This is my story of darkness. This is my story of tragedy. This is my story of weakness. This is my story of sadness. Of loss. Of grief. Of heartache.

This is also my story of overcoming. Of growing. Of strength.

But let’s be clear of one thing: this is my story.

You will inevitably have questions. Concerns. Comments. It’s natural. You’re human. We want to know everything about certain events to understand, to heal, to help, to sympathize. For some, to properly judge and feel righteous about it even—yes, I did just call those folks out. You don’t get that. You don’t get that luxury. This isn’t about you. It’s not even about me. It’s about how broken we have become as a society. How broken systems have become. How much we’ve made everything about the individual instead of as the whole. How much we’ve ignored the individual to make it about everyone else.

This is about the silenced. This is about the abused. This is about the unprotected. The uneducated. The loss.

My god, this is about the loss.

And this is also about the gains.

I am not a victim. I am not a survivor. I am me. That is still my superpower.

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“Want to play the rape game?”

“No.”

“That’s the spirit!”

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The first time I had sex I was raped. We had been hardly dating, both virgins, and shared the same birthday.

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They say you have to say it. That saying it is what helps you get over it. False. But there. I said it. It’s true what they say: the hardest thing is admittance. This next one, though.

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The second time I was raped it was by a long-term boyfriend and on my 25^th birthday. I might also mention he is the father of my daughter. My daughter who partially shares his last name. If you think I had her name changed because I’m a single mom with full custody of my kid and I was sick of proving she was mine—we had different last names—you’re wrong. That’s just excuse I had given him. I had her name changed because his name makes me physically ill. I still hate that it’s partially attached to her.

His name. The sound of his voice. The sight of him. Sends me into a downward spiral. Chasing the flush of the toilet.

And did I mention he knew about the first occurrence? Talk about a betrayal. Talk about the hurt. Talk about the disrespect.

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I wish I would have seen what her doctors saw.

My daughter’s first two doctor visits, they made a point of asking me if I feared for our safety. The first visit, he was with us, they made an excuse to pull me into the hall. They asked me twice. Are you sure? The next visit, I took her alone and they asked me once again.

They told me it was standard procedure, normal protocol. They ask all the moms.

I’ve asked other moms about this. It’s not standard practice. They were never asked.

Why didn’t I see what the doctors saw??

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I hate my birthday.

Eleven years ago, it was a different kitchen in this same city. I was of a different mind. There were no brown cabinets. Everything was white—the counters, the cabinetry, the appliances—but I was picturing them stained red. Instead of laughing with my daughter in my lap, there were silent tears with a phone in one hand and a knife in the other. I couldn’t see the future; I was blinded by nightmares. I was reliving a moment I couldn’t even fully remember.

Yellow light. Lines. The carpet tells me it’s daylight. His snores tell me it’s early. My head confirms it’s too early. Then the flashes.

Hands on thighs. Spinning room. Darkness. Limp hands. Fingers wrapping wrists. A tug. Pounding head. Nooo. Thick tongue.

Darkness.

Denial.

Text message.

Gathering clothes, shoes, keys.

Down the stairs.

Out the door.

Car.

“I think I had sex last night. Mind if we stop at the drugstore first?” Oh thank God.

“You know what? Same here,” Denial reroutes. Changing story.

We took the pills together. Nobody cared. All was silent.

Denial loves silence.

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The thing about private colleges is they’re small. Too small. Everyone knows everyone. Everyone parties with everyone. Everyone knows who bangs who.

Or didn’t.

They never knew. It had been a week. We stopped talking. It was as if neither existed. Then I’d hear him slip past my dorm room door with a different girl almost every night. My how the mighty virgin had fallen. They don’t know.

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It was lunchtime when I learned he supposedly lost his virginity differently than how I’d lost mine. There was a party at a larger campus and after years of waiting for the right girl, he chose a random chick to hook up with. The story was out. It was news. It wasn’t me.

But it was.

Denial.

Twenty months later I “lost” mine on Christmas Eve to a random guy I graduated high school with. It was over. No more falsely holding the title Virgin. No more being asked why I hadn’t yet or what I was waiting for. Over. The story was wrong, the time was wrong, but it was over.

