Not quite twenty years after H drugged and raped me, I have enrolled in yet another creative writing workshop. The instructor has encouraged the class to “go there”, to write about the tough stuff—the shame, the embarrassment, the grief, the mistakes, the ugliness, the traumas. I choose to write about the time my friend was raped when we were both 12. I believe that somehow in writing about it, I can break the memories’ lifelong grip on me. In that, I was not entirely wrong—writing about traumatic experiences can have great therapeutic value when done in the presence of and under the guidance of a qualified therapist, or at least after undergoing successful treatment for the trauma. Not so much, sitting in a classroom among strangers, unwittingly reliving the day of my friend’s rape by recounting its details on paper for the first time. But I didn’t know that then. So, heart hammering, breath shallow, and palms sweating, I eke out a couple of pages describing the incident. The instructor praises me for my courage, for my apparent detachment in accounting a terrifying event in my life. For a couple of days afterward I’m revved up, still riding high on the pat on the back from the celebrity writing instructor, aglow from my presumed victory over the memories of my friend’s rape. I mistake all this high excitement for some kind of triumph. A couple of nights later I was asleep in bed alone. My husband and I usually went to bed at the same time, but this night he had worked late and wasn’t quite ready to turn in at the usual hour. A few minutes after drifting off to sleep, I jolt awake to an apparition of a strange man, fully clothed, lying on the bed next to me. It’s clear from the evil glint in his eyes that he means me harm. I scream, leap from the bed, open the door, and practically fly into the hallway. My startled husband meets me there and wraps his arms around me. I am shaking and my heart is in my throat, raw from the shriek that tore from me. Chills march up and down my flesh. When I look back at the bed, the apparition has vanished. It did not then and to this day does not seem like a bad dream. Intellectually, I know it was that, or something like that—perhaps a hypnagogic hallucination, which can occur while falling sleep. But it felt so real, so un-dreamlike, and when I recall it today, it still does. After this, it will be months before I sleep through without waking up screaming in the middle of the night, before I can shower without my husband on guard just outside the bathroom door, before I can stay at home alone without huddling on the couch while monitoring every doorway and corner for shadows that could be threats.
Whatever explanation one assigns to the vision I had that night—psychological, neurological, spiritual, supernatural—it turned me inside out. After decades of pretending everything was fine, of minimizing horrific things that had happened to me, of questioning my own senses when no one close to me would acknowledge horrible things that had happened to me and in my family, of strong and appropriate emotional reactions denied because, again, no adults close to me would validate them, of attempting to shrug it all off because it seemed the only alternative, the gig was up. All of this that I had internalized, that I’d stuffed down out of sight, out of conscious mind, was instantly exposed to the light and air, and it wasn’t budging until I dealt with it. It was, in every sense of the phrase, a wake-up call.
Throughout most of my life, symptoms of undiagnosed Complex PTSD had constituted my emotional norm subtly but consistently: hypervigilance, an exaggerated startle reflex, insomnia, a tendency to isolate, dissociation and emotional numbness, anger, irritability, distrust, flashbacks, and so on. For years they’d simmered, explained away as moodiness and sensitivity; suddenly they boiled over and would no longer be dismissed.
Because the old, ingrained habits of minimizing my experiences, of blaming myself, of the empty internal chorus of “I’m fine” ran deep, I didn’t reach out for obviously much needed help as soon or as assertively as I should have. I tolerated intolerable circumstances that to most anyone else would have constituted an emergency requiring immediate attention. As a result of my “toughing” it out, it was a couple of months before I was referred to a trauma therapist. Over the course of three-plus years, I underwent EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) treatments for the series of traumas I experienced while growing up. In time, the memory of H’s confession loosed itself from the muddy bottoms of my mind and surfaced, a bloated corpse. Twenty-five years after H had drugged and raped me, and twenty years after H had confessed to me his crime, I would at last face the truth about what had happened to me—the truth of what a man who I thought was my friend, whom I never would have believed capable of hurting me or anyone else, had done to me. More importantly, I would speak of it to others, to my husband, to my therapist, to a few friends. What fragments of memories I did have of that night would begin to piece themselves together in a more logical fashion. Little by little, I began to make sense of what happened that night.
