THIS IS HOW I PUSH BACK.

There are few adults in my life that I trust with my whole heart. I’m going to give one of these people a pseudonym. We’ll call him Mr. D.

Today, I met with Mr. D and told him about the man who raped me. 

The conversation was triggering, it was overwhelmingly hard to breathe.

When he asked me how my life has been, and if there was anything I specifically wanted to talk about, I knew exactly what I wanted to say:

“This year has been hard for me. I have never been in such emotional turmoil. I have not been able to breathe deep and actually taste the air because I have never felt this numb before. This year has been hard for me, because I was raped by a man who I loved, and who I thought loved me. I was raped. I was raped.”

When I sat down in the chair across from Mr. D, I found myself choking up—I knew the words, I had them in my head, I had planned this conversation since the moment the meeting was scheduled. In that moment, when I sat down in that chair, across from Mr. D, the words stuck in my throat—they coated it, like a decoupage project I never wanted to start. 

I ended up asking myself why I could not say those words. Why could I not just say that I was raped? I milled about in my head reaching for other vocabulary—sexual assault, abuse, etc and had to catch myself.

This is rape culture. This is what society has told you for so long. As a survivor, people are afraid to hear you say that word because they do not want to listen. 

I caught myself being the victim of my own shaming. I caught myself not only reliving every moment of that night but feeling so guilty that it happened. That someone who I loved forcibly led me into his room, put me down on his bed, and raped me. I felt guilty that I was raped without being under the influence of any mind altering substances. When I was raped, I was sober. When my rapist raped me, he was sober. Yet I cannot tell you the specific date that it happened. Not even the month—I think it was winter.  I was doubting my own credibility, even though I could still remember the moment he took me into his room. The moment he penetrated me. The feeling I had, the thoughts in my head. They told me, “You are being raped. This is rape. He is raping you.”

As I sat there, not knowing what to say, I prefaced my words by saying, “There is no easy way to say this.”

Why would I believe there is an easy way to say that I am a survivor of rape? Why did I need to qualify my own experience?

These feelings made me angry. They still make me angry.

Why, as the victim of rape, must I feel shame and guilt about something I did not choose to happen to me? Why must I still silence myself? Why am I so afraid to tell people what happened, to share my experience? 

Why am I still in such disbelief that I was raped?

Once I told Mr. D, once I looked him in the eyes and told him “I was raped.” 

Once I said it, I did not want to stop. I wanted to tell everybody. I wanted to tell the man who raped me that HE is a RAPIST. and that that is all he is to me now. He is now just the man who raped me. 

My survival depends on these words. I depend on my voice. I depend on the ability to be LOUD about it, to the best of my ability. Because I am a survivor, and this is my story.

THIS IS HOW I PUSH BACK.

THIS IS HOW I PUSH BACK. 

THIS IS HOW I PUSH BACK.

I WILL PUSH BACK. 

I WILL PUSH BACK.