Trigger warning: suicide and sexual assault.
Based on research, you are more likely to be sexually violated by someone you know versus a complete stranger.
In 2022, I became a part of that statistic.
And I spent too much of these past years wishing it were a stranger that had taken advantage of me while I was unconscious (or perceived to be).
At the very least, I would have been immediately vocal about the incident and sought support from my family and friends. Instead, the fear of disappointment from loved ones resulted in my suffering in silence.
Despite numerous tries and invested effort to pretend it didn’t happen in order to keep things the way they were, I eventually found a shell of myself failing miserably to bring that to fruition.
While my goal had been to protect appearances, neglecting my needs led to a decline in my mental health. Before I knew it, I had become reclusive; the social withdrawal was negatively impacting my psyche.
I need to end this debilitating feedback loop.
I’ve come to realize things might have to get messy before I could truly begin my healing process.
Having watched Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and foolishly believing I would respond differently if I were the victim in the show, I froze in my own unfortunate reality.
I was sleeping on a friend’s couch when someone draped an extra blanket over me, and proceeded to touch me.
I was so stunned by this person’s hand fondling my left breast.
My body was instinctively in shock and I found myself struggling to take my next breath. I laid there waiting for what appeared to be the longest three seconds of my life to end.
What is going on? Why is this happening? Why are they doing this?
Why did they do that?
This person believed I was unconscious in that moment, and assaulted me.
Before I had a chance to process that night, my brother died. Everything happened so quickly with his search and rescue, death, and funeral. I didn’t know it back then, but the timing of both events allowed me to dissociate from the sexual assault.
“It was no big deal.”
My brother’s death somehow made it easy to convince myself I was lucky to be alive, and what had happened to me paled in comparison.
At the time, it felt relatively small and the grief minimized it so much so that I thought I could continue living as if it never happened.
15 months later, it became apparent that the dissociation was a vanishing smokescreen.
In October 2023, I felt apprehensive about helping with setting up birthday decorations at my friend’s house after staying there past midnight to help out the previous year. Truthfully, I didn’t want to do it at all this time around.
In spite of that, I wanted to show up as a supportive friend and offered two hours of my time. Throughout our friendship I had always given my time freely, and this was the first occasion I set a limit on it. I felt guilty about that, and wasn’t at all surprised when it wasn’t received well.
I thought I could keep the status quo as long as I kept showing up to celebrate their family’s milestones just as I’d always done, but it became increasingly harder to maintain.
In retrospect, that pivotal moment marked the beginning of the deterioration of what was supposed to be a lifelong friendship.
My visits became scarce and every subsequent hangout was shorter than the last.
The sad realization was that I no longer felt safe inside that house.
This became clearer as I developed a stronger inner sense of self-worth. My ongoing presence was a reminder that our values were in misalignment.
After three years of making concessions, I figured it out:
You cannot heal in the same place that broke you.
With the distraction gone, I couldn’t rationalize that person’s immoral behavior anymore. I was again confronted by the assault as the grief from losing my brother subsided.
From then on, it became the loneliest period of my life. I had nothing to help suppress my feelings about the matter. I also stopped drinking alcohol so there wasn’t anything to relieve the pain.
I resorted to blaming myself for opting to spend the night there, for staying silent, for freezing and not fighting back. The constant negative self-talk eroded my confidence, and made it hard to reach out to people I care about.
At home, I couldn’t even confide in my fiancé and emotional rock, JT. We’ve lost count of the amount of times he’s had to hold me while I cried without knowing the reason why.
“Is there anything I can do to help you feel better?” he’d ask.
I always thought of the same response:
“Can you change the past?”
On the off chance I woke up one day with the ability to shake it off, I couldn’t risk disclosing the assault to him. Someone with a strong moral compass like him would immediately lose respect for that person and never perceive them in the same way.
That house underwent renovations and expanded the living room, and I was encouraged to come check it out. Every fiber of my being dreaded a visit to marvel over the space where I had been violated.
I was burned out and didn’t want to sign up for the mental performance anymore. Wearing that heavy social mask to operate in ways that felt inauthentic to me was tiring.
It was clear that too many days had elapsed of finding myself desperately gasping for air as my self felt buried six feet deep.
I imagine that’s how my brother must’ve felt for years before he took his own life.
Something needed to change so I elected to distance myself from my friend’s family for the past six months to gain clarity.
It took me years to wrap my head around this chilling thought: The assault was premeditated.
The blanket was a ruse—it acted as a reason for their leaving the bedroom on the other end of the house to approach me in the living room, and to test whether I was conscious or not.
Taking space helped to cement the fact that there’s no justification for what they did to me while I was sleeping, and only one reason is sufficient: this is who that person is when they think nobody is watching.
. . .What else are they capable of doing?
The silence of my struggle had been deafening, yet the sound of walking away has brought me peace.
I finally learned to accept that I am not responsible for the pain that this person has caused.
They probably thought they got away with it all these years and frankly, sometimes that was also my wishful thinking.
In my weakest moments, I lowkey wondered how drastically different my life would be today had I been asleep during the assault.
But would I rather not know what I know now in order to avoid the outcome?
Not a chance.
Letting go of people we care about is one of the hardest things ever.
Every circumstance is unique and nuanced, but it ultimately comes down to our values and belief system.
I had to choose between insidiously maintaining this friendship or detach from it.
While I can endure pain, how could I knowingly subject my future child to a known predator?
Sometimes a single act is all it takes to leave a lasting impression—calling this one selfish and damaging would be an understatement—and I do not condone it.
I’ve been on my guard for everyone around me, and JT often points out how distrusting I am with seemingly innocuous motives.
Someone I trusted betrayed me, and that betrayal has affected my other connections too.
I drifted from my friends, and it hasn’t been easy for me to open up and reconnect with them. I would be lying if I said life hasn’t been challenging as I seek my new sense of identity without that decade-long familiarity.
I simply trust that the sun will rise again, and my resiliency will propel me forward.
I will be okay.