Content Warning: Sexual assault, rape, suicidal ideation
In order to make sense of the whole story, I need to provide some background information to help you, the reader, understand the context. See, I was a sheltered kid. I went to a private school from kindergarten through 8th grade. I was only exposed to the same 10 people for my whole life at that point. Our focus was on our grades and our faith. I was not exposed to pop music, trendy clothes, or popular tv shows in this environment, as I am sure you can guess. What is not entirely shocking is that in 8th grade, we had a single sexual education course that lasted all of an hour and promoted abstinence. Forget the anatomy, what goes where, for how long, etc. All I knew was "don't have sex because it is bad." But what was it? Who does it and who has the right to it? What about safe relationships, sexual practices, and all those important questions? Nope. Just don't do it. Don't even think about it. Now onto the regular scheduled program, brace yourselves...
I entered public school at the age of 13. I had never gotten any male attention before because, well... remember I went to school with the same kids for practically 10 years? The world of relationships was all new to me. I wanted to fit in and find some sort of connection with anyone. My family is not as close as I would wish. Getting my needs met at home was difficult. Talking about our emotions was not something we ever did. I never had an example of a proper, healthy relationship. I was estranged from my dad and my mom hated all the mushy feely stuff. I just remember feeling unloved and would do virtually anything to say that I had someone in my life that cared about me and expressed it in a way that I was not used to.
I ended up dating a boy in my honor's english class in 9th grade beginning in the spring. I do not quite remember how I ended up in the relationship, but I know it was simply because he showed interest in me. I never had a good model of what a healthy relationship looked like. Mix that with the people pleaser that I am, you get a hot mess, and everything goes… Nothing off limits, nothing seems wrong, and no one taught me otherwise.
I believed this relationship to be safe. The guy was a spitting image of someone my dad would want me to be with. To start, our families knew each other from church. He came from a Catholic family where his parents were still married. He was an athlete, a scholar, attended Bible study, wore nice clothes, and was polite. My dad still references him to this day. Little does he know that his favorite boyfriend I ever had was the one that planted the seeds for my mental illnesses and trauma to grow out of.
It was great at first. He made me feel seen, something I never felt from my parents. He told me I was beautiful, he would listen to my problems, he would show me off in front of people. But, things changed fast. I quickly grew to feel uncomfortable around him. The need to always be kissing me, touching me, always violating my personal space and being mad at me when I didn’t reciprocate what he wanted… I should have noticed the signs from there. He would pull these elaborate stunts to make it known that I was his. He really embarrassed me on a frequent basis and our classmates would notice. I still remember to this day an assignment we had for our English class. We had to write a poem. Our teacher asked for volunteers to read their poem, and of course his hand shot up. He loved to be the center of attention. He got up to the front of the room and asked me to come up there with him. The whole class cheered and peer pressured me into it. I begrudgingly walked up to him as he went down on one knee, held my hand, and read his love poem inspired by “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day.” How could I even dare to think about leaving him after he confessed his love so publicly in front of everyone? This was the manipulation that brought me closer and tighter into his grasp.
He began with the mental and emotional abuse to ease me into the thick of what things would be like from here on out. Everything was a competition. He would brag to the whole class when he scored higher on assignments than me. But if I received a higher grade than him, he would not talk to me for days. He would refuse to study with me until he proved that he was and always will be smarter than me. He has a physical disability called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. He will be living with chronic pain for the rest of his life. He said that I am the only thing that makes him feel better, not even the high doses of Percocet and other crazy drugs they put him on to try and dull the pain. He often mentioned that he couldn’t live without me. So, how could I ever leave him after hearing that? In a way, I felt like his savior. I had a purpose. I should have gotten out while I could before the worse of it started.
September 5th, 2012 was the day that changed my life forever. It was his 16th birthday. As a present, he wanted sex. His explanation was if I really loved him, I would do it. If he was telling me this I felt that it must have been true. In a relationship, I thought the goal was to make each other happy. I never saw my parents try to do that for each other, so I assumed that people in happy relationships put the needs and desires of their partners first.