Twenty months were spent in nightmares, wondering. Piecing together a night of clips. Until one night when it became too overwhelming to deny. I ran from his house, puked along his driveway. Lost the battle to tears on the drive home. I couldn’t get home fast enough.

Because, what if I just ran this truck into a tree instead?

I made it home, only because I wasn’t sure if crashing would work.

The following years would be spent hopping beds in drunken stupors.

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Stranger Danger. That’s what we’re taught in schools. We don’t learn how sometimes it’s the closest ones we allow in who we have to fear. How that guy you’re dating could be a monster. How even if his friends know you’re dating you might still want to keep him at an arm’s length. How you can’t trust the guy to just cuddle you in bed. How you can’t trust the guy for an untampered beverage. How you can’t trust the guy for just some Advil.

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My 25^th birthday was rung in fighting off my boyfriend and then sleeping with the palm of my hand cupped around my own private after throwing up—not because of the alcohol—and a shower to wash him off me. 3:30 am on my birthday and I’m standing in the shower scrubbing him off me furiously—why won’t he just wash off me?! I was stone cold sober. He couldn’t get it through his drunk skull that I didn’t want sex. He thought he was being irresistibly cute. I, however, wasn’t drunk enough to forget a fucking detail. This time, I didn’t have enough in my system to forget and two and a half months later, I didn’t have the mind to deny it any longer.

He doesn’t remember a thing. Doesn’t understand why that was the last night I let him touch me until I finally broke it off over two months later. How I was short fused and found the presence of him annoying, ugly. How I would find every excuse in the book not to be alone with him.

How two weeks later I locked him outside of his own damn house.

We had gone to a friends’ wedding. I played I had migraine when friends asked me what was wrong—they noticed I would flinch at his touch, my forced smile, my aggravated voice, my judgmental tone, and disgusted stare—he couldn’t do a damn thing right. I didn’t allow him to go out with the after party—I encouraged him. I went home to his house—I was in town visiting—and ignored his calls and texts when he got home. I had locked him out of his own house. But that fucking banging—he wouldn’t stop pounding on that goddamn front door for me to open up.

He tried again. This time when I forcibly said No, he heard me—though not without calling me a tease first.

I was his fucking girlfriend.

I was revolted.

I wanted him gone.

I still do.

I want nothing more than that night to be erased and the man who did it, as well.

Do you have any idea how it feels to be the type of person who wastes every single birthday, shooting star, 11:11 wish on the disappearance of someone? Not just someone but the father of your child. I’ve done it so many times I’ve lost count. Seven years of wishes wasted on a sickness.

Do I think he was intentional? No. He had no clue what was going on. He’s a compulsive liar and the most selfish person I’ve met. Do I think he knows what he did? I’ve watched him spin so many lies over the years, he could never comprehend. If you told him the story as it involved two other people, would he recognize the wrong? Absolutely, he’s not that stupid.

He thought it was a game. He thought he was being sexy—he said so. And it had been so long. Seriously, that’s what he said: “But baby it’s been so long,” “But baby, doesn’t it feel so good?” No, it didn’t. In fact, it hurt. I felt raw. I was dry. It was like sandpaper. And I told him such when I begged him to stop but he didn’t believe me because to him, it felt “amazing” (gag me). “But baby, I can’t believe you’re doing this to me.” No, baby, what YOU are doing to me; I can’t even fucking fathom.

Apparently, that’s common after giving birth. Not being able to get wet enough for sex or feeling overly tight. But it was six weeks to the night post birth, and it had been so long for him.

One-in-four women are sexually assaulted by the time they’re 25. I read that statistic once and it’s never left my head. I was lucky enough to be assaulted twice. Correction: Raped.

I wonder what the statistic is for that.

I hear admitting the actual term is great for healing and moving past a tragedy.

Catch me later on it, maybe it will have worked by then. No promises.

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Full confession: I hate the #MeToo movement with a passion. It capitalizes on this idea that men in power assault women who want to rise up. It negates the fact that majority of these cases actually happen between relationships, in the home or with a boyfriend or close friend. It’s not men in power. It’s everyday men who we give the world to and abuse that power, that trust.

Newsflash: marriage doesn’t give one ownership of a body. The only one who owns my body is me.

