I saw you again at the club last night.
My friends and I had been looking for this place for a while, and I was so excited to be the one who finally found it. We crossed the street and ran inside, and as soon as we passed the threshold, there you were, standing alone.
“Ellen!” You crowed, as if we were longtime friends. You reached out to hug me, but I dodged your grasp. This time, I ran.
“Don’t touch me!” I retorted. “I really, really don’t like you right now.”
You made a face as if you were confused. My friends looked to me for an explanation. “That’s the guy that raped me,” I whisper-screamed. My friend immediately retracted their hand from shaking yours as if they had touched something poisonous.
“We can leave,” they urged. “We don’t have to stay.”
“It’s okay.” The music was good, we had finally found this club, and we had been excited … I was not going to let you ruin my night and theirs.
I marched up the stairs like I was on a mission, leaving you in my wake. I was tipsy and my senses weren’t sharp, but what I did know was that you looked like a fucking loser standing there by yourself and you are really, really short. Once inside, I thought that I could shake you off like a bad dream, but you stayed, haunting my vision and making my senses on high alert. I kept scanning the room to make sure you weren’t there. I felt like I was being watched; chased. I had to keep a distance between us.
I have never been triggered by anything before – I’m privileged enough to not have anything veritably traumatic from my childhood to do so – but you were my first trigger. Your presence alone sent me into a spiral. All my thoughts and all my emotions simply vanished, replaced with stone cold dread and a bout of anxiety. I’m sure I looked like a ghost. You were my worst nightmare and last night, you reminded me that you were real.
I tried to keep up the energy. I didn’t want to be a damper on my friends. But at that moment, I simply couldn’t feel. I was a frail, empty shell of a person, and your presence drained every ounce from me. I didn’t know you had such a power over me – such a superhuman ability to make me feel such a particular way – but you did, and I was terrified.
At the ripe old age of 17, I was coerced. There were things I didn’t want to do but he threatened to leave if I didn’t, so I obliged. During your first time, you don’t know what’s normal. You don’t know what’s expected of you. So, you try to meet expectations.
I remember going home feeling like something was completely off. This did not feel like what the romance movies had portrayed. This was not what the Y/A novels had promised. I cried big, bawling gulps of tears, but I still couldn’t make sense of what had happened to me. At the time, I didn’t know what the word ‘coercion’ even meant.
In Ohio and many other American schools, teaching abstinence is the extent of sexual education. According to a study from Missouri State University, because schools in the United States don’t discuss sexual consent within their sex education programs, the societal normalization of rape has continued due to victim blaming and sexism (1). It wasn’t until a mandatory sex ed course at Emory that included a lesson on consent that I truly learned what had happened to me on that night when I was 17. Up until that point, I was even still friends with the guy.
Because we were still ‘friends’, I confronted him about it. I don’t remember his exact reaction, but what I do remember was him begging me to keep my mouth shut. He said that he would admit it to his family and his friends in due time, but I’m sure that was just an excuse to allow him to keep living his double life: one where he coerced a woman and one where he did not.
I kept my mouth shut, but what I really wanted to do was tell his mom. I wanted to tell the debate team and all his friends. I wanted to tell the entire world to ensure that he could never hurt another woman again.
The word ‘rape’ is simply four letters. It’s a small word that barely takes up space on a page. And yet, this single, tiny little word can be a defining experience that alters the lives of many. The statistics say that 1 in every 6 women has been raped in their lifetime (2), but I argue that this statistic is much higher than recorded. My evidence lies in my own experience: I have been assaulted for the past year of my life, and I had no idea until now.
In my mind – and the minds of many – ‘rape’ is something colossal. It’s something violent and gruesome and unimaginable. When I hear the word, I think of date rape drugs, gang rape, arms pinned with nowhere to move, white knuckles and bruises, and more of the like. The way rape is handled in the mass media is almost theatrical. Rape is ever present in modern television – take Game of Thrones, Thirteen Reasons Why, or Private Practice, for instance – and every time, it’s extremely triggering, while the rape itself serves no real purpose for the plot. Due to all these theatrics in television and elsewhere, we are trained to think that rape is something of such large magnitude that anything less does not qualify for the harsh, ugly title.
In reality, rape is a spectrum, varying in degree. If white is not being raped at all and black is the worst that the word has to offer, then I have been unlucky, but not unlucky enough to be on the darkest side of the spectrum. What I have been unlucky enough to experience are the shades of gray – the area between white and black – where I was abused, but not of high enough caliber that my experience would match the traditional perception of rape.
While different shades of gray do not differ in severity and/or importance, because I was not at the darkest end of the spectrum, I spent much of this past year ignorant of what was happening to me. It took a night worse than the rest and a Reddit thread for me to finally snap out of my disillusion and to finally ask: why did something feel off?
It felt like I was 17 all over again.
Apparently, if you’re in bed with someone and you say ‘no’ and they continue to try to change your mind (asking repeatedly, begging), then that is coercion. If you say ‘no’ and they continue to initiate throughout the night, then that is assault. If you have intercourse that you did not consent to, then that is rape. Any attempt at manipulating your original refusal is coercion, any successful manipulations are assault and/or rape, and there are no excuses. The realization that hits later is so awful, because maybe if I knew immediately or maybe if I had been notified about this critical information earlier, then I wouldn’t have let it continue for so long.
You’re probably laughing at me. This seems like common knowledge, doesn’t it? Why didn’t I just say no? Why didn’t I just leave? I didn’t feel like something was off in the moment, so was there truly anything off about it at all?
However, for the abused, this notion – this understanding of what constitutes rape – is hard to learn and even harder to put into action.
