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Oct. 24th, 2003 03:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tylikSo one of my friends has a post about her experiences being raped. It's a public post, y'all can find it if you'd like. Near the end, she wrote these lines:
"What I'm trying to say, is that you don't get over these things. They replay in your head. You wonder what it was you did to deserve it. To make it happen."
Which is a lot of what I've heard from a lot of people about being raped. Maybe this is the general experience, I don't really know. It's certainly the popular one of the last several years. I'm not trying to disagree with it, because we're talking about different people's experiences. It doesn't really reflect my experience, though, so I'm going to write about that.
[This is really long -- I mean, I knew it was going to be long, but it's several times longer. Though I'm glad to have written it. And while not particularly graphic, not necessarily appropriate for everyone. It is about me being raped. I'm posting it publicly, though, so use your own discretion. I probably will make it friends only after a couple of days, but mostly because I might want to publish parts of this someday, and I generally don't leave such things up out of general principle.]
I've been raped. Actually, probably more than once, but some of the situations are fairly ambiguous, and some are such ancient history I don't want to pretend I really know what happened. So I'll stick to the most recent, one that lends itself to a fairly simple narrative, which isn't particularly recent, being some twelve and a half years ago.
So, I had just turned eighteen a couple of weeks before. To put the time in context in the rest of my life, I had recently ended my one, and wretched, monogamous relationship. I was at some stage of a court battle with my father, which would eventually mean that I had some support through college -- though that mostly amounted to having my tuition paid for, and maybe a third of my rent. Support through college was mandated in my parents' divorce agreement, but then we're talking about the guy who'd stopped paying child support for me when I was 15. (It wasn't all that bad at first, but tuition increased by more than fifty percent during that period, and the amount of support, which was figured on the cost of tuition the year before I returned to college, was fixed. And I didn't take out any loans -- okay, except for one emergency loan when my father was playing games that was repaid within three months.) I was working one of my two food jobs -- or I was about to start doing so, I don't remember the exact timing. I was feeling more than a little adrift, in terms of my connections with people or lack thereof. (In the next year, I would learn to use that to my advantage and became generally more focused and productive.) Summer quarter of that year I started taking intensive Chinese.
But this was March, I think, in particular it was Norwescon weekend, back when Norwescons were held at the Tacoma Sheraton. I was my current height, more or less, but a bit more slender and rather less muscular. I had hair down to my hips which I usually wore loose. I was still fairly involved in the SCA, and tended to wear a lot of SCA clothing (certainly at cons), usually fairly simple in ornamentation, in soft blues and greens and a kind of faded rose. I almost always had my harp near at hand. Hmmm. I seem to remember that at this particular con I also wore an outfit that my recent ex-housemates had dubbed "the soap bubble", being a tight little bodice of silver blue tissue lame, and a skirt made of layers of angles and tatters of the same material. Though I'm pretty sure that's not what I was wearing when all this occurred.
I was finding being eighteen to be unexpectedly trying. I had been living on my own for some years by that point, was a regular con-goer and did not expect a birthday to change things. Cons were a place I felt safe, to act and dress as I pleased, and it had not occurred to me that my underage status (which I did not at all attempt to hide) gave me any measure of protection. Or at least, I didn't realize how much protection (I had realized that certain kinds of attention were usually quite effectively discouraged by announcing "I'm sixteen!") But after the recent dissolutions of a relationship and my previous household, I was less surrounded by people I knew well, and generally getting a lot more attention directed to my body. I know I ended up changing into rather more modest clothing in disgust, and I was still feeling kind of off about the whole thing.
At some point in time I ended up hanging out with a number of Blatha an Oir-ians (people from the Tacoma SCA branch), a few of whom I vaguely knew. This turned into hanging out with a group of Blatha an Oir-ians whom I hadn't previously known, but it was comfortable enough (if in retrospect, fairly boring). I think we had lunch, wandered about some, and eventually ended up in someone's room. And suddenly everyone took off and I was there alone except for one guy. (Who had been rather attentive throughout the afternoon, but hadn't really made of an impression. In retrospect, he was a bit socially clumsy, big, blonde, and with something of the half grown puppy about him. Some military connection. Not bright.)
Now, you have to understand that going to cons and getting laid was nothing new to me. I didn't tend to take strangers to bed very often, but that was prudence rather than chastity -- most of my lovers were friends, and people known to me through the community, and I could check their references. (And did. Including talking to the recent exes of my very first lover before I took him to bed.) My liaisons were many but usually fairly quiet. I had fallen in love only once, and not wisely, but that was a ways in my past by then. I was not particularly interested in this guy, but making out with him seemed nominally a better idea than going back to the con. I was bored and lonely, and while I knew that this wasn't really going to change that, it was a welcome enough distraction.
And one thing progressed to another. I was perfectly willing to have sex with him, really, if fairly apathetic about the whole thing. Did we not have any condoms? Or was it just that he really didn't want to use them? I can't really remember. There was some discussion of condoms, I did not mention I was on birth control (SOP for me, then -- I liked the extra protection from pregnancy, but I didn't want anyone pressuring me to have unprotected sex) he knew I was completely unwilling to have sex without an appropriate latex barrier, and seemed to accept that. And then in the middle of things, he tried to push inside me. I stiffened, and tried to push him away, and told him "no". (Actually, "get the fuck out" might be closer to what I said.) He kept on saying "I just want to feel you" and I realized he had me pinned, and at an amazing mechnical disadvantage. I struggled a big more, and argued, during which time he patted his belt, on something next to the bed, attached to which were his knives, which made me realize it was in easy reach. He was panting.
It was a strange feeling my my head. I haven't been in a lot of fights, but I've been in a few and I know that I was right on the edge of the kind of adrenaline kick where I would just go, put everything I had into getting out, and I wouldn't feel any pain until later. I also felt less certain than I ever had that this would be enough. If I could just pull my knees up, I could probably have kicked him halfway across the room, but my body was pinned under his, his hands were holding down my shoulders, and I just couldn't get any leverage. I had an image of myself, pulling myself through the door of the room, naked, maybe bleeding, into the hallway of the con. It just didn't seem worth it. I stopped struggling, he fucked me. I endured.
Then I got up, got my clothes together, and left. Except he didn't want me to go, and wanted to keep something of mine so he knew I'd come back. I just wanted to leave. Finally he kept a brooch of mine -- not expensive really, but a handmade brass shawl pin from the Celtic Swan Forge that I'd had for years and did value. (Which I've never seen again, and it does kind of irritate me.)
I found my ride, a particularly nerdy friend I'd known for years, several years older, and told him I needed to go home right then. I don't know exactly what I said beyond that, but he took me home. The entire way back I ranted about how much I hated getting hit on by all these guys, and how it seemed like I went to the con and was suddenly treated like a piece of meat, hello, I was just out of a relationship and certainly not interested in anyone, that way, at all, right now, I just wanted everyone to leave me alone.
My ride, who had listened kindly to my rant the whole way back, waiting until we were parked in front of my house, put a sympathetic hand on my arm and said something about how he knew that must be really awful for me, but he just found me completely fascinating and he wanted me to know how he felt...
Somehow, the absurdity of him deciding that this was the perfect moment to hit on me got through even then, and far from ripping off his face it was all I could do not to fall out of the car, laughing hysterically. This guy had -- still has -- no a malicious bone in his body. Just very, very clueless (he's a little better these days). I don't remember what I said to him, though I'm fairly certain I discouraged his advances, got my stuff, and went up to my room. (Suite? I had the whole third floor, but it didn't have it's own bathroom...)
It wasn't for another day or two that it occured to me that I had been raped.
Damn, this is getting to be long...
So how did this effect me?
It's hard to say. I won't try to say it didn't effect me, but I don't think it really did, much. Certainly not for the long term.
It's partly a confusing question because it came in the middle of a whole bunch of turning points in my life, and probably wasn't one of the more important ones. (Though there was a general growing up, loss of innocence theme there.) I had reached my bullshit tolerance in a number of areas. I was never going to try and force myself to love again, and I reached a point where I was a lot less interested in having people understand me -- certainly, I was no longer attached to the idea, and I was kind of fatalistically giving up on it. I was in the process of winning the ability to get myself an education, and I was going to damn well milk that for everything that it was worth. I really, really wanted my own life, and to have it be something that absorbed the energies that were so poorly invested in other people, and that I was proud of.
The rape probably was a major contributor in why I moved more and more away from being the gentle little harper girl I had been -- publicly, anyway. (Had I ever been that?) But then, some of the relationship things (not just my flirtation with monogamy, this had been building for a while) were still probably more important. I cut my hair off (my hair grows quickly, but I had it down to about half an inch for a while there). I changed my image in other ways. I buried myself in my studies -- but then, they were the kind of studies where that was required. And I that fall I started teaching. (Teaching preschool, studying international political economics, and accelerated Chinese made an odd but useful structure for me.) In some ways I was very lonely, but I loved my studies, I loved my job, and generally I was too busy to worry about anything else.
Did I trust people less? Um. I was certainly a little more wary about certain situations... but not really. I didn't trust people in general very much at that point anyway. And after some of the mind games I'd been through the past few years, honestly a vaguely stupid guy willing to resort to threats of physical violence and intimidation to get laid seems almost refreshingly straightforward. I think I really mean that.
I remember feeling pleased when I got my STD screening back, some time later, and was still completely clean. It seemed like permission to forget my past, if I wanted to. I don't forget, mind you, that just isn't the way I inhabit my memory, but I could ethically sever that connection if I wished to.
Sexually, it didn't really change things for me that much. This was about the begining of the period of several years where I was not interested in having a primary partner (or resigned to never finding one, and getting on with other parts of my life)... but again, I think that had more to do with the last few serious (or something) relationships than anything else. I was no longer willing to sacrifice parts of myself for love (and it didn't work, anyway). I had a number of lovers, some of whom were also good friends, but nothing that really changed me, or even for the most part really reached me. I didn't try to make them into something they weren't, and for the most part things went pretty well. Sex and love were already very separate to me, then, and I don't think I've ever taken sex, as sex, very seriously. (At least in that emotional sense many people do. In other ways, I take sex about as seriously as I take food.)
I did feel dumb about the whole thing for a while. (Though I think I've had more consensual sexual encounters that left me more squicked.) And I felt guilty that I never went to the police or anything. (I did, however, speak to the man's baroness, and a few of the older women in the barony who I trusted.) I felt weird about the extent to which I had consented, if that was what my ceasing to struggle was. I remember wondering if it was going to make me feel weird the next time I was in bed with someone... and it didn't.
It's certainly not the most traumatic thing that ever happened to me, maybe that's part of it. This isn't me saying "oh, so many awful things have happened to me in my life" it's just a personal assessment. And traumatic is what traumatized you -- if I had a choice between being raped in a similar manner and working for a certain petty dictator at Microsoft again, I would chose the rape with a light heart. I felt more helpless, more trapped, more used and more dirty with the other. And oh my heavens but it lasted longer, and I had more doubts about to what extent I was doing it to myself. (It is axiomatic for me that what other people can do to you will never touch on what you can do to yourself.) Everyone has their own buttons.
Am I damaged? Am I forever scarred by this?
To me that's probably the most insidious thing about how our culture discusses rape. Or any of a number of other things, for that matter. This idea of damage. This idea that you had some previous existance as an intact innocent, and you can never go back, you'll always be something less than that.
It haunts me sometimes, even though I basically reject the notion. But it's the kind of thing that can poison your mind with self doubts if you let it. How can I, I who has been so battered in life, who really has only scant experience with what most people call normalcy, possibly know how to have a loving relationship? How can I offer comfort, or advice? How could I raise a child? Where the hell could I possibly get any idea about what is good and right and healthy so that I can build a world like that for the people thatI care about?
But it doesn't haunt me very much.
I'm me. I don't feel particularly broken. Oh, I have my quirks (certain kinds of reserve, and my lingering insomnia comes to mind), and I certain have no intention of becoming static. For everything that has scarred me, as some might phrase it, I have learned, and changed, and for the most part grown stronger. (Or is that "grown stranger"? though I tend to think of myself as having become less strange.) I am the inheritor of my history, but not its servant.
My spirit is certainly in better shape than my body... and really, my body isn't doing that badly. (Ask me again after double class wushu tonight ;-) )
I don't talk about this all that much. It's not out of shame. It's more that most of the time if I mention I've been raped I feel the like people who hear try to fit the story into some kind of script. I don't want anyone's pity. I really don't want people to start being careful what they say around me because they think this or that might be a sensitive topic. And I am firmly convinced that there are many thing more interesting about me than plastering "rape victime" or "rape survivor" over my forehead. How dreary. And how cliche.
And, of course, there are so many people who are so public about their experiences, and a lot of the time it seems like talking about mine will be taken as a challenge to theirs, or a way of invalidating theirs, or whatever. The one thing I'm a little sensitive about is when people start generalizing on the victim theme. I have a right to my own experience, I have a right to have lived it, learn from it, and interpret in the way I want to. And so do you.
