Guest post: Our scars are our torches

Women are mothers, teachers, healers, and crusaders. We are slowly entering a revolution for women where sexual assault and abuse are a topic of national conversation now more than ever before.

Let me tell you a story about myself. When I was 14 years old, I had my first chaste kiss at a summer camp where I was volunteering. When I was 15 – I was a junior in high school that year, moved ahead for academic reasons - I was asked to a Christmas formal by a 17-year old boy who had just transferred to my school from another state. I was shy and introverted and hadn’t dated much so was thrilled; he was very handsome. We went to a party after the dance where there were no parents and alcohol was in abundance, but I wasn’t very experienced with it so I only had a few sips. Any slight head change was immediately extinguished by excitement when he asked me to go to a park with him in his car and make out. I hardly knew him but was heady with youth and the clear starry night and the possibility of fun.

In the car on the way to the park – a park that happened to be across the street from my house, we had the windows down and the wind was whipping through my hair. He put Bad Company in the tape deck and I was pleased because I knew the words to a lot of the songs and I have a decent singing voice I was proud to show off. We pulled into the parking lot and awkwardly started to do what a million 15 year olds do every day and it felt wonderful.

Then something happened; it took a turn for the worse. He got rough, and I wasn’t prepared for that – what to do, what to say. I don’t even think I knew there was a name for it at that age. I tried to push him away. My clothes were torn. He became violent. I remember staring off into the trees, trees I had run and played under when I was younger, trees that had sheltered me from the sun at the adjacent swimming pool for many years, trees that still shelter me now from the memories of that experience. I disappeared into the moonlight as it shone through the trees. As an adult I know this is dissociation. As a teenager it allowed me to go on.

When it was over he offered me a ride home but I opened the door of the car and ran. I hid behind some bushes and stared at the front door of my parent’s house until it was light enough outside to go knock on the door, pretending that a friend had dropped me off after a sleepover. I have no idea how long I waited, but it must have been hours in retrospect. I remember aching with pain and dripping blood on the ground as I leaned against a fence and peered through the leaves, still frightened since I was alone in the dark. I finally gathered the courage to knock and when someone opened the door, I hid the areas of my torn clothes with my hands as I rushed up the stairs to my room. I cleaned myself up in the bathroom with the door locked. I called a friend from another school in another town and told her that all men were brutes, and that I would never trust them again. I was too ashamed to tell my parents.

I convinced myself that it was my fault; that I had asked for it. I wore turtlenecks to school for weeks until the bruises healed – luckily it was winter so it was easy to hide them. I managed to make his presence, one that persisted until graduation, invisible to me. I beat myself up inside my head for singing “Feel Like Making Love” on the way to the park – I still cannot listen to that song and have to change the station or remove myself from the situation if it starts playing on the radio or at a restaurant or bar. My singing that song felt like giving permission for what had happened, even though the words were in no way a description for what occurred.

I beat myself up even worse when a six-foot tall confident blond tennis player asked me how my date with him went – he had asked her out. I told her it was fine, didn’t meet her eyes, shrugged my shoulders underneath my turtleneck, then turned around and walked away. She angrily sought me out the next week because he had tried to lock her in a room and assault her and she had to kick and scream and fight and forcibly push him away and run through a door to escape. “Did that happen to you?” She asked angrily. I shook my head no and burned with shame. She got away, I thought. She is stronger than me. I’m a failure.

Predictably, my mental health deteriorated. I became so thin and pale I looked like a ghost of myself. I became a career bulimic. I started having suicidal thoughts. A teacher was worried about something she saw in my private journal for writing class and alerted me that she was going to talk to my parents. This was my breaking point. One of my parents walked in on me trying to slit my wrists with a steak knife that morning. I didn’t want to end my life, they were just chicken scratches; a cry for help. It was a necessary turn of events to get me into counseling.

I finished my senior year of high school and graduated at 16 as Valedictorian. I went to a month of inpatient rehab for bulimia and learned that I was raped and was able to tell my parents. I still carried the shame, but started to gain some weight back. I found the courage to go to the police station and report the incident with my mother by my side, and was happy that the statute of limitations was up so I could not prosecute; that would have been too painful just as I was starting to heal. I felt I owed my statement to other women: to the tennis player I wasn’t able to protect from his violent advances, to any future woman he might assault. I was proud.

I started college close to home; I wasn’t strong enough to move away. I learned by word of mouth about two other women my perpetrator had sexually assaulted. I watched the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill trials and patted myself on the back internally about not speaking out. I walked on the sidewalk the morning after a No Means No demonstration – they had painted it in colorful sidewalk chalk all over campus. A group had snuck out in the middle of the night and wrote “unless she’s drunk” after half of the statements, and I patted myself on the back for keeping silent and not going to those demonstrations.

Once I learned that my perpetrator had come to a college party I was attending and my normally passive self physically fought my college boyfriend to keep him from going to beat him up. “Take me home now,” I screamed at him while pulling his arm. I didn’t want a scene I wanted out of the situation. It took four of his friends to help me hold him back. He finally took me home and I cried in a closet.

After graduating Magna Cum Laude, I had a brief stint as a psychiatric counselor at an inpatient child and adolescent ward before starting medical school. I read the files of 5 and 6 year old children who were being used for child pornography by family and friends and then went to tuck them in for bedtime. I remember one little boy grabbing my head and forcibly kissing me on the lips and trying to put his tongue in my mouth. I tried to hide my shock not to hurt his feelings, teaching him gently with my actions how to give a proper good night hug and peck on the cheek. Two days later I held him in a basket hold in the safe room for over an hour so he wouldn’t hurt himself or another child. My relief was palpable when he finally fell asleep in my lap.

On the adolescent side, I met a girl who was 13 and pregnant. This young girl the same age as my daughter is now was so proud of the pregnancy because she had been “sexed” into the gang. I learned this meant she was gang raped, and that because she got pregnant during the gang rape that the child was a child of the entire gang, and her status was elevated above other women in the gang.

I went to medical school. I listened to a friend talk about being sexually harassed by a surgeon, all the nurses around rolling their eyes as if to say “that’s just him we put up with it,” and decide not to report to protect her future career. I watched her decision reinforced when a student reported a notorious sexually harassing doctor, one that I intentionally stayed away from, only to become the butt of every joke on campus. I became a doctor. I listened to a friend share in residency about an attending who was sexually harassing her in a creepy way and the department’s solution was to keep her away from him – to not put her on any rotations with him. I later learned the creepy attending was transferred to another academic institution after a surgeon learned from his tween daughter that he harassed her at a school bus stop. So this is how they take care of this, I thought. This is so crazy.

I became a wife. I became a mother. I got divorced. I went to therapy, again as an adult. I’ve never asked or heard what happened to my perpetrator. Thankfully he has not attended any class reunions.

After a few years of dating my current boyfriend, we became engaged. I’ll never forget the first time I told my fiancé about the rape. We had been dating about 6 months and things were getting serious. I was terrified of his reaction; terrified he wouldn’t love me. It was the middle of the night; we were on a long weekend away. I went to the porch of the bed and breakfast and stared into the trees watching the moonlight. I drank a glass of wine and gathered the courage. I crawled back in bed with him, woke him up, and we started a conversation where he told me he loved me. I awkwardly confessed that I had been raped. He looked into my eyes and said something no one has ever said. “I’m so sorry that happened to you. Want to tell me about it? I’d love to listen whenever you feel like it.” Tell my story instead of sweep it under the rug, or awkwardly dismiss it? I felt like I had been doused with a bucket of cold water. I found the courage to tell him I loved him back, and shared a truncated version of this story.

It’s not men’s fault that they don’t always find the right words when hearing about sexual assault, or women for that matter. It is hidden in a cult of guilt and shame, passed down generation after generation. Women are speaking out now more than ever before: carrying their mattresses across campuses, trying and more often succeeding in prosecution. Every time I read a story about a woman with a successful prosecution, I cheer silently on the sidelines as a member of her team. Every time I read about a woman who is penniless and suffering from mental health disorders after being kicked out of the military, her bright and promising future doused by rape, I cry silently on the sidelines as a member of her team.

In therapy I mourned my lost innocence. In solitude I forgave the little boy who grew up in a house where the possibility to do what he did to me was transformed into a reality. My therapist told me that my empathy did not need to extend to my rapist, but I couldn’t help it. And in some small way, it helped me heal.

We need to remind men and boys that the porn they can so easily google as a teenager at a sleepover is not reality. We need to tell them if they are in a gamer chat room online and a girl walks in they cannot verbally assault her just because everyone is anonymous. They cannot rape her at a college party, even if she drinks too much. They cannot call her bad names and treat her with disrespect, even if they witness it growing up in their own house.

This is a cultural ill. We need to change the fact that women on Indian reservations are so easily raped by men who know they can escape prosecution. We need to change the fact that sports institutions objectify women and value the achievement of their college and professional athletes over disciplining those that have no boundaries with women. We need to change military culture around women. We need to stop human trafficking. It’s a worldwide disease, and our country may be healthier than some, but it is still very sick.

Last week the election of a president that boasts of sexual assault and promotes intolerance and hate struck my core as a human being, but also hit me on a much more personal note. I woke up at 5am and the confirmation of what I dreaded was happening at midnight spun me into outer orbit. I sat on the back porch, had a glass of wine, and sobbed. It felt like decades of achieving and therapy and reaffirming my worth in society was erased by half of America.

A few days later I sat in a Sunday school class with a group of strong, mostly single mothers and was reassured. The current leader (we all take turns – well, them anyway I’m a slowly reforming atheist looking for faith who does not yet feel qualified to lead in this arena) spoke of a Saturday spent in a prayer house. She, a Methodist, said that she was reminded by an Episcopal leader that all lives have value, and that we spend too much time, especially in America, measuring our value by our achievements and our wealth.

She spoke to my 15 year old soul. That girl had promise and value – no different from the doctor I am today. That incident no longer defines me, but it does shape my future actions. I vow to revolt against hatred, not with anger or blame, but with love and action. I vow to value every human being I encounter no matter their origin or political inclination. I vow to use my scars to help heal others.

-Anonymous