After memories of H’s confession surfaced, I emailed H to tell him I was cutting off all contact with him. Unfriended and blocked him on Facebook. H expressed confusion about why I was doing this, and I didn’t feel obligated to extend my contact with him to explain what I thought should have been obvious. I haven’t heard from him since.
This abrupt estrangement left me with many questions. Has H raped anyone other than me? While it seems apparent that his crime against me was premeditated (or, at least in having the roofies on him, he was prepared to commit a crime against someone), was it personal? Was his violence against me vengeance for breaking up with him or refusing him sex when we were dating? Was he finally “getting his”? Was he still struggling with his sexual orientation and somehow needed to disprove it to himself by raping a woman? My current therapist assures me that none of these was a likely motive. Or was I an easy target for an experiment he’d been biding his time for a chance to try? Had he been carrying roofies around in his wallet for months, looking for an opportunity to test them out on some trusting, unsuspecting woman or man? Or had he obtained them for the express purpose of raping me? Some of my questions have bordered on self-blame—had I missed cues that he was dangerous? Was there always a slight sinister edge to his voice? Did he seem like the kind of person who was just cold and detached enough to look upon other people as subjects to be toyed with for his amusement, insects on the sidewalk, slowly frying to death by sunlight under his magnifying glass? I wonder, too, what if any effect the rise of the #metoo movement and the steady stream of sexual assault accusations of high-profile men in recent years have had on H. Does the barrage of news about it all stir guilt, remorse, regret, or shame over what he did to me? Or has he conveniently buried it out of reach of consciousness, as I did for so many years? Did my apparent brush-off of the incident give him tacit permission to follow suit?
I could ask H these questions. I could unblock him on Facebook and message him there. We have dozens of common friends and acquaintances from whom I could obtain his contact information. I could propose we seek out a restorative justice program for adults. Get a dialogue going. Work toward understanding and forgiveness. Hash it out—with an impartial, compassionate referee, of course—until there’s a transcendent moment of peace for me when the tension drains from my face, and H hangs his head and sobs, shoulders convulsing, pain transferred. To do this would be very “now”. I’m not there, though, and I don’t know if I ever will be. My arms are crossed, my face a stony stare, my heart a fist, as I wait for what I believe I deserve, what I believe H owes me: to think of this first himself, and to offer it by writing or voicing a confession that explains why he did it and answers all of my questions and some I didn’t know I had. I want H to intuit my unmet emotional needs that his actions created and meet them all in a long-read blog post, a podcast, or a video, and then ensure that it makes its way to me without direct communication from him, a note slid beneath a door. If this is babyish, selfish, out of vogue, then so be it. I’m not going to pretend I’m above it. I’m guessing there are therapists out there who would tell me, based on what I just admitted, what stage I’m at in whatever recovery phase I’m still in decades after the night in question, and the steps I must take to move forward, to heal, to wrap this shit up and slap a bow on top. Perhaps it’s premature to write this, whatever this is. Maybe I should have waited to write this until after I’d grown beyond this embryonic state of processing. Then I could look back and wax on about how long I was stuck in that unproductive, narcissistic rut, thinking only of me me me and my feelings, my loss, my suffering. In the aftermath of a rape, though, who else is there but the raped and the rapist? There’s the emotional wreckage wrought by his violation of my body, my agency, my trust, my sense of safety. And there’s the presumed psychic vomit pile—early trauma/poor coping skills/unaddressed emotional pain/fear of his own sexuality/rejection by a woman?—that in the first place led to H conceiving of the idea of raping me, planning and organizing the event, and then executing it–which could have been spontaneous, a seize-the-moment situation. Chances are, I’ll have to find my own way to reconciling all that I don’t know and likely will never know.