"What I'm trying to say, is that you don't get over these things. They replay in your head. You wonder what it was you did to deserve it. To make it happen."
Which is a lot of what I've heard from a lot of people about being raped. Maybe this is the general experience, I don't really know. It's certainly the popular one of the last several years. I'm not trying to disagree with it, because we're talking about different people's experiences. It doesn't really reflect my experience, though, so I'm going to write about that.
[This is really long -- I mean, I knew it was going to be long, but it's several times longer. Though I'm glad to have written it. And while not particularly graphic, not necessarily appropriate for everyone. It is about me being raped. I'm posting it publicly, though, so use your own discretion. I probably will make it friends only after a couple of days, but mostly because I might want to publish parts of this someday, and I generally don't leave such things up out of general principle.]
I've been raped. Actually, probably more than once, but some of the situations are fairly ambiguous, and some are such ancient history I don't want to pretend I really know what happened. So I'll stick to the most recent, one that lends itself to a fairly simple narrative, which isn't particularly recent, being some twelve and a half years ago.
So, I had just turned eighteen a couple of weeks before. To put the time in context in the rest of my life, I had recently ended my one, and wretched, monogamous relationship. I was at some stage of a court battle with my father, which would eventually mean that I had some support through college -- though that mostly amounted to having my tuition paid for, and maybe a third of my rent. Support through college was mandated in my parents' divorce agreement, but then we're talking about the guy who'd stopped paying child support for me when I was 15. (It wasn't all that bad at first, but tuition increased by more than fifty percent during that period, and the amount of support, which was figured on the cost of tuition the year before I returned to college, was fixed. And I didn't take out any loans -- okay, except for one emergency loan when my father was playing games that was repaid within three months.) I was working one of my two food jobs -- or I was about to start doing so, I don't remember the exact timing. I was feeling more than a little adrift, in terms of my connections with people or lack thereof. (In the next year, I would learn to use that to my advantage and became generally more focused and productive.) Summer quarter of that year I started taking intensive Chinese.
But this was March, I think, in particular it was Norwescon weekend, back when Norwescons were held at the Tacoma Sheraton. I was my current height, more or less, but a bit more slender and rather less muscular. I had hair down to my hips which I usually wore loose. I was still fairly involved in the SCA, and tended to wear a lot of SCA clothing (certainly at cons), usually fairly simple in ornamentation, in soft blues and greens and a kind of faded rose. I almost always had my harp near at hand. Hmmm. I seem to remember that at this particular con I also wore an outfit that my recent ex-housemates had dubbed "the soap bubble", being a tight little bodice of silver blue tissue lame, and a skirt made of layers of angles and tatters of the same material. Though I'm pretty sure that's not what I was wearing when all this occurred.
I was finding being eighteen to be unexpectedly trying. I had been living on my own for some years by that point, was a regular con-goer and did not expect a birthday to change things. Cons were a place I felt safe, to act and dress as I pleased, and it had not occurred to me that my underage status (which I did not at all attempt to hide) gave me any measure of protection. Or at least, I didn't realize how much protection (I had realized that certain kinds of attention were usually quite effectively discouraged by announcing "I'm sixteen!") But after the recent dissolutions of a relationship and my previous household, I was less surrounded by people I knew well, and generally getting a lot more attention directed to my body. I know I ended up changing into rather more modest clothing in disgust, and I was still feeling kind of off about the whole thing.
At some point in time I ended up hanging out with a number of Blatha an Oir-ians (people from the Tacoma SCA branch), a few of whom I vaguely knew. This turned into hanging out with a group of Blatha an Oir-ians whom I hadn't previously known, but it was comfortable enough (if in retrospect, fairly boring). I think we had lunch, wandered about some, and eventually ended up in someone's room. And suddenly everyone took off and I was there alone except for one guy. (Who had been rather attentive throughout the afternoon, but hadn't really made of an impression. In retrospect, he was a bit socially clumsy, big, blonde, and with something of the half grown puppy about him. Some military connection. Not bright.)
Now, you have to understand that going to cons and getting laid was nothing new to me. I didn't tend to take strangers to bed very often, but that was prudence rather than chastity -- most of my lovers were friends, and people known to me through the community, and I could check their references. (And did. Including talking to the recent exes of my very first lover before I took him to bed.) My liaisons were many but usually fairly quiet. I had fallen in love only once, and not wisely, but that was a ways in my past by then. I was not particularly interested in this guy, but making out with him seemed nominally a better idea than going back to the con. I was bored and lonely, and while I knew that this wasn't really going to change that, it was a welcome enough distraction.
