My Sexual Assault

Photo by C.T.

It didn’t happen in a dark alley, he didn’t wear a trench coat, and I wasn’t in a skimpy red dress. There wasn’t screaming, only firm objections that turned into whispers inside the back of my skull. In between those objections he’d call me pretty. I wore shorts and a t-shirt because it was a hot day. No one was in the house with us, just me and him. I tried to go home but he wouldn’t let me go. We were friends. It wasn’t rape, but it was most definitely sexual assault.

I left his house feeling uncomfortable, violated, and confused. I quickly walked home. I don’t know what made me answer his texts after that. When I got home I planned on ignoring him, but he spammed me and I answered. Within a few weeks he cut contact.  I didn’t think about what had happened or him. A  few months later I was talking to a friend about how the idea of sex and being physical with someone made me uncomfortable. I told her, “I had an awkward experience with someone last spring, maybe that’s why I can’t even think of getting physical with someone.”

A thought crept into my mind; was it assault? No, impossible. I just failed to please my partner and get into the act. The thought shook me to my core. I refused to think of it as a possibility. I mentally threw out the idea. By this point I hadn’t talk to him for a few months.

When school started again I met a guy that I really liked and we started dating. But the idea of getting too physical– physical beyond making out– made my skin crawl. It wasn’t him, it was a gut feeling. The only thing I knew was this wasn’t a natural feeling. I talked to my friend about what happened. I talked about it as if it was nothing, as if I was ordering a sandwich at subway. She told me it had been an assault.

Denial is the first stage of grief. I didn’t want to believe what she had said. I asked a friend who worked with teens, I asked my boyfriend, I asked a few other friends by making up a story and not saying it was me. The answer was all the same: it was an assault. My deepest fear was to be raped or sexually assaulted. My deepest fear had happened and I hadn’t even realized it. Aren’t assaults aggressive? Don’t you always know it was an assault? The answer to both is no. You don’t always know, but if something feels wrong, then it most likely is. I also learned that even if a traumatizing experience happened to you months before, the memory, realization, and experience could still hurt.

Society has taught us you’re either damaged or you’re not. I never thought that was true, but this made me disagree with the idea in a whole different way. Everyone get’s damaged at some point, whether you break the heel of your shoe at prom, or you get sexually assaulted.  What no one talks about is the healing process– the part where you go from feeling broken to being able to feel like you can function in life again. What no one talks about when it comes to sexual assault survivors is that there are so many set backs. Sometimes you take two steps forward and then five steps back. When I first found out I had been assaulted, I wouldn’t let anyone touch me. Human contact made me want to claw my skin off; thinking about the assault itself made me want to claw my skin off. Humans shed skin but I felt as though I couldn’t have shed enough skin to get rid of the places he’d touched me. I started feeling the places he’d touched me; it felt as though I could feel his fingertips on me again. There was a point when I had a panic attack while I was with my boyfriend, I curled into a ball on my bed and cried. When I finished crying I reached my hand out and gripped his finger. That was how it was for while. I’d grip his finger, then I worked up– yes worked up– to holding his hand. Then I could kiss him again. Notice how I said worked up to it, that’s another thing about the healing process, for some people, you have to work up to a lot of things.

Blaming myself for the incident is another thing that ran through my mind, and from talking to friends who had gone through this too, it seems to run through a lot of victim’s minds. I thought for a while that if I had worn jeans that day despite the heat, that maybe he wouldn’t have been able to touch me. I thought maybe if I hadn’t let him kiss me he wouldn’t have thought we could go further than just that, kissing. I thought if maybe I had been louder with my objections then maybe he would have actually stopped. I thought I was an idiot for a long, long time. In the hours I was alone I’d constantly beat myself up about it. Telling myself that if I had worn something different, or spoke louder, or not hung out with him that day, or not given into his compliments and believed that he thought I was special, then we could have avoided all of this. But over time, with the help of friends and family, I taught myself that it wasn’t my fault. No one should ever pressure you into anything you don’t want to do. I wasn’t the one in the wrong here, it was him. He shouldn’t have done what he did. It took a lot of constant reminding for that knowledge to stick, and it eventually did. Don’t get me wrong though, I still have days where I blame myself or I start to overthink and start beating myself up again. But deep down I do realize it wasn’t my fault.

I figured out I had been assaulted 6 months after it had originally happened. At the end of the day I decided not to report my assaulter. I had a lot of people encouraging me to but I knew that I didn’t have any proof and knowing my relationship with him wouldn’t have helped my case. I knew people would just view me as a naive girl who cried “rape.” I also knew that we lived in a society where the victim just gets slut-shamed, interrogated,” and beat on. I didn’t see it as worth it. I decided to focus on getting better, I decided to focus on myself and make sure that I was going to be okay.

I found a lot of support in my best friend and my boyfriend. But I still felt entirely alone. My parents knew and some close friends did also, but I decided to tell the school because my assaulter went to school with me. I didn’t want to reveal my assaulter’s name, but I was seeking a comfort zone in every aspect of my life. I spend eight hours of my day in this school building. I wanted a safe place in case I had a break down– which happened a lot back then. So after lunch one afternoon, I wandered into the guidance office and asked if I could speak to a counselor. I waited a few minutes, I sat by the circle table left of the door. A counselor called me and I slowly walked in, shut the door,” and sat down. I explained everything, when I figured out that the assault had been an assault, how the incident went down and how I didn’t wish to report my assaulter for reasons I already said. The counselor looked at me with sympathy and proceeded to tell me, “That’s horrible. I’m so sorry that happened to you. But you know, you must keep a routine. So keep coming to school keep doing your homework! If you want to come into the guidance office for five or so minutes because you’re feeling overwhelmed then you can,” but we have to get you back to class.”

I needed more than that. School is important, I get that. I could easily keep going to school, but at the same time I could also stop keeping up with basic hygiene. I could stop eating and sleeping, or I could eat and sleep too much. I walked out of the counselor’s office feeling even more alone. I realized that the school was not going to be a place where I could seek help. A part of me still feels like it was because I wouldn’t report my assaulter. I ended up seeking comfort in other places. Through my times of sadness I realized that the friends I had drifted away from still loved me, and were still there for me. I cried in my former best friend’s arms during a lunch period because I was having a particularly rough day. My fears about being broken up with because I never thought I could have sex or go further than making out, were put to rest because I had an understanding boyfriend.

Not every sexual assault/rape victims experiences and reactions are the same. Only you can really understand, fully, what you’re going through. But that doesn’t mean you’re alone. There are resources you can contact, or you can talk to close friends and/or family members. Not only women are raped and/or sexually assaulted, men are too, so if you’re a male that has been sexually abused, don’t brush under the rug because you feel as though men cannot be raped or abused. The healing process exists. You aren’t abused one day then fine the next. Sometimes it’s harder for others, sometimes it’s easier. Everyone’s healing process is their own. Anything you’re feeling in that process is normal. Feeling angry, irritated, sad, upset, and depressed are normal, and not feeling anything at all is also normal. Being in this situation is tough, but it taught me that I’m not alone.