Consensual sex: agreeing to have sex the entire time for which the event of sex occurs.

This means that as soon as one person wants out or says no or becomes unconscious to where they can no longer say yes, it is over. Done. Pull out. Get off.

I was in a college classroom—Sex Ed for my health education minor—when our teacher reiterated this again and again. As I sat in that seat and couldn’t stop shaking. I was the last to leave the classroom. The reality, the last little straw of denial that I had tried to hang desperately on to had simply evaporated. Funny how they don’t reiterate it when it matters—when we’re kids. Twenty-six years old, I was just then hearing the firm definition of consensual sex. Funny how my teachers never went into the details or exercises of what consensual sex means when it counted—before the rape, when I was innocent and ignorant of sex. Maybe then girls wouldn’t be blamed for the guy’s abuse of power. Maybe then society wouldn’t assume guys were the only gender who could commit such a crime. Maybe then victims wouldn’t feel like the justice system was rigged when it came to rape cases.

Not just rigged, assaulting.

Who am I kidding? I still wouldn’t have had the mental capacity to come forth and fight for the truth.

And who am I kidding? He still wouldn’t have pulled out when I had told him to.

That didn’t happen. Instead, I had to wedge my knee in there and force him out and off of me. Me, 118lbs. pushing a 190lb. male off me. Because it had been too long and I couldn’t possibly be saying No to him. I was. He just didn’t want to hear it.

One good thing about not having enough to drink that night: I could overpower a clumsy drunk ogre.

I didn’t sleep that night. Instead I thought of all the ways of how this could’ve been my life. How this could’ve happened twice. How my baby’s daddy could do this to her mother. This couldn’t be real life.

But this was my life. And I had made it through it once before.

Though, before I hadn’t been capable of accepting the truth and working through it. Instead, I blindly found guys to replace the memory, to put as much distance (sex) between that first rape and the present—a futile effort that never succeeded. I chased sex to erase that first time as if it was the only way. Instead, I learned how many guys listened when I did say no. Some may have been assholes about it.

But they stopped when told.

Somehow, that knowledge and recognition was healing.

I don’t think every walking male is a rapist and I can be in a room alone with a man I don’t know. That’s the stereotype, that’s why we don’t speak up: we aren’t all victims, we don’t all let it ruin our lives, we don’t all allow it to blur the lens when we look at the rest of the male population. Just because one guy hurts us doesn’t mean we believe all men will.

It’s the victim mentality that keeps us quiet. That and the truth. We suddenly know the worst part of someone, we’ve been held captive (literally) by their evil, but that is not always who they let the public see. Then, there’s the little girls who cry wolf—they are the ones who shut us up. They are the ones who make us believe we won’t be heard because too many have lied before—yet we don’t dare call them liars because who are we to judge and assume? We can’t know which ones are lying, we just know some are. Or we question their tale because we knew the man or because their story is never consistent or because whenever something doesn’t go their way they’re quick to claim sexual harassment. Or we question their tale because we had been there and it’s not a laughing matter. It’s not the butt end of a joke. It’s not for fucking talk radio.

It’s fucking hell. It’s suffocating. It’s drowning. It’s clawing at my throat to breathe. It’s my god why can’t I just crawl out of this fucking life and be done.

Speaking up isn’t hard because of the fear of not being believed, it’s because we first had to fight someone off and then we are forced to fight the world in telling them who someone really is; when really, we just want to forget. We want to move on. We don’t want to live in the nightmares and we don’t want your pity. We don’t want to retell the same story we relive every night when we fall to sleep. We don’t want to be put in the same room with the one person who makes us dizzy, whose voice makes our skin crawl, whose proximity makes us fight to not lose consciousness.

We don’t want to fight to prove we were raped—we want to fight to forget the entire event and the person exists. We don’t want to recount our story over and over again for someone to find fault—someone who wasn’t even there, who couldn’t feel the warmth of our tears on our cheeks or taste the saltiness when they reached our mouths; who couldn’t understand the inner turmoil of “this is really happening” and “this can’t be fucking happening”; who isn’t sent back to that fucking nightmare with just one word from one voice and then we’re fighting to be out of that room even though we’re already miles and years away.

No, fighting for justice is another form of rape.

We aren’t survivors. We are living.

sur · vi · vor

noun

the remainder of a group of people or things.

a person who copes well with difficulties in their life.

I hate that fucking term. It assumes the odds are against me. The odds were never stacked against me. I decide my odds.

Let me be clear when I state the only thing that died that night was my respect for this guy and our relationship. I am very much alive. It didn’t kill a part of me. It was a tragedy, it was by all means a “difficulty” to “cope” with—still is, I refuse to be put in the same room with him, I avoid all his phone calls—but I refuse to let it define me. I refuse to let this one night, and the other night, determine the woman I have become and am still becoming. I didn’t “learn to cope”. I was already strong. This didn’t make me stronger. It just taught me evil exists in the world and sometimes, it’s close to home, closer than we can ever imagine. I refuse to give him or this event credit for who I am today.

He does not get that.

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I didn’t realize how much that first one affected me until I realized I had stopped singing in the shower. I was always singing in the shower. When we had to be quiet in the house and my mother would tell me to keep the music down in the shower, I would get an attitude. It was habit. I don’t remember many times during my childhood when I didn’t sing in the shower. But that changed when I came home my first summer of college.

I started singing in the shower again last year. I had met a guy who made me feel unbelievably safe. I was never one who fell asleep easily but somehow, with him, or his one dog that always slept on the bed with us, I could pass out quickly and sleep through the entire night.

I’d give just about anything to feel that safety again. It has been the hardest part of our recent breakup—not being able to sleep well or through the night—for me to give up and get over. He wasn’t perfect but for the first time in twelve years, I had felt safe behind closed eyelids.

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My rapists don’t get to define me. They don’t get to have a piece of me, not even the broken pieces.

Here’s a reality: I love sex.

That feels so damn good to say.

After everything.

The fact that I get to say this makes me feel so incredibly good about myself and how far I have come. What they couldn’t keep from me. What I have been able to put behind me because I know. I know the beauty of intimacy; I know how good it can feel. I know that it is not the clothes I wear or how I act that determines my choice to give someone my body. It is me saying yes, for the entire time we have sex. And it is someone accepting and also saying yes for the entire time.

They don’t own the broken pieces of me because I didn’t break. I may have wanted to end my life at one point, I may still collapse at the slightest appearance of his name, sound of his voice, or sight of him…

But I’m still here.

I bended. I chose to move on. I have said the words that no one should ever have to say, and I kept going.

I still choose to date. I still open myself up to love. I’m still standing. I still choose to believe there are good guys. I still choose to trust.

More importantly, I choose to live. Every day. Not walk around in a daze, not succumb to the fear or the nightmares. I choose to fall asleep at night. I choose to close my eyes. I own my life and my body and I make sure I know this.

These days, I put myself to sleep at night and I wake up wanting and ready for a new day.

I’ve been through hell, and I visit it on occasion, but I refuse to become a resident there.

Why do I so firmly believe in pushing forward? It’s the only way to move. I’ve been held down, I’ve been stripped, I’ve been taken. There is power in knowing we can overcome.

We can. I am.

What happened to me will never be okay. It will never be okay that our system is rigged. It will never be okay that I will never feel safe to talk about this shit. It will never be okay with me that my daughter’s father is a disgusting human. It will never be okay that even though I have confronted him about this once, I will likely never hear an apology from him. It will never be okay that I can’t seem to simply forget, forgive, and move on—I would love to forget, maybe forgive. It will never be okay with me that people could talk behind my back but could never ask me, “Why can’t you be in the same room with him?” It will never be okay that as soon as this is posted…if I post it…people will look at me differently. It will never be okay that some people will have the nerve to talk about this even though it doesn’t consume them, it doesn’t involve them, they are not part of the nightmare.

It will never be okay.

But I am okay. Not every day, but most days. And I will be okay. And I am more than okay with that. You don’t need to be—this doesn’t involve you. But I need to be.

And for anyone who thinks they have been in my shoes, you haven’t. And if you have had to spoke those words or are still trying to admit those words and give them a voice, I haven’t been in your shoes. Because your nightmare didn’t involve me, it’s yours to work through and overcome and I will not talk as if I know your nightmare. I don’t.

I only know mine.

I just hope you can find your way, too.

And I know I am okay.