I’m Over My Assault

—Amanda ReCupido, Chicago

[Content/trigger warning: sexual assault]

I thought I knew when my assault happened to me. It was nearly textbook—someone handed me pills, and I blacked out. But see, they handed them to me, and I took them, and I was already drunk, but I had asked for food and they promised they would get me some, but handed me pills instead. It was murky, but it was close enough to the “perfect victim” we had been taught we had to be in order to report. I had to be believed, right? Still, I said nothing. Even when I learned my perpetrator had done the same to others, when I learned I was part of a pattern, a blip.

Then there was one boyfriend who surprised me by not using a condom, when I was at that age when I was paranoid enough about getting pregnant that I’d double up on birth control. I shouted “wait!”, tried to hold him off, but it was over soon enough anyway. I remember because I could still hear the faint sounds of the TV program my roommates were watching through the other side of our apartment’s thin walls. And they had seen me come home with him, and we continued dating after that, so that couldn’t have been that. Even later, when he monitored my phone and movements, when he threatened me with physical violence. When I nearly became a statistic.

Of course, there were grey situations I never knew what to do with—a college make out turned frightening when I realized the very athletic frame on top of me rendered me helpless, and I looked toward my dorm door and knew despite being surrounded by people, no one would know what was going on inside, so I made my body rigid, repeated his name robotically, informed him that I was “not having fun.” He cried after, and I comforted him, but we never spoke again. But nothing happened so how do you even categorize something like that? Even when later he was suspected of roofie-ing a friend, or when rumors spread that he threw a chair at an ex-girlfriend.

The problem with teaching girls like me who came of age in the late 90s/early 00s that rape only “counted” if it was brutal, if it was penetrative—made us unable to identify the assaults that were happening all around us. We were told rapists were strangers who lurked in the bushes, and not your best guy friend who sat next to you in English class.

I suppose you never forget your first. Though it turns out you can suppress it for 18 years. The first time it happened to me, the incident itself might not have fit society’s accepted definition of assault, but my behavior fit the textbook definition of someone who had been assaulted (note: the following section headers have been lifted from various sexual assault resource websites).

It is common for survivors of sexual assault to initially deny they were abused.

One thing I remember was a voice popping up inside my head saying, “this shouldn’t be happening to me, I have a boyfriend.” As if fitting “correctly” inside the patriarchy made me less of a target. As if married women and mothers aren’t assaulted every day. I remember trying to tell my boyfriend about it later on the phone, but I didn’t, and the moment was lost, and I never brought it up again. It had happened in public, surrounded by people who ignored my protests and my physical attempts to get away from this boy, this other 17 year-old, this supposed friend of mine. And I was wearing a thong (it was 2003, everyone was), and I eventually let him, so I wanted it, right? If no one else was going to acknowledge what happened, I didn’t need to either.

Some common behaviors exhibited by victims of sexual assault include:

Depressed and withdrawn mood

I was already anxious about my boyfriend being away at college (my abuser convinced me he was cheating on me with whole lines of college girls who would do more than I had allowed), and with him, it seemed, all my friends. I didn’t have anyone to turn to about what I was going through—I didn’t know who might be safe, who wouldn’t blame me, who would offer comforting solutions instead. Sexual assault awareness so far had been tips for girls on how not to get assaulted, and I had failed. I walked the halls of my high school like a zombie, going through the motions of classes and after school activities. I wore my boyfriend’s North Face jacket, sometimes not taking it off for entire days, cloaking me in my sullenness, worn like an armor that deterred anyone from trying to speak to me. When he visited on a break and asked for it back, I felt another piece of myself fading away.

Maybe it was this anxiety that, with my boyfriend home for a weekend and faced with a choice to spend time alone just the two of us or go to my abuser’s house where people were drinking, I chose the latter. Maybe subconsciously, I wanted him to see, to save me from myself. At one point, my abuser said something uncouth, as he usually did. I waited for my boyfriend’s reaction, the moment he confirmed my gut feeling was right. But he just laughed along. Maybe I was the one who took things too seriously, who was the unfunny feminist, who didn’t get the joke, who should just let things go.

When he drove me home that night, minutes away from curfew, he surprised me by pulling into the empty church parking lot near my house, the site where we’d fool around. “We don’t have time,” I told him. He leaned over and kissed me, but, too tired from the booze, I was unengaged and merely accepted it. “It’s funny,” he smiled. “When you’re drunk, you just sit there and take it.”

Sexual behaviors

About a month later, I did something stupid. I never knew why I did it; I never thought it was related to what had already happened. Even later, while my boyfriend was breaking up with me, another voice inside my head popped up saying the name of my abuser and I waved it away, telling it, “that has nothing to do with this.” But there was a boy who was after me, with the reputation to match. He knew I had a boyfriend but still kept asking me out, and experience had taught me his harassment wouldn’t stop until I gave in, that if I went ahead and got it over with, he would finally leave me alone. I don’t know what compelled me. Maybe the isolation and the loneliness with my boyfriend away and the fear he was moving on. So I went out with him, perhaps telling myself it was just as friends, but when he went to kiss me I let him, maybe because I knew he expected it, that I’d be called a tease otherwise, that there was much worse he could do to me than just let him have this. 

My initial assumption proved correct—after that night, he no longer bothered me. But I felt guilty and so I confessed to my boyfriend, and that’s when the reason I didn’t tell anyone about the first incident came out—slut, whore, bitch. I knew this already. I was Catholic—they taught us that women who “gave up” their sexuality to any degree were as good as “used lollipops.” 

“I didn’t want to,” I told him, when he angrily made me detail the encounter. “Then why did you do it?” he threw back. “I felt I had to in order to get out of it.” “That doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “I can’t explain it,” I sighed, resigned. I wouldn’t be able to for nearly 20 years. All I knew in that moment was that I didn’t deserve anything, much less love, much less forgiveness.

Many victims continue to have a relationship with their abuser.

I saw my abuser every day. We sat next to each other in many classes, our last names close alphabetically. He started dating my friend. See, he couldn’t be bad if she liked him. And now that I didn’t have my boyfriend, I really didn’t have anyone, so he remained in my life. It couldn’t have been an assault, because he was my friend, because he cared about what happened to me, didn’t he?

Drugs and alcohol can help numb the pain of abuse.

My abuser began supplying me with vodka dressed in water bottles bearing our high school mascot. This felt better than feeling what I was wrestling with in my head and heart every day, slogging from school to activities to church on weekends, a ghost. At his parties I was no longer invisible. At his parties, people wanted me, and what did it matter anymore? I was a gross lollipop. I was boundary-less.

Survivors may find it challenging to form healthy attachments with others.

College was a chance to start over, but by then I was addicted—to the drinking that gave me courage, that allowed me to step out of my skin, and to the attention and validation that came with these behaviors. I was rebranding myself, I was empowered, like Samantha on Sex and the City, which had ended earlier that year. No one could take anything from me if I was the one giving it away. Even if I didn’t necessarily want it, I couldn’t think of a reason to deny. This is what happens when the absence of a no becomes a yes, versus the other way around. The first time I learned about enthusiastic consent my world just about ripped open. How many times had I acquiesced out of habit, because I had been taught not to provoke men, because I had been taught that my own actions had done that very provoking, and it was a matter of reaping what I had unintentionally sowed?

And then, the other stories I mentioned above happened, which only made things worse.

A victim's view of the offender's actions change over time.

I saw my abuser for the last time at age 25, after a move back home following an abusive relationship. I remarked I couldn’t believe I had “gotten myself” in that situation—I was so smart and feminist. I had read Gloria Steinem. I attended rallies for Planned Parenthood and for victims of sex trafficking. He sat there, sipping his iced coffee, joking about what I must have thought about him. The remark stopped me cold, but even then, I hadn’t begun yet to pause and unpack. I was still moving forward at rapid speed, leaving everything behind.

Five years later I started journaling and writing again, and the memory of the assault was the first thing to come out of me, from somewhere seemingly unknown. “That’s weird,” I remember thinking. “Why would I write about that?”

Some survivors experience fertility issues.

When I met my husband, I slowly trotted out the stories of my past to him, each time tip-toeing to gauge his reaction. He was the first person to tell me I wasn’t the things I thought about myself my whole life. He was the first romantic partner to truly celebrate me. His acceptance of me as an entire being finally allowed myself to come out of survival mode and begin to heal. He wasn’t going anywhere, and I had a safe space to explore.

Soon we got married and started trying for a baby, and tried and tried. I had surgery for endometriosis, a condition caused by a lifetime of stress. I became numb to the constant appointments, of undressing and opening up my legs, of following instructions I didn’t always understand. It all felt a little familiar.

This shame and silence can last for decades.

But you already know all that. You’ve seen it in public accounts, from Cosby to Kavanaugh to #MeToo and everywhere in between. I watched I May Destroy You and Promising Young Woman, feeling a deep anger and sadness as I watched my experiences given a name I never allowed myself to attach to them. I felt a further mix of relief and frustration as therapists formally pronounced the words I’d batted around for much of my adult life: anxiety, depression, PTSD. There was freedom in finally relieving this burden, sure, but I was also frustrated at a past I couldn’t change, at a trajectory I couldn’t reverse, at people who had repeatedly let me down.

In a society ignorant to the mechanisms of sexual assault and the behaviors of its victims, and without the language to speak about it or resources to support and heal, I was left to flounder, and at worst, was further harmed. Because at age 17 my physical boundaries had been violated without consequence, I was more susceptible to future assaults. But I didn’t know this in 2003, back when we slut shamed our pop princesses and the sexual politics of movies like Old School always left something to be desired. The virgin/whore dichotomy still reigned supreme, and until that point, I was a virginal youth group leader, until I somehow wasn’t. If only I had been able to recognize what had happened to me, to understand it wasn’t my fault, I could have healed so much faster. I wouldn’t be sitting here at age 35 wondering how different my life would have been if I hadn’t blamed and punished myself this entire time.

While many women are speaking up, there are countless more still suffering in silence. It is only in sharing—whether publicly or to each other—that we can recognize the impact of what truly happened and even begin to undo all the damage done.