The National Sexual Violence Resource Center says that 1 in 5 women will be raped. While statistics vary among organizations, RAINN cites that 1 out of every 6 women will become a victim of an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. Maybe one day I’ll stop apologizing and begin healing again.Of those assaults, 51.1% of female victims report being raped by an intimate partner and 40.8% by an acquaintance. Maybe that’s where healing begins.” I try to apologize to myself for willingly entering such a confusing and harmful situation. Writer Nayyirah Waheed once wrote, “Apologize to your body. You could carve the letters Y-E-S into their back a billion times, but it won’t make you forget that you once didn’t get a chance to say yes. You can’t consent in hindsight, and no amount of sex - consensual, amazing, mind-blowing sex - you have with your rapist will erase your sexual assault. Self-harm can be in the form of cuts on your thighs or orgasms on your rapist’s futon. We deserve it even when we try to heal by hurting ourselves, no matter what kind of hurt it is. We don’t always find it, but we always, always deserve it. Sometimes people sleep with their rapists. Some of us hate our rapists, and some of us can’t. The relationship had disintegrated and disappeared from memory as if it had never happened.Įvery single person experiences rape differently. Our fling had ended without any pain or grand gestures. Another part of me felt relieved - I didn’t have to sleep with him anymore. There was a part of me that felt rejected. For me, sleeping with him was the ultimate denial that he ever raped me.Ī few weeks after our last sexual encounter, he started dating someone. I constantly thought to myself: What if I could relive the first night? If I went back in time and consented, it would have been a great story instead of a tragedy.Įvery time I said yes, I was trying to consent retroactively. The way he looked at me made me feel like I was worthy of everyone’s love, including my own. In the month that followed, I was all over him, my hands running through his corkscrew curls. When I scrubbed away my memories of the assault, what remained was the attraction I’d felt toward him before. In some ways, those feelings were a form of denial. Maybe this is why I didn’t expect to feel human feelings for my rapist. Looking back, I realize that choosing to sleep with my rapist was a part of another self-destructive pattern. This time around, I thought I was doing well because I wasn’t doing those things. I cut into my thighs, took painfully hot showers, and scratched my skin open. Like many others, I self-harmed to deal with the trauma. This time, I found myself in the eye of the storm, calm and numb, while my body twisted and turned around me. I always thought of orgasms like a hurricane, with all my nerves twisting and turning and rising up out of my body. I closed my eyes and found myself halfway between pleasure and confusion. If it was that bad, I wouldn’t be able to sleep with him now. It wasn’t that bad, I told myself as his face disappeared between my thighs. We ended up having sex for the next 6 hours. This means he’s different, right? This means it’s OK. None of my other rapists had ever asked for forgiveness. What more could I ask for? I thought.Īs he tearily begged for forgiveness, my heart broke. He apologized to me profusely, and he told me he’d never do it again. He sat at my desk in my dorm room and started crying. I was completely without a blueprint on how to act and feel. While I waited for him to arrive, I frantically googled “what to do if your rapist apologizes.” No good results turned up. I allowed him to come to my residence to speak to me. “I need to know how to fix things,” the text read. Later that week, he texted that he needed to see me. He texted me an hour later to apologize, and an hour after that to tell me he’d stop texting me if that was what I wanted. ![]() It was the beginning of what would be months of apologies. “I’m so sorry,” he said, as realization crept into the lines across his forehead. ![]() As soon as I got up and left my rapist’s bed, he realized what he had done.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |