I'm having a hard time writing this, just like I am having a hard time looking in the mirror and getting out of bed. Its something I know I have to do, but some days, it really is just too difficult.
I stepped outside today and I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know who to turn to, but I couldn’t turn to my myself. I feel so overwhelmed that I am not sure I can bear the weight of my own breath.
I want to collapse into myself, letting skin and muscle and bone be consumed by the black hole that those men put inside me. I can feel my blood leaking from my internal wounds and I am so tired of watching myself drain away.
I always thought that time would pick up the pieces of myself that I am left with, but it feels like I will always be just a diminished person: a body with no soul, a mouth without a voice. I wish I could say I’ve recovered from what those two men did to me, from the pain, from the screaming, from the silence.
Violence is a given, not a surprise. Maybe I’ll always be one of those empty people straddling the line between living and surviving. The trauma doesn’t end, it chews its way through me, consuming my body and mind. I feel them inside of me, against me. The sounds of wire mesh ripping and sticks cracking latch onto the back of my neck when I walk at night or try to focus in class or when I am trying to make love. I feel damaged.
I have good days when I can feel color in my cheeks and my hands stop shaking. I am reminded that I am not my rape, I am not reduced to what those men thought of me, what they did to me. But some days, most days, I am triggered by something that pulls me back to that place.
A woman from my burlesque dance yanked me by the shirt collar and chewed the skin off of my lower lip, and I could feel the scars that those men left on me burn when she refused to let go.
I had a panic attack in bed with my boyfriend at the time. He was so horrified that he could have hurt me that he couldn’t console me. I haven’t felt that lonely and afraid since I was actually raped.
My sister found my story from last year online and knew it was mine instantly. She threw my trauma back in my face, and I kept thinking she would tell other people what had happened to me. It made me feel the same way when I did when my rapists followed me around for the 12 hours after my assault. They laughed at me, they stalked me, they relished in my fear.
I recently found out that no one wanted to read my submission from last year. Its not that I wanted people to want to read about my assault, like it was some kind of popularity contest about who had the juiciest story. Its just that the person who read my narrative was clearly unprepared, and didn’t know what she was doing. I didn’t feel empowered, I felt silenced. I was reminded about how I am unable to speak about what happened to me, how I can’t trust people, how I’ve never known how to ask for help or support.
I’m exhausted. I am so tired of being a victim, but I don’t yet feel like a survivor. My assault is past tense, its something I live with everyday. My rape isn’t something that happened, its my life.