Lingerings

A few days ago marked the 6 year anniversary of the first time I met the man that raped me.

Time has made memories fuzzy, but the date will never leave me. The eerie knowledge that in 8 short months after that first meeting, he would change my life in ways I couldn't have previously imagined.

This post is a little different than what I typically put here, but understanding my identify as a survivor is something that has been a challenging negotiation so far in my journey towards social worker. So we're just going to go with it. It's been rolling around in my head for weeks now and my fingers are ready to let it free now.

I want to make a list. A list of the ways that 5+ years later, my rape still affects my life. I went through about 3 years of talk therapy and then 5 months of intensive EMDR to work through the trauma, and if I were writing this before the EMDR, it would look remarkably different. I'll try to explain how. Just know that treatment does change things. It improves things in miraculous ways. But it doesn't make it disappear.

What Being A Survivor Means
1) Fear. Before EMDR, this fear was one of the driving forces in my life. I often talk about how I wasn't a huge party girl in undergrad, but not often about the fact that the reason was that my fear of being around absolutely anyone I didn't know while drinking was crippling enough to keep me in my room. The fear of walking home to my apartment. The fear of seeing my rapist appear at my doorstep. The fear that someone would find out the who and where of my assault. The fear that my secret would cease to be mine. Now, after EMDR, the fear is much less intense. It's almost what I imagine phantom limb pain to be. I feel the echos of the fear that's not really there anymore. But when I hear a bar is especially crowded or I'm out without the warming comfort of my life partner, my anxiety amps up. I make polite early exits from nights out. I run to the sanctuary of my car-doors locked and windows up and sit in the safety of it all.

2) Empathy. It never leaves my mind that there is probably another survivor in the room. Even if I'm at a point now where a casual comment or mention of sexual assault doesn't trigger me, I know what it felt like when it did. It makes me sometimes a little crazy about trying to create safe spaces for survivors. It makes people tell me I'm being silly or unrealistic. But I know how it feels to hear people talk about something as innocuous as their love for Law and Order SVU and wondering if people want to consume my rape for their entertainment as well.

3) Changed. Relationships that are never the same. I don't want to go into the details of exactly which ones changed for me in a forum as public as this one, but trust that my life would be filled with very different people right now than it is if I hadn't been assaulted. It ended friendships I used to treasure. It sewed seeds for the most important relationships in my life right now.

4) Goals. My rape changed my life path. Since the first moment an LCSW hugged me at the end of my first counseling session at a free YWCA sexual assault counseling center, a little voice has told me that I need to pay the world back. That hug changed what I wanted to be. I think I knew in that moment I wouldn't follow through with medicine. I needed a career where I could move that hug forward.

5) Mental health. Can I say what my mental health would look like if it hadn't happened? Maybe not. But I also believe that trauma, especially when endured by a still developing brain, permanently alters that brains ability to process emotion and respond to serotonin and dopamine. And I know that artificially flooding my brain with serotonin makes my life more worth living.

6) Impatience. I cannot accept any movement to end violence that demands a wait and see mentality. Even one more person who goes through what I went through is too many. Every microaggression is too much. There are no small victories. Only the erasure of power-based person violence.

Over the last 5 years, I can say with certainty that I've done an enormous amount of healing and growth. From a scared 17 year old who didn't know how to process what happened, to a 23 year old putting altered beliefs into practice, I am a changed woman. I believe in the power of therapy and EMDR more than I could have otherwise. I believe in hope. I believe in healing. And I believe in ending our fucking rape culture and stopping this from ever happening again.