I remember it like it was yesterday. We were in his bedroom with all the lights on. We were sitting on his scratchy carpet floor. He pushed me down and I laid there naked while he got on top of me. I was scared, but at the same time, I was praying that his parents would come bursting through his door. My head was right next to the door and his older brother was even in the next room over. I could have screamed for help, but I sat there without moving. I remained quiet. He finished. He was happy.
After it was done, it hit me. I was a 14 year old girl, from a Catholic family, with high expectations and goals for my future. Oh the shame that I felt, but also the feeling of never being able to go back and say no when he asked me to be his girlfriend, these feelings remain to this day. All the work I put into my life has led up to this point, where I would allow someone to use me however they wanted. I was naive. I was a child. But even so, this is something I will have to live with.
The sexual abuse continued from there. He manipulated me and would guilt trip me into having sex with him. He claimed that it would help his chronic pain go away. I thought that a person with a physical disability could never lie to me about something like that. And as his girlfriend, it was my job to take care of him and meet those needs. I would sometimes tell him that I didn’t want to, but that didn’t matter. I would go to get up, and he would push me back down. My arms were often pinned above my head with his hands pushing into my wrists. If I didn’t move, it didn’t hurt so bad. I realized I could also dissociate from the event if I could look anywhere but his face. His bedroom ceiling was my best friend. That, and his alarm clock on the side of his bed. I remember this one time vividly where he had me pinned down. I stared at the alarm clock and watch exactly 30 minutes go by, where I was paralyzed in shock, shame, and sadness. But it gets worse. When he wanted to do me from behind, that was the worst, because he couldn’t see my pain and I didn’t have the courage to stand up for myself. I would push my head into the pillow to muffle the sound of my cries.
When it wasn’t sex, it was anything else to pleasure him. He would force my head down with his hands to perform oral sex and would not let me get up. This is when my panic attacks started. I couldn’t breathe, choking on a foreign object in my mouth that I was ashamed to be even near, covered in DNA that caused the stains on my clothes and the lingering scent of him on my body. I thought that this would be my life from here on out - selling my body to have a real relationship that will never be about my own happiness. I felt trapped.
In the midst of everything, there was only one time that the abuse got physical. We were in an argument and yelling at each other, I can’t even remember what it was about. I attempted to stand up for myself and I got in his face. He grabbed my wrists and held them tight, threatening to hurt me. He slapped me. But I slapped him back. What’s funny about this is that I was still made to feel bad for what I did. In his eyes, I wasn’t defending myself. I made him hurt me, but what I did was wrong.
Perhaps the worst of it all was when my mom discovered that I had lost my virginity. She told me that she couldn’t trust me anymore. I was a slut, a whore, and a horrible role model for my sister. I must be monitored because obviously the endless amount of work my parents put into raising me didn’t work. She thought that it was my choice. At the time, I felt it was. I was allowing it to happen, so it couldn’t have been abuse. I was ashamed that my mother was ashamed. She didn’t dare tell my dad though…
The abuse continued on for 8 more months until I was able to escape. My mom was the one who saved me from the relationship. She noticed the mental and emotional abuse. I spent almost every night crying in my bedroom. I was battling between fulfilling his needs and respecting my parents. She noticed that I would beg her to let me see him, even though I didn’t want to go. I was so scared of letting him down, because I knew I would pay for it later. It came to a point where she couldn’t stay silent anymore. She asked me why I stay with him, and I told her that I didn’t want to be with him, but I couldn’t end it. He needed me. That moment is when she handed me my phone and told me her terms. I would call him immediately, while she sat there watching me. I was to put him on speaker phone. I then was to break up with him and hang up the phone. She knew that I wouldn’t follow through with it if she wasn’t there with me in my bedroom. I did as she said, but I did it all while sobbing. I had a feeling the days after that weren’t going to be easy.
