Me Too – …on the B.L.

Sitting in my favorite spot in my favorite coffee shop in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood, I’m working on a listicle for tomorrow. Lacking in motivation and inspiration, I’m lackadaisically mocking up something mildly interesting, but decide to procrastinate by scrolling through Facebook to see just what I was up to on this day over the years. My eye catches on a specific yet vague post that only means something to me, and I’m reminded that seven years ago, a few hours from now, I will be raped for the last time.

I don’t drink anymore, which has nothing to do with the events of that night, but I still love a pretty mocktail.

I’m not sure if I want to write about the rape or if I want to write about the role social media plays in recovery, trauma, triggers, and moving on. Probably not either. I’m not actually ready to dive into the feelings of that rape. I don’t feel moved to write on social media either. Both are important, so I should pick one. Or trash this altogether and pretend I’m not crying in a coffee shop because of course my period is deciding to show up and be an emotional one. Then again, I might just be crying in a coffee shop because I was raped seven years ago and it is one of the harder stories I have to write. Partially because it’s the only one I don’t really remember. It is also the most stereotypical and statistically probable rape stories I have. Mostly it is still so fucking painful. Part of me wants to protect him and his family because I deeply care for them still. Even as I write this, I’m censoring every feeling and desire to talk about it because I do not want to give away any identifying information, but at the same time…. He fucking raped me. Then again, the role social media plays in this precise moment is something I have talked about and found fascinating every time a depressing memory pops up in my “On This Day” page or Timehop.

I’m heading out to dinner with one of my good friends, so I can press pause on writing this and figure out what I want to do while pretending I’m completely fine with my friend. Write this? Don’t write this? Stop here, press publish, and call it good. Or continue on by diving into the trauma or the social media. Or find a whole other angle and write on that.

Okay, I’m back. I decided to write…. I hate me. This job is terrible sometimes. Can someone please sponsor me or hire me to write a column so I can get paid for the pain I’m dredging up to create a little bit of good out of the craphole I call my past.

I’m choosing to kind of go in the rape direction but with a different angle because I literally threw up thinking about diving into that and I can’t stop shaking. I’m going to pretend the shakes are from the americano even though it very much is the anxiety.

Being the rape survivor I am, the kind of rape that was cyclical and repetitive. So many rapes. Too many to count. So many rapists. I think I know how many, but I’m not completely certain how many were involved in the gang rape, so it’s an estimate. At some point it all blurs together in a sweeping memory of the fact these things happened and were a daily part of my existence. Only the extraordinary instances stand apart from the others.

I was drunk seven years ago, which for most people would not be unusual. I rarely drank and refused to get drunk with anyone but my partner. That night, I was with my best friend, a friend I’d had for a very long time, a friend I trusted completely. We drank. I drank a lot. I don’t remember what happened. I remember what came after. I remember being willing to look past it. To forgive. To move on. Chalk it up to a drunken night between friends. An oops we could laugh about later. But the truth is… I was way too far gone to give consent. I truly don’t remember anything, to this day, but I do know what happened. All I asked was to keep that night between us until I figured out how I felt. Instead, he told all our friends I was a bad lay. No shit. I was incompacitated. It also wasn’t sex. It was rape.

Seven years ago was hard in an unexpected way. Being raped and recovering from that was not new and had become a routine part of my life. As shitty as it sounds, I know how to recover from rape, get my head on straight, pick myself back up, claim it, and keep trudging along. The act of getting over being raped seven years ago tonight wasn’t really that hard. I’d done it many times before; I half expected to do it again—most days I still do. What was hard was knowing my best friend did it to me. My best friend who knew everything did it to me. What was hard about that night and the aftermath wasn’t getting raped; though it was awful. It is always awful. It was and is the grief.

Grief is a bitch. I have lost people in so many ways. Some from death, some from growing apart, some because they were cruel. Yes, I had lost people I was close to because they raped me. This was different. I grieved in a way I never had before. I recovered from being raped, but seven years later I still miss my best friend. He was family. He was a pillar in my life. He knew everything about me, and I lost him. I lost one of three people I thought I would be able to count on forever. The only person who had never made my faith in him and us waiver. He rocked the foundation of my soul because I lost faith in my own ability to trust people. I had let him into the darkest recesses of my soul for well over a decade. He knew things about me not a single other human knew. I let myself lean on him and depend on him in a way I haven’t been able to before or since. We went through so many things. We grew up together. We loved each other. We were as inseparable as two people could be while living in neighboring states. I legitimately thought of marrying him because the idea of spending my life with my best friend seemed awesome.