For the past year, I did not defend myself when my consent was violated. I know I have no obligation to provide any explanation as to why I didn’t. I still don’t even understand all the intricacies myself. But in an effort to provide a bit of color, whenever my ‘no’ was questioned, I felt pressured. I felt dumb for not realizing that x, y, and z were all leading to this, even though ‘this’ was not my original intent at all. I never thought about what I wanted in the moment. I felt bad that I couldn’t give a person what they wanted when I was physically capable of it. Sex is a conquest, and as a woman, I am the prize. How awful would it be if the prize was not shiny enough?
There is no apology or explanation in the world that can take away what I have experienced.
I hate you – all of you – for your blind ignorance. I hate you for your smugness, your conviction that you are always right, and your audacity to think that you should always get what you think you deserve. I hate you for always putting your needs first and making me an afterthought. I hate you for making my body a vehicle to get what you wanted. I hate you for the waste of time, oxygen, and privilege that was spent on such a puny existence like yours; all of it for you to end up being someone that has irrevocably harmed many women. I hate you for what you’ve given to me: experiences that you’ve never had to have, lessons that you’ve never had to learn, and pieces that you’ve never had to pick up. I am not the bigger person, and I don’t care to be. I wish you nothing but the absolute worst that this world has to offer, because you deserve nothing less.
It’s been 24 hours since I ran into you. I’m curled up in my bed, relaxing from a day out with my friends, typing this and trying to process you. You elicited a response out of me that I am almost embarrassed about. However, what has happened has happened and there is no time machine that can change that. What I understand now is the next time that I see you, I’m not going to run. I’m not going to be silent. I’m going to tell it as I see it; I’m going to make you realize what you have done; and if that can cause you even an inkling of the pain that you have forced me to endure, then I will be more than satisfied.
The realization of what had happened was incredibly hard to bear, especially because the worst perpetrator was someone that I had cared about deeply. Indeed, research says that more than 90% of rape and sexual assault victims know their attacker (3). However, imagining you and your ignorance, blindly navigating the world and causing even more destruction, was even scarier. I could not let your obliviousness protect you anymore, because I feared for the girl that came after me. I couldn’t let you hurt her like you hurt me, no matter how terrifying confronting you was.
I got a mixed bag of responses, but I’m glad that I did it. I will never know the fruits of my labor, but I like to think that I prevented at least one experience like mine.
A bad habit of mine is using ‘good damage’ as a coping mechanism. This happened to me for a reason. This happened to me because of x y, z. Because of this, I am able to _____. And the like.
It worked when I was processing the racist bullying I endured in middle school, and it worked when I lost toxic friends and relationships. But when I try to use this method on you and what you’ve done, my mind goes blank. It is impossible to try to understand you because I am nothing like you.
Believe me, I have questions, but I know you will not have the answers, because there is no justification for abuse. But even if those answers existed, nothing would change. I will never again be the same person I was before I met you.
There is no goodness that comes out of this damage, and as fucked up as it sounds, that’s kind of terrifying. There is no upside or silver lining. There is only the damage and the aftermath.
Something that scares me more than what happened to me is the phrase “I never knew.” I heard it much more than I should have after I shared my experiences with my friends. This phrase meant one of two things: either it was news, because that meant they realized that they had been assaulted too, or it was a condolence, because they had endured the same. It is terrifying that this has happened to so many of my loved ones and presumably many other women that I don’t even know. It’s so common that we took our assault to be normal.
I have racked my brain to find some trace of meaning and purpose from all of this. All I have come up with is that documenting my experience can perhaps be somewhat educational. Not all damage is good damage, and perhaps none of it is good at all. But the thought that I can weaponize my experience and use it as a preventative measure for others makes my damage a little less damaging.
I have never spent so much time on a singular article. Every time I open this document, I stare at the words that I’ve written, and it almost feels as if they’re a wall of letters standing against me. Every time I edit this article is exhausting because I must revisit my trauma. Publishing this is terrifying, because it lets you – the reader – into an extremely personal aspect of my life, but that is a door I’m willing to open. Many other women and I never knew better, but hopefully you will. Rape is incredibly normalized, and a single article like mine cannot reverse that fact. However, I hope that sharing stories like mine can etch away at the foundation of that notion, until one day, hopefully in the world my children live in, rape is not so acceptable anymore.
I wish there was a manual on how to heal. I don’t know the steps, how long it will take, or where the finish line is. All I know is that this healing process is incredibly nonlinear. I cry a lot, and it’s kind of embarrassing because I must cry on a brick-hard dorm bed to the screams of people playing a heated basketball match outside. Sometimes I disassociate and the day feels like a dream. On those days, even existing is exhausting. On other days, I get so, so angry. The rage inside me is fiery and almost tangible and I wish I could meet you in a boxing ring (but you aren’t allowed to land any punches, of course). Other times, even doing all the above is not enough to encompass how I truly feel. Those days are particularly frustrating. What I do know is that time heals, because I am not the same person I was after that night when I was 17.
According to science, the cells of an entire human body regenerate in 7 years. In 7 or so years, I will have a body that is a stranger to your presence. It will be new and clean, and it will be unscarred.
It will be like you never touched it.
1. Griffin, Logan J., "The Effect of Sex Education Programs on Rape Culture" (2021). MSU
Graduate Theses. 3627
2. “Scope of the Problem: Statistics.” RAINN, RAINN, https://www.rainn.org/statistics/scope-problem#:~:text=1%20out%20of%20every%206,completed%2C%202.8%25%20attempted).&text=About%203%25%20of%20American%20men,completed%20rape%20in%20their%20lifetime.
3. Adams, Lucy. “Sex Attack Victims Usually Know Attacker, Says New Study.” BBC News, BBC, 1 Mar. 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-43128350.
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