I don’t dwell on it. Most of the time, it’s one barely audible track of the mental background noise of my consciousness. If I separate that track from the others as one splits a music track with an audio-editing app, it is cacophony, but most days I can acknowledge its presence and the emotions it evokes, and then get on with my business. That’s not because I’ve buried it yet again as I did for two decades after H’s confession. Post-EMDR treatment, my memory of the rape hangs like a mist, almost imperceptible except for the clammy feeling it leaves behind. Largely transformed from a traumatic memory to a non-traumatic memory, it does not hold the same power over me as it once did.
A traumatic memory is very little like a non-traumatic memory—the two types of memories are experienced much differently from each other. In fact, the two types of memories aren’t even stored in the same area of the brain. And a traumatic memory is less like recalling an experience than it is effectively mentally re-experiencing the event. EMDR and other treatments for trauma and PTSD can defuse traumatic memories and transform them into something closer to an ordinary memory. Anyway, I rarely have flashbacks of the rape, and when I do, they’re much less intense than they once were. It helps too that I know what I’m remembering, which was not the case until H confessed. After he confessed, I did not have the coping skills to accept what H admitted, so I shoved that knowledge into the darkest corners of my mind. Now I have the coping skills to accept the fact that H raped me and to manage the emotions that accompany knowing that fact.
Though I don’t dwell on it, it’s still significant enough that I felt compelled to write this piece about it. It’s not the first time I’ve written about H raping me. The first was in 2015, when I came across a submissions call for an anthology about rape culture. During the first few days of writing, I tread cautiously, hoping to avoid a repeat of the retraumatization I’d triggered in myself by writing about the time my friend was raped. Yet I suffered no hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations. Not even any nightmares. A weird dream or two was all that came out of it. I made the mistake of writing in the much-maligned second-person voice, not so much because I chose it, but because it just came out that way and I didn’t question it. In retrospect, writing in second person was probably a way of distancing myself from the subject matter. The anthology editor did question my use of second person, and rejected the piece because of it, despite what she called the power of what I had to say. For a writer, it was disappointing. I felt I’d dropped the ball somehow in not more carefully considering the voice I’d written in. There was still therapeutic value in writing that essay, though, day after day, to make sense of what had happened to me, and doing it all on deadline, no less. A few years later, along came the #metoo movement (and at this writing, that was a few years back). Through a barrage of news and online chatter that kept the rape—and H—forefront in my mind, it was the “why I didn’t report” flavor of articles and personal posts that prodded me to write. I didn’t report because between the drug with which H had laced my wine to incapacitate me and my advanced degree in cognitive and emotional dissonance, I didn’t know I’d been raped until five years after it had happened. Then I spent the next 20 years trying to deny that awful knowing. It was, though, the infusion of strength and courage from reading other women’s accounts of sexual violence that fueled this piece.
Never before had I been exposed to so many other women’s stories of rape and assault; never before had I felt so unalone, so supported by sheer numbers. That’s not to say I find it shocking or surprising that this sort of thing has happened to so many women. Over the years, friends and acquaintances have shared or hinted at their own stories. They’re rampant, these violations, as many of us know. But due to my own denial, it was only in very recent years that I really considered myself fully in league with these other women. There was always a sense of affinity with them, but it stopped short. Yes, I’d been molested when I was a child (although the most damaging part of that ordeal was my mother’s reaction to it), and I’d found my friend after she’d been raped, and like most women, I’ve endured countless unwanted touches and inappropriate, even threatening remarks from males throughout my life, but me? Lucky me, when it came to rape, I had been spared. I was a rape victim sympathizer—a friend of the raped. That’s how thoroughly I had sealed off the knowledge of my own rape. Yet even as I denied it, from behind the walls of its premature tomb it banged and hollered, in the form of flashbacks and other symptoms.
To be continued …
This Must Be Normal 