Survive.
Again
I am a time traveler. I first discovered my superpower lying on the edge of the sidewalk with a sweet boy. Our romantic friendship left me lonely and confused. I thought the first time we touched, it would feel perfect and satisfying. See, I needed to prove to myself that I could still live the dreamed teenage life of lust and recklessness, but the boy would not touch me. He knew about my history; he knew a wrong turn might offend me, and so we lay still. Overcome with inadequacy, I put my hand on his face and he finally pulled me closer. The familiar tug and pull began, reassuring me again of the surviving potential in my existence. Somewhere in the middle of an embrace or a word, I realized the world around me had flared in and out of focus. I wish I could remember exactly what he did that initiated the process, but from one moment to the next, I went from the sidewalk, to the floor of a dark, cold room. I recalled this room from a month earlier. Immediately, I sensed danger and then fully recognized that I had somehow traveled back a month to a horrible night. I didn’t want to accept the reality of reliving what I knew would happen next, so I punched and kicked indiscriminately around me. I screamed at the monster on top of me. I beat him and myself in the hopes I would wake from this nightmare. The monster rolled over and left me alone on the floor. I cried and closed my eyes until I knew I had transported myself back to the present. When I opened my eyes, the sweet boy stood above me, transfixed in suspicion. I told him I had Band-Aids in my room, but he hurried home.
—Regina Gonzalez-Arroyo
* * *
Relationships After
A Chorus
I met another guy, who was also in a frat, although he was very different. I told him what had happened and he was supportive and careful and cautious.
We started a relationship, and it was definitely difficult. One night we were hanging out and we were horsing around and he grabbed my shirt. I started screaming and crying and collapsed on the floor. That happened multiple times. It was bad.
I found myself in a manipulative relationship. Just got out of that.
Someday I will date again and have a sexual relationship. I’ve been with someone since. It was really rough, but it helped me to detach myself from labeling my sexual experiences. It helped me put my bad experience into a separate category.
I had never been in a relationship, and I wanted to prove that love did exist. We spent time talking and holding hands. I had never held hands with a woman before, or been kissed in public before, and they just kissed me while we were standing on the corner there. And it really meant something to me, that they weren’t ashamed to be out with me.
In the summer, I had gotten into a new relationship with a guy I had known for five years. I was very open with him about what I had gone through, but he asked me not to tell him the specifics of that day. He helped me through my flashbacks, and he was and still is always there to listen when I want to talk about it. I am not saying that you cannot help yourself, but it is nice to have unconditional support from everyone in your life, which is what I have.
I did talk to my partner at the time and told him what happened. It was really hard for me to talk about it. After I was raped, I had cheated on him, having sex with random people. I felt really guilty about that and tried to explain why, but I was having a really hard time having sex with him again. He was sad. He was really sad for me. He felt horrible. He felt like shit. I felt like shit.
For a long time as a survivor, I felt as if I was broken and didn’t deserve anything better than those types of relationships. Then I met my fiancé. I had never believed that what I have with him could be possible.
I was always a romantic growing up. I always wanted to be in love forever, like in a fairy tale. But then I was assaulted and I thought, “That’s stupid and it doesn’t exist, it’s not real.”
You don’t know who will support you. Someone had said, “Have you told Bobby?” And I had said, “Oh, no, because he will come to school and beat the shit out of this guy.” But, no. Bobby never even asked if I was okay.
I had a five-year affair with a sixty-year-old married man. He was safe, effeminate. He wouldn’t rape me.
My partner is supportive and kind and generous, really wonderful. I’m very huggy. He’s very much a feeler, like me.
* * *
Olivia Benson Believes Me
ANONYMOUS H
I had never heard of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit until freshman year of college, at the University of Maryland. My roommate loved the show, so one night I decided to join her. The first episode we watched focused on college sexual assault, portraying victims who, like us, were students who had just arrived on campus. The story line didn’t just unsettle me—it struck a nerve. I felt intensely connected to the characters, especially Mariska Hargitay’s Detective Olivia Benson. I ended up watching every episode, even though I couldn’t explain why SVU impacted me so profoundly. There was something deep at play. And as I watched, I slowly began to realize the connection.
It had started when I was fifteen, in high school. I had a crush on a boy who presented me with this concept of “friends with benefits.” I took that to mean he liked me, but all he wanted was the benefits. Soon, I started having problems with anxiety.
Then, two weeks before my sixteenth birthday, a guy named David gave me a ride home from a party where my crush had just ditched me for some random girl. I had known David for years, and he and my crush were friends. My crowd didn’t drink or smoke, so I was sober. I was under the impression that my “friends with benefits” thing was secret. But David knew and, looking back, it’s easy to tell he knew I was vulnerable because I was upset. He ended up forcing me to do what he wanted, which was to pleasure him.
I don’t even remember exactly how it ended. I remember him laughing. I was in shock. Something felt wrong, but I assumed I was overreacting, and I believed that because we didn’t have intercourse, I wasn’t entitled to my feelings. I told three people what had happened, and one of them—my best guy friend at the time—responded that he had expected more from me. He said he held me to a higher standard and I had disappointed him. I convinced myself that David’s actions were okay and I needed to get over it.
* * *
I don’t even remember exactly how it ended. I remember him laughing. I was in shock.… but I assumed I was overreacting, and I believed that … I wasn’t entitled to my feelings.
* * *
After the thing happened with Dav
id, I turned to boys, telling myself, “I’m gonna use them. I can’t be used because I’m the one calling all the shots.”
I was hooking up with a lot of guys—not intercourse, but everything else. I was convinced that I wasn’t the girl that people wanted to date.
Once I began college, I told myself I wanted a fresh start. But during my second semester, I regressed. I was having a bad week, anxiety-wise, and I turned to what I knew: coping via boys.
I texted this kid Ben who was in my class and invited myself over to his apartment. I remember asking him how drunk he was and he said, “Four out of ten.” I was maybe tipsy, but I was in control.
All of a sudden he started taking my clothes off—we hadn’t even kissed. He pulled me on top of him and started pushing me down. He kept pushing. I resisted. He’s a big guy, muscular. I’m five foot one, 115 pounds.
He forced me to perform oral sex and other acts. I dissociated, leaving my body behind while my mind went elsewhere. I knew what had happened was wrong. I left his room crying, and I hardly ever cry. But, like before, I didn’t deem it an assault. I believed it was my fault: I knew my state of mind that night, but I went to his room anyway.
I told my mom. Her response? “You should never go to a guy’s room alone.” I kept watching SVU, and the characters’ struggles reminded me of my experiences. I deeply sympathized with them, yet I felt conflicted. I still didn’t feel entitled to my emotions. However, as I made my way through the series, it became clear that what I had gone through wasn’t okay … and that terrified me. I had never considered that I was assaulted, but everything made sense. I began to understand how my high school experience had affected me, tainting my understandings and expectations of relationships.
We Believe You: Survivors of Campus Sexual Assault Speak Out Page 16