He raped me, and I lost him. I lost his family who made me their family. I can’t scroll through my life from 13 to 23 without him playing some role in each memory. Even if he wasn’t physically present, he was always on the other end of a text conversation or phone call.

As I write this, the grief is overwhelming. I remember him so starkly as the man I could count on. Not being able to remember the actual raping makes all of this harder. If I could remember, I could hate him. But I can’t. I don’t get to hold on to the terror or how unsafe I felt or my confusion or the moment I knew what was happening and accepted my fate or the stomach curdling touch of his hands on my body or any of the other things I know happened. The moments that would turn all of those happy memories sour so I could stop missing him, stop loving him. The one time I decided to drink with him, he raped me. Alcohol took the memories of those horrific moments away from me. Some have called it a blessing, but I don’t. I’m left grappling with the knowledge of what he did and the aftermath juxtaposed against ten years of trust, joy, laughter, history, and intimacy only people who experienced adolescence together have. There are two competing versions of this fundamental human in my mind and neither sit well. I grieve because I don’t have the man who was once so important in my life’s story, who knew me so well. I grieve because I don’t have the closure of being able to hate him so I can let go of that hate and move on.

Whether I’ve thought about it or not, that moment rocked my trust in male friendship. I have always been a guys’ girl. I’ve always felt more comfortable with men than women. There’s an easy camaraderie between us. My dude friendships always outnumbered my lady friendships significantly. Sure dude friends had raped me before. Sure it was awful. None of them had been all that close. None of them really even came as much of a surprise when I put clothes on and climbed out of whatever spot they chose to rape me. I had never been hurt in that way by someone so close to me, someone I considered to be my person. I slowly let every dude friend in my life fade away. It took me five years to let another man come close to being my friend. I’m still working on allowing myself to trust the men I have in my life.

This is not a cautionary tale telling women and girls to not drink or they’ll be raped. Hell, I have hundreds of stories where I was stone cold sober getting raped. Rape is never the raped’s fault. Fault lies completely in the hands of the rapist. Don’t fucking rape people. If there is too much alcohol, don’t fucking touch them. Even if they beg. Err on the side of let’s enthusiastically and soberly consent to this. Like fucking adults.

This is the story of life after. For those who say it gets easier. If it gets easier for you, I’m super duper happy for you, but that’s your story. Mine does not get easier. Fourteen years after the first time I was raped, I’m still broken. It’s livably difficult. There are new waves and new obstacles and new grievances. I am always processing and growing and figuring out how to deal with the consequences of men’s violence. Social media is full of reminders and triggers. Am I fine? Yes. I sure am. I’m sitting in a coffee shop, getting this out. Yes, there are tears. Yes, I went to the bathroom, locked the door, and doubled over hyperventilating. Yes, I will post this, then get up and walk to my car like nothing happened. I am a survivor, and it fucking sucks. I’m finally getting to the point where good things and bad things happen and I don’t instinctively want to call my rapist of a best friend. I have learned to live without him, but I miss him every day, which makes me sad because now I’m the person who misses her rapist. But I don’t miss the rapist, I miss the man he was before. So here I am. Pissed off, on my period, emotional, hyped up on caffeine, in public, and in desperate need of a hug.

Happy Sunday. I was raped seven years ago tonight for the most recent time. I don’t know if I’m going to sleep tonight.

bisous und обьятий,
RaeAnna

This isn’t necessarily about books. There is one thing I am more passionate about than literature, and that is advocacy. I have a passion for so many issues, but the one nearest and dearest for me is sexual assault and rape. With everything going on in the past week, I decided to share with you something very personal. I have had a separate blog about this issue for years. You can find that here: Unashamed Truths of a Middle Class Twenty Something. You can find my original blog post of this here: #MeToo

If you have been a part of my life or followed my social media in any degree in the last six years, you will not be surprised by this statement: I have been raped. I have been raped more than once. I have been raped by more than one man. I have been raped by more than one man at the same time. I have PTSD. Men have irreversibly changed my life through violence. I have been raped.

If you follow me, you know I don’t like to say I have been sexually assaulted. It’s not specific enough. I have been raped. And I am so far passed giving a fuck if that makes you uncomfortable to hear.

Harvey Weinstein and his deplorable actions have finally lead some of Hollywood’s biggest names to come forward to tell their truths. Good for them! Social media is starting to explode with #MeToo to show how widespread rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment are.

Rape is not a socioeconomic issue. Rape is not a race issue. Race is not a cultural issue. Rape is not a political issue. Rape is not a women’s issue. Rape is an issue.

