Reclaiming my body
On November 1st 2014, I was sexually assaulted. It took me almost two years to say those words — to define it. My attacker was someone I’d known for almost half of my life. My friend. My boyfriend’s friend. I awoke to it happening. I didn’t fight back or scream, nor did I get up. I pretended I wasn’t awake, and I waited for it to end. My actions — or lack thereof — did not constitute consent. It’s taken me a long time to tell myself that, too — to fight the part of myself that questioned, "What if you'd resisted? Would things be different now?"
The way I've always dealt with difficult situations has essentially been to do the perfect opposite: I refuse to process them entirely. I push them to the back of my mind. I occupy myself. I pretend that everything is fine. This time was no different — I planned to go on as if I was no different, as though this event hadn’t affected me. The glaring issue that I stubbornly overlooked, however, was that I was obviously not fine. Living in a foreign city for university made being “not fine” so much worse. I'd not yet been in Newcastle for two months, I hadn’t yet formed close friendships, and now I didn’t want to. I stopped going to social events, I avoided my flatmates, and I rarely attended my classes. A few times, I tried to visit a university counsellor and made it as far as the waiting room. How could I discuss my feelings about something that I couldn’t even name? Instead, I stayed in my room and slept for days on end.
When I returned to my hometown of Manchester at Christmas, I felt safe in familiar surroundings. I didn’t tell my parents what had happened — in my head, I was still telling myself it wasn’t a big deal. I told my close friends and my boyfriend. I didn’t want to be excluded from my social circle because my attacker was part of it; the loneliness I felt in my head didn’t need to be exacerbated by a physical loneliness.
Over Christmas, I made the decision to finish my first year at university and then transfer to an institution closer to home. Looking back, I should never have stayed, but I couldn’t afford to pay off the accommodation contract I was hopelessly tied to, and I didn’t want to waste a term’s tuition fees. After all, it wasn’t a big deal. I managed the remainder of the school year by coming home most weekends — often skipping my Friday classes to take a four-hour coach up the country on a Thursday and not return until the following Monday. At this point, I’d begun to deliberately close myself off. I couldn’t settle in my new environment and preferred the security being at home gave me. Back in Manchester, I remained closed off at my new university, preferring to keep myself busy with friends and family. Familiarity was a welcome set of open arms and I burrowed myself in her breast like a tiny child.
The only time I talked about what had happened the previous year was to make clumsy jokes at my own expense — perhaps if I acted light-hearted about it, I might feel that way, too. My alternative coping mechanism was to get drunk and bring it up, and then feel embarrassed about it in the morning. And I was embarrassed. I hated that this had happened to me because I felt ashamed. So again, I pushed it to the back of my mind. I didn’t feel like addressing my assault and finishing my degree were things that I could achieve at the same time.
Relentlessly quashing your emotions is difficult at best, but it’s even worse when you see that the person responsible for splintering your confidence and faith into uneven, scattered fragments has “liked” someone’s post on your Instagram feed, or when you run into them at your local pub, or at one of your favourite band’s gigs. Each of these events felt like a deliberate attack — why would he invade my personal space like that? Did he just not give a shit? I realise now that people who do give a shit don’t treat their friends’ bodies like objects while they think they’re asleep.
After these encounters, I no longer had a permanent residency in the safety net I’d painstakingly fashioned for myself. Now, I was faced with the prospect of pulling the cord to no parachute — and falling for miles. One Saturday, I was inexplicably late to work after seeing my attacker the previous night made me terrified to travel back to town in the morning. The excuse I gave my manager was a blatant lie — she knew it, I knew it — and I also skipped the Christmas do that evening.
Now, I was angry. What wasn’t supposed to be a big deal was rearing its ugly head again — it had made me seem unreliable to my employer and caused me to miss a big event in the work calendar. While each of these things may not seem like a big deal (there’s that phrase again), I felt as though my months of slow, steady progress had been ruined. That was two years ago.
Since then, I’ve seen him once, physically, five months ago. For almost three years now, a trespasser has lived in my mind. Now that university’s drawing to a close, I’m preparing for the possibility of him living up the road from me. Is there even a way to prepare yourself for casual run-ins with the person who sexually assaulted you when you were eighteen? I don’t know.
One outlet that’s equipped me to an extent is writing — or fingers to keyboard, in this instance. I’ve always found it easy to put pen to paper. When I finally allowed myself to acknowledge my trauma with words and definitions, I couldn’t stop. Pouring my thoughts onto the page allowed me to untangle some of the emotions I’d haphazardly buried into a corner of my brain almost three years prior. It was the first time I’d had an extensive conversation with anyone about what had happened —and that conversation was with myself. I scrawled sentences into my journal and tapped words onto my laptop keyboard, identifying what I’d been feeling for so long but just hadn’t been able to understand — or had even given myself chance to.
There remains a part of me that’s been forever altered by my assault. A version who was far less cagey — one who felt in control — and one I’m not sure I’ll ever get back. But my mind is finally allowing myself to forgive that eighteen year-old. She didn’t invite this — she couldn’t have prevented it — and berating her with these notions isn’t just irrational, it’s incorrect. A victim of a robbery couldn’t stop their intruder just because they “really wanted to.”
Opening up to the written word reminded me that even after my assault, I was still good at something, so I nurtured this new truth about myself. When I made the decision to begin writing a blog, I was extremely triggered by the US presidential election. The bulk of everything I felt compelled to write about centred around a man who’d been accused of sexually assaulting multiple women — bragging about his exploits and passing this off as “locker room talk” — and his steady ascension as a hero in the eyes of what seemed like an entire nation. I was furious. For me, every vote for Trump was a vote for my attacker — a vote in favour of a society that allows men to assert their “entitlement” over women’s bodies, and then shames us for it. All of this I poured into potential blog posts, and all of them fell victim to the backspace key. Silence.
The idea of hitting ‘Publish’ on this post and finally expressing my trauma has endlessly paced through my mind — switching between tentative baby steps and forceful, impatient strides. Today? I’m tired of being another woman forced to carry the weight of her rapist’s dark secret on her shoulders. It’s too heavy. I’ve spent the past two and a half years stifling my emotions, unnecessarily distancing myself from people close to me, protecting my attacker for the sake of my own shame, and at times feeling absolutely crippled by this burden I could not share.
When a woman is sexually assaulted, there’s the first assault: the one where her autonomy is stolen, her body invaded, and she is betrayed by her body. Then, there’s the second assault: the misplaced rage of a society that tells her she let her guard down, she didn’t take the correct measures to protect herself, and ultimately — what happened is her own fault. It’s exhausting, and it needs to stop. Sexual assault is not shameful for anyone but the perpetrator. It is never, ever justified. Conversations surrounding sexual assault and consent are not ones that should be had in whispered tones or behind closed doors; they're discussions that our society isn’t having loud enough, or often enough.
Sometimes, I’m still unsure how to exist in this world with my experience inside of me. More and more frequently, this feeling is replaced by an all-consuming need to protect other women from a world in which sexual assault is normalised, and even encouraged. I refuse to be silenced in this world. My body is not an object for your attention or sexual gratification. I am the subject of my own story.