A Peecharrifica Blog

My Story: I Was Raped.

I work with rape and assault victims. I look them in the eyes, I listen to their stories, I hold them, I pray. Inside, later, when I’m alone, I’m reminded of what happened to me. I rarely talk about it, but today seems to be the day.

This is my story.

I’d left for college and moved away from home for the very first time.

I had a party - a sofa party - in that flat. I invited everyone I knew and … it was just a wonderful night. I’ll never forget how good it was. We drank entirely too much and I felt like the most beautiful girl in the world.

Near the end of the party, a man at the party asked me if I could take him home. I said no, I hated to drink and drive. He said ok but, could he crash on my sofa? A few other friends had said they were staying and so I agreed and I’d take him wherever he was going in the morning.

I’d thought it was only the right thing to do. To make someone walk home, drunk, at 3 in the morning when I knew we would be awake at 7 to get ready for 8 o’clock classes was ridiculous. It wouldn’t have been right or kind, in my mind, so I said yes.

I remember walking to my bedroom and wondering if I’d be able to wake up in time for class.

I remember lying on my bed, fully dressed, face on my arms, hoping I’d not end up vomiting.

I remember moving my legs to hang off the bed because my mother had taught me never to put my shoes on the linens.

And then, nothing.

Until I woke up with someone’s hands round my neck. He was raping me.

Over and over it happened while I wondered why no one was alarmed at the sound of me screaming - I found out later they’d all left shortly after I went to my room to sleep.

It was winter and the sky was still a blackish blue when he left and I called a friend - screaming. I don’t remember what happened then but the next thing I knew, I was in a hospital room and I saw the black shoes of the detective they sent to help me. The first thing he said to me was, “Look, I don’t have a lot of time. I want to know, did this really happen or are you just angry because you weren’t paid for your services?”

15 minutes later I was arrested. I was in handcuffs and the back of a police car. I spent hours being questioned by police officers who asked over and over again what the hot pink curtains in my windows meant and if it was my way of “turning the red light on.”

I had no idea what a red light was but they didn’t believe me. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t believe me, I couldn’t understand why they didn’t help me, I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t let me go home. I was still drunk and I could feel the throbbing pain from the choking and the rape.

I couldn’t go home. I spent the next 4 days in jail, waiting to see a judge about bail. I had to have a public defender because what they’d charged me with meant prison time - and it took time to find an attorney who would represent me.

The day I was released, I attempted to commit suicide.

Why am I telling you these memories? Why am I talking about this?

Because when I see people arbitrarily use the word rape so they can shock their friends and readers of their microblogs into paying attention to what they’re saying, when I see people arbitrarily use the word rape so they can make people laugh, when I see people arbitrarily use the word rape for any reason, it burns something inside of me.

You use the word rape to describe how ravenously hungry you are and I can only think “I cut my arms open to get away from the pain after I was raped.”

You say it to refer to how voraciously you eat and my first thought is, “I still can’t remember the first two years of my life after I was raped. That’s how bad it was.”

You throw it out to talk about how terrible the economy is and I shake because I’m thinking, “After I was raped, one of my instructors made me apologize to my class for not being at practices - even though I was in jail at the time.”

You use it to express how attracted you are to a girl or a boy and I think, “Someone tried to kill me while they raped me.”

You talk about rape like it’s a joke and I want to scream, “YEARS LATER I STILL CAN’T SLEEP A FULL NIGHT WITHOUT WAKING UP SCREAMING FROM THE NIGHTMARES.”

You argue with me to try and get me to understand rape isn’t “just” being sexually assaulted - rape can be anything where one thing is taken from another person by force, you say. I want to say, “I can still see the scars on my legs, arms, and torso from where I tried to cut the pain of my rape away, like an inoperable tumor.”

So when you talk about it like it’s nothing, I want you to know, you talk about me like I am nothing. You talk about me like I am alone. You talk about me like I am not a sister to the millions of other survivors of rape, sexual assault, and violence around the world.

I want you to know we are not alone. We are not garbage to be taken out and thrown away…. or forgotten.

Every time you use the word rape to refer to anything that is not rape - no matter how serious that other thing is - you are minimizing and erasing people who have, literally, fought to bring themselves back from the brink of horror - a terror so large and overpowering that many never come back from it. Many of us succumb to this evil and commit suicide, find ourselves addicted to drugs and alcohol, or end up in a situation where we are raped again.

None of us will ever be who we were - whole lives decimated after the act of a soulless monster who chose to use us to make himself feel better about his lack of power. Most of us will never be able to recover those parts of ourselves we lost in the battle, either. We don’t laugh the same, we don’t dance the same, we’ll never be able to do mundane daily tasks without wondering if we’re safe. Some of us will wake up in the middle of the night for the rest of our lives, covered in sweat and screaming - feeling like we’re dying and the rape is still happening, until we realize it was just a nightmare; Then we’ll cry ourselves back to sleep.

Do not erase me. Do not erase us. Do not erase our victory over something that could have taken us - as it has so many others - away from this world permanently. Do not take away from us what we have given everything to achieve: Survival. Do not victimize us again.

That’s all I ask… all I’ve ever asked.