While I felt free for a second, he never let me forget what I had done to him. He had the cheerleading team bully me for the rest of the school year. It sounds like a plot from a coming of age movie, but that’s seriously what happened. I had food thrown at me every day at lunch while I was forced to sit alone. I lost multiple friends and couldn’t walk to my classes without being pushed around or yelled at. He spread a rumor that I had told him to kill himself, which is ironic because he knew how depressed and suicidal I was. I could never say that to someone, no matter how much pain they had put me through. He even had his siblings bully mine at completely different schools for that comment that I never made. The school administrators had to get involved.
Even though I got away from him, he never truly left. While I eventually entered a new relationship, the trauma followed me. I would have panic attacks every time I would attempt to be intimate with a partner. These panic attacks still happen today. I also experience dissociation whenever I hear of him, hear that my friends have seen him, see his picture, or even see him in person. I freeze, lose feeling in my lower half of my body, feel a deep weight on my chest, feel as if I can’t move, and am unable to breathe and see. This numbness I experience is now what I know to be PTSD.
I didn’t reveal the truth about the rape to my friends and family until years later. My friends couldn’t believe that I had let it go on for so long. But the truth is, they saw the abuse happen right in front of their eyes. The way he would touch me, yell at me, and talk about me in public were all indicators that I was not in control. But I can’t blame them because they were kids too. I often question why my teachers didn’t step in, especially my English teacher who watched him perform that poem. Why didn’t they just ask me about it, about anything?
I still remember the day I told my mom. We were at lunch during an off day of my final national dance competition. I had graduated from high school a month prior. We were the only ones in the restaurant. We were having great conversation as usual, laughing and gossiping. The conversation somehow got switched to me wanting to go on birth control for reasons other than preventing an unwanted pregnancy. She told me that she wouldn’t allow it and I brought up the fact that she doesn’t trust me. Then she said, well can you blame me? Look what happened when I gave you leniency with your first relationship. You were 14. How do I know you aren’t just going to use it as a free pass to just keep having sex? I finally couldn’t hold it in anymore. “Mom, you really think that it was my choice?” She asked me what I meant by that. I told her. "I never wanted to do it. It wasn’t my decision." She finally understood what I meant… We both started crying. She reminded me that I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do. The waitress didn’t know what to do with herself at that point, because we needed refills on our drinks, but she didn’t want to interrupt this intimate moment we were having. It thankfully brought some laughter back into the atmosphere.
I was relieved that people knew the truth, but I don’t think it made it much better. What hurts the most is what the people in my life said after they found out. I often hear that what I experienced wasn’t really rape, because I allowed it to happen. I get told that I should have moved on by now and have gotten over it. The hardest thing I have heard thus far has been from my mom. She told me that she still remains weary of me and what she allows me to do. This is because I am a girl that cares too much about other peoples’ feelings that I will do whatever a guy asks of me because I don’t know better. I have been painted to display weakness. I am a coward, feeble-minded, and innocent. I am easily manipulated. I am the perfect target. I can’t be strong. I will always be a victim.
Luckily, opinions of those in my life are changing. Some slower than others, but I’ve learned to be grateful for any step of growth. However, I’ve come to the conclusion that my healing cannot be done on their terms. What they think happened to me, why they think these things happened to me, how I should live after these things happened to me, are moot. While I was not in control when I was a 14 year old girl in an abusive relationship, I am in control of what happens here on out.
I’m slowly learning that I won’t always be a victim. There is always a chance that I will get hurt again, but that can’t stop me from living. I’m beginning to reframe my story and view myself as a survivor. I don’t need to be in a relationship, let alone remain in a relationship that isn’t serving me, let alone a relationship that is harming me. There is a future in store for me, and as I go down this road of healing, happiness is patiently revealed to me one moment at a time. These moments are glimpses of what I have identified to be my needs and desires for my life. Who do I want to be? How can I become who I want to be? In the midst of all of this reflection, I have found that I deserve to be more than my trauma. I deserve to take up space. I deserve true love. Most of all, I deserve to survive.
Image by: @IcaImages