It's pretty clear from the previous 2 blog posts I've written that there's been some pretty traumatic events happen in my life. So how does anyone recover from those kind of events? This blog is going to be a little bit about my recovery, my transformation from victim to victor.
It wasn't an easy transformation and it most certainly wasn't a simple one either. It's a recovery that's lasted over half of my lifetime already and one that still continues to this very day.
Every journey must start with the first step though, right? In my case, that was the moment i realised what had happened to me, rather than the actual moment the rape took place. It was months later before I actually realised what he'd done, because I was simply too young, too naive to understand and I believed him when he told me I was a freak for not enjoying myself.
Though still to this day, 17 years on, I find it difficult to relate that experience to myself somehow, I can talk about it, but it almost feels like I'm telling somebody else's story and not mine which is a very odd, surreal feeling indeed. It's almost as if I can't relate that experience to the same feelings I've felt when T hurt me later on, because of the time delay in piecing together what had happened to me. It left nothing making sense to me. But in between that and what happened with T, there were several other issues in my life.
It seems that the first rape, left me with some pretty unconventional ideas of what a relationship was like between a boy and a girl. I wasn't even aware at the time, because I had no concept of normal to compare anything to, the early experiences I had were far from normal though I had no idea of that at the time.
It's only years later that I've come to realise it was not all that normal at all.
See by 15 I had begun a relationship with a very close male friend of mine, and after a couple of months we took the next step in making it a sexual relationship, a mutual decision and one we didn't make lightly. So as I turned what is meant to be 'sweet sixteen', I found myself in a 'grown-up' relationship having safe, consensual sex. Except one day, whilst I was on my period, my boyfriend tried to instigate sex, I quickly told him it wasn't possible and the reason why. His answer was to simply drop his fly, and push me down to a kneeling position in front of him, clearly he expected gratification in other ways and I simply accepted that this was how it was, no questions, no protest, I just got on with what was expected of me.
You see, I'd learned that saying no got you nowhere, I believed that in a relationship a girl just did what was expected of her whether she wanted to or not. So that was exactly what I did, I quickly realised that whenever that time if month came around I would be expected to do 'other things', things which I did not like, or enjoy in the slightest, things which turned my stomach and made me nauseous, things which to this day, I still cannot bring myself to enjoy because of the memories triggered by them.
Shortly after this relationship broke down came the incident with T, by this point I was already broken, confused, a bit of a mess to be truthful. I wasn't sure what to think or feel. It didn't feel wrong to tell T to stop what he was doing that day, I had every faith he would listen to me, after all we were such good friends, I knew the game we'd been playing was going too far, things were getting beyond my control but I knew T wasn't like that, all I had to do was ask him to stop. So I did, several times, I quickly realised that he actually was NOT going to listen to me, I was already well aware that a struggle was fruitless in this situation, so I simply switched my focus elsewhere until the whole ordeal was finally over.
Walking home that day, I just felt different, I can't explain the feeling, but I felt like everyone must know what had happened, that somehow my body was displaying T's betrayal to the world.
It wasn't, of course, but something drastic had changed inside me from that day. I was already self-harming, I didn't think it was noticeable, I just assumed everyone bought the cat scratch stories that poured out if people noticed, and no one really questioned why I wore gloves indoors, during my lessons in order to hide the cuts and scratches that constantly adorned my hands. All I knew at the time was that I hurt so much on the inside that I needed to hurt on the outside too, I needed to punish myself for the bad things I'd let happen to me, I just needed a way to let out all the anger that was building up inside of me. Cutting gave me the release that I craved, and at the same time it gave me a new pain to focus on as I watched the wounds try to heal, as I absently picked at the newly forming scabs, it took my mind briefly away from the volcano of hurt and anger bubbling away in the pit of my stomach.
So how does one person even try to recover from all that betrayal, all that hurt, how do you even begin to think about trusting people again?
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