Women are taught to protect themselves. Men are not taught to ask for consent. Women are taught to keep quiet. Men are taught to boast about their conquests. Women are taught shame. Men are taught pride. Women are taught how to be slut shamed. Men are taught to slut shame. Women are taught to laugh. Men are taught rape jokes are funny. Women are taught to be kind. Men are taught to be ruthless. Women are taught to be weak. Men are taught to be strong. Women are taught to suck it up and keep on keeping-on. Men are continually reinforced with the fact they can do pretty much anything they want to women and face zero consequences.

The hard part about being a raped woman is you’re constantly surrounded by men acting out, in varying degrees, the same behavior which hurt you. Where is our safe space?

I met my first rapist in church. We grew up together. I met my second in college. I met my third in church. I met my fourth in middle school. Aren’t these supposed to be safe places? Some even sacred? Church is supposed to be safe and holy and the embodiment of Godliness. That’s the problem. Rapists are everywhere masquerading as friends and even family.

I don’t like working in an office. It’s hard because they usually only look at me as one thing: their next blow job. Or they think I’m stupid and only hired me because I am nice to look at. I found it easier to work in a bar because at least, there there was a lack of nicety about it. Those men were up front about their assholishness.

I work from home now as a freelancer and blogger. I try not to leave the house without my big dog or my even bigger boyfriend. Speaking of which, I like to date big men because they scare away the other men because men don’t actually respect women enough to leave them alone when they say no. If I go to the grocery store alone, someone either asks for my number or calls me a bitch, but usually it’s both. As a blogger and freelancer, I spend most of my time online or on social media to expand my business. There is no respite there either. My Instagram inbox is filled with older men bombarding me with dick pics, sexual come-ons, and more. It’s become a new hobby of mine to see how many white men don’t take “no” for an answer. The best insult I get is “blond,” which is funny because I’m not even blond. The worst is somewhere along the lines of I hope you get raped.

When I’ve told men I’ve been raped, too often I hear “Yeah, me too! Haha.” Then they realize I’m not joking, they’re usually a bit confused followed by “I guess, I shouldn’t make rape jokes around you then, huh?” Rape has become more of a punchline and less of a criminal offense.

In college, I remember reading essays on rape. The authors didn’t know how to charge the men because it is so he said she said, and unfortunately, the men have the power. The authors were angry and upset and frustrated because they didn’t know what to do. Their arguments were well thought out, but nothing ever came to fruition in court when prosecuting. The authors were alive and writing in fifteenth century France. I remember sitting at home on my couch in tears with the heaviness of the knowledge that not a single thing had changed in over six hundred years. If some of the greatest thinkers of Renaissance couldn’t encourage change in one of the most pervasive issues, how would I?

I have been incredibly open about my past. I have always believed it can help someone. There are days, I don’t know if it’s true. There are month long periods, I will go without writing or talking about it. It doesn’t mean it’s not there; it’s just too hard to go there.

I don’t like being known as the girl who got raped. It’s not a fun identity. I have been on the receiving end of many rape and death threats because of it. Why men think this is an appropriate response is beyond me. It’s amazing how many women have similar responses. I’ve heard everything from “if you would have gotten pregnant by your rapist, then you’d have something to talk about” to “I hope it happens again and they disfigure your face” to “maybe you should have fought harder.” When employers Google my name they find two things: I’ve been raped, and I’m vocal about it. So I don’t get many interviews… Actually, none.

I mentioned I wanted to try stand up comedy to a friend because I funny stories, I like to make people laugh. Their response was “like ‘I once got raped in this super funny way’? Yeah, funny.”

I am known as the girl who got raped. Even to those closest to me. I am not known by my triple degree or penchant for books or encyclopedic trivial knowledge or my musical talent or even my personality. I am known as the pretty girl who was raped. I am not defined by the achievements I have worked my entire life for. I am known by the actions of men. Moments have defined who I am in the eyes of others because I chose to speak out in order to create change in the world women inhabit.

Sexual harassment is rampant. Sexual assault is rampant. Rape is rampant. Sex trafficking is rampant. Every woman I have ever known has been sexually harassed, some don’t even know it. I know too many women who have been sexually assaulted. I know so many women and men who have been raped. I have worked alongside sex trafficked women. I am the keeper of so many people’s painful secrets because they have no safe place, no one to talk to. I keep my own secrets because some things are too hard to talk about.

I don’t want children. If I were to have children, I don’t want girls. I want boys. I want to raise boys to be good men who do not rape or perpetuate rape culture. I want to raise boys to be good men who call out sexist jokes and support women. I want to raise boys to be good men who raise the bar for all other men. Because I do not want any other woman to know a moment of the pain men have caused me.

Tag: Me Too

Seven Years Ago Tonight I Was Raped For the Last Time

#MeToo