And one thing progressed to another. I was perfectly willing to have sex with him, really, if fairly apathetic about the whole thing. Did we not have any condoms? Or was it just that he really didn't want to use them? I can't really remember. There was some discussion of condoms, I did not mention I was on birth control (SOP for me, then -- I liked the extra protection from pregnancy, but I didn't want anyone pressuring me to have unprotected sex) he knew I was completely unwilling to have sex without an appropriate latex barrier, and seemed to accept that. And then in the middle of things, he tried to push inside me. I stiffened, and tried to push him away, and told him "no". (Actually, "get the fuck out" might be closer to what I said.) He kept on saying "I just want to feel you" and I realized he had me pinned, and at an amazing mechnical disadvantage. I struggled a big more, and argued, during which time he patted his belt, on something next to the bed, attached to which were his knives, which made me realize it was in easy reach. He was panting.
It was a strange feeling my my head. I haven't been in a lot of fights, but I've been in a few and I know that I was right on the edge of the kind of adrenaline kick where I would just go, put everything I had into getting out, and I wouldn't feel any pain until later. I also felt less certain than I ever had that this would be enough. If I could just pull my knees up, I could probably have kicked him halfway across the room, but my body was pinned under his, his hands were holding down my shoulders, and I just couldn't get any leverage. I had an image of myself, pulling myself through the door of the room, naked, maybe bleeding, into the hallway of the con. It just didn't seem worth it. I stopped struggling, he fucked me. I endured.
Then I got up, got my clothes together, and left. Except he didn't want me to go, and wanted to keep something of mine so he knew I'd come back. I just wanted to leave. Finally he kept a brooch of mine -- not expensive really, but a handmade brass shawl pin from the Celtic Swan Forge that I'd had for years and did value. (Which I've never seen again, and it does kind of irritate me.)
I found my ride, a particularly nerdy friend I'd known for years, several years older, and told him I needed to go home right then. I don't know exactly what I said beyond that, but he took me home. The entire way back I ranted about how much I hated getting hit on by all these guys, and how it seemed like I went to the con and was suddenly treated like a piece of meat, hello, I was just out of a relationship and certainly not interested in anyone, that way, at all, right now, I just wanted everyone to leave me alone.
My ride, who had listened kindly to my rant the whole way back, waiting until we were parked in front of my house, put a sympathetic hand on my arm and said something about how he knew that must be really awful for me, but he just found me completely fascinating and he wanted me to know how he felt...
Somehow, the absurdity of him deciding that this was the perfect moment to hit on me got through even then, and far from ripping off his face it was all I could do not to fall out of the car, laughing hysterically. This guy had -- still has -- no a malicious bone in his body. Just very, very clueless (he's a little better these days). I don't remember what I said to him, though I'm fairly certain I discouraged his advances, got my stuff, and went up to my room. (Suite? I had the whole third floor, but it didn't have it's own bathroom...)
It wasn't for another day or two that it occured to me that I had been raped.
Damn, this is getting to be long...
So how did this effect me?
It's hard to say. I won't try to say it didn't effect me, but I don't think it really did, much. Certainly not for the long term.
It's partly a confusing question because it came in the middle of a whole bunch of turning points in my life, and probably wasn't one of the more important ones. (Though there was a general growing up, loss of innocence theme there.) I had reached my bullshit tolerance in a number of areas. I was never going to try and force myself to love again, and I reached a point where I was a lot less interested in having people understand me -- certainly, I was no longer attached to the idea, and I was kind of fatalistically giving up on it. I was in the process of winning the ability to get myself an education, and I was going to damn well milk that for everything that it was worth. I really, really wanted my own life, and to have it be something that absorbed the energies that were so poorly invested in other people, and that I was proud of.
The rape probably was a major contributor in why I moved more and more away from being the gentle little harper girl I had been -- publicly, anyway. (Had I ever been that?) But then, some of the relationship things (not just my flirtation with monogamy, this had been building for a while) were still probably more important. I cut my hair off (my hair grows quickly, but I had it down to about half an inch for a while there). I changed my image in other ways. I buried myself in my studies -- but then, they were the kind of studies where that was required. And I that fall I started teaching. (Teaching preschool, studying international political economics, and accelerated Chinese made an odd but useful structure for me.) In some ways I was very lonely, but I loved my studies, I loved my job, and generally I was too busy to worry about anything else.
Did I trust people less? Um. I was certainly a little more wary about certain situations... but not really. I didn't trust people in general very much at that point anyway. And after some of the mind games I'd been through the past few years, honestly a vaguely stupid guy willing to resort to threats of physical violence and intimidation to get laid seems almost refreshingly straightforward. I think I really mean that.
I remember feeling pleased when I got my STD screening back, some time later, and was still completely clean. It seemed like permission to forget my past, if I wanted to. I don't forget, mind you, that just isn't the way I inhabit my memory, but I could ethically sever that connection if I wished to.
Sexually, it didn't really change things for me that much. This was about the begining of the period of several years where I was not interested in having a primary partner (or resigned to never finding one, and getting on with other parts of my life)... but again, I think that had more to do with the last few serious (or something) relationships than anything else. I was no longer willing to sacrifice parts of myself for love (and it didn't work, anyway). I had a number of lovers, some of whom were also good friends, but nothing that really changed me, or even for the most part really reached me. I didn't try to make them into something they weren't, and for the most part things went pretty well. Sex and love were already very separate to me, then, and I don't think I've ever taken sex, as sex, very seriously. (At least in that emotional sense many people do. In other ways, I take sex about as seriously as I take food.)
I did feel dumb about the whole thing for a while. (Though I think I've had more consensual sexual encounters that left me more squicked.) And I felt guilty that I never went to the police or anything. (I did, however, speak to the man's baroness, and a few of the older women in the barony who I trusted.) I felt weird about the extent to which I had consented, if that was what my ceasing to struggle was. I remember wondering if it was going to make me feel weird the next time I was in bed with someone... and it didn't.
It's certainly not the most traumatic thing that ever happened to me, maybe that's part of it. This isn't me saying "oh, so many awful things have happened to me in my life" it's just a personal assessment. And traumatic is what traumatized you -- if I had a choice between being raped in a similar manner and working for a certain petty dictator at Microsoft again, I would chose the rape with a light heart. I felt more helpless, more trapped, more used and more dirty with the other. And oh my heavens but it lasted longer, and I had more doubts about to what extent I was doing it to myself. (It is axiomatic for me that what other people can do to you will never touch on what you can do to yourself.) Everyone has their own buttons.
Am I damaged? Am I forever scarred by this?
To me that's probably the most insidious thing about how our culture discusses rape. Or any of a number of other things, for that matter. This idea of damage. This idea that you had some previous existance as an intact innocent, and you can never go back, you'll always be something less than that.
It haunts me sometimes, even though I basically reject the notion. But it's the kind of thing that can poison your mind with self doubts if you let it. How can I, I who has been so battered in life, who really has only scant experience with what most people call normalcy, possibly know how to have a loving relationship? How can I offer comfort, or advice? How could I raise a child? Where the hell could I possibly get any idea about what is good and right and healthy so that I can build a world like that for the people thatI care about?
But it doesn't haunt me very much.
I'm me. I don't feel particularly broken. Oh, I have my quirks (certain kinds of reserve, and my lingering insomnia comes to mind), and I certain have no intention of becoming static. For everything that has scarred me, as some might phrase it, I have learned, and changed, and for the most part grown stronger. (Or is that "grown stranger"? though I tend to think of myself as having become less strange.) I am the inheritor of my history, but not its servant.
My spirit is certainly in better shape than my body... and really, my body isn't doing that badly. (Ask me again after double class wushu tonight ;-) )
I don't talk about this all that much. It's not out of shame. It's more that most of the time if I mention I've been raped I feel the like people who hear try to fit the story into some kind of script. I don't want anyone's pity. I really don't want people to start being careful what they say around me because they think this or that might be a sensitive topic. And I am firmly convinced that there are many thing more interesting about me than plastering "rape victime" or "rape survivor" over my forehead. How dreary. And how cliche.
And, of course, there are so many people who are so public about their experiences, and a lot of the time it seems like talking about mine will be taken as a challenge to theirs, or a way of invalidating theirs, or whatever. The one thing I'm a little sensitive about is when people start generalizing on the victim theme. I have a right to my own experience, I have a right to have lived it, learn from it, and interpret in the way I want to. And so do you.
