A's Story ✨
One summer night when I was nineteen years old, I was at a party at one of my best friends’ houses when her parents were out of town. It was getting pretty wild—what else can you expect when fifty drunken teenagers are alone their first summer off from college. A childhood friend of ours, we’ll call him B, was there. We had had an ongoing flirtation for years, but nothing had ever really happened. Drunkenly, I sent him an evocative text from across the party luring him upstairs to a bedroom.
B and I got to my friend’s little brother’s bedroom, and things started immediately, but it wasn’t what I expected. He was rough from the minute it started—grabbing me and biting me. It was all happening so fast that my brain couldn’t keep up and say “stop”. I was somehow continuing to move through the motions, even though I really didn’t want “it” anymore. We began having sex, and he stopped and told me he didn’t know where the condom went, he didn’t see it on him. In that moment, it felt like yet another sign that what we were doing wasn’t right, so I started to move off him.
Before I could fully climb off of him, he grabbed both my arms and slammed me down on the bed. I screamed and tried to get up, but I couldn’t break loose from his grip. That’s when I completely froze. The next part of it I still can’t remember, ten years later. My brain has still completely blocked out the most violent part of the rape. The next thing I remember is finally hitting him, breaking free, grabbing my clothes, and running to the bathroom to get dressed. I’ll never forget looking in the mirror and seeing my entire chest covered in bruises and blood from his bite marks. I’ll never forget crying to myself in the mirror—but this time, crying to someone who I didn’t recognize. That was the night that I became a new person.
After getting dressed, I rushed downstairs and ran into my two best friends of the time—one of them whose house it was. I told them what happened, and the friend whose house it was said angrily, “you had sex in my brother’s bed?” I don’t know about you, but I definitely wouldn’t call that “sex”. They both tried to deny it ever happened because they were friends with B too. I knew from that moment I couldn’t talk to them about it, but I decided I needed to talk to him about it. I slept over at that house that night, and the next morning texted him asking if we could talk. He walked over in the morning, I met him outside, and when I confronted him, he told me I was being dramatic and that it wasn’t a big deal.
It hurt to move the next day, to walk. My whole body and insides hurt. I remember driving to CVS alone to buy Plan B. At the time you had to get it from the pharmacy. I could sense the pharmacist just thought I was another reckless teen neglecting to use a condom. They really had no idea. I called my therapist on the phone and she said strongly and firmly, “this is sexual assault, you can press charges”, but it didn’t click. My rapist and two best friends had already told me it didn’t happen, that it wasn’t a big deal. I was drunk. I had initiated the hookup before it turned nonconsensual. In my nineteen-year-old eyes, I had no right to be calling it assault. I couldn’t see back then how clear it truly was—it felt foggy and grey to me. I was covered in bruises and cuts and still couldn’t manage to think it was rape because every single person besides my therapist was telling me it didn’t happen or that I was blowing it out of proportion. Every part of my body was sore and I was still blocking it out.
My body and brain protected me for the next four and a half years. I didn’t think about it until my life came to a standstill and the PTSD started. For two years, I experienced flashbacks, nightmares, dissociation, severe depression, anxiety attacks, and the worst body pain of my life. I couldn’t function—simple tasks like eating or driving were impossible for me. I didn’t sleep, I often couldn’t speak. I lost friends, I couldn’t be in school, I couldn’t work. My whole world was flipped upside down. It took intensive trauma therapy and working through that night and what it meant to get me back to “normal”. But what is normal? While I no longer have PTSD, there isn’t a day I don’t think about it—it has affected my self-esteem, my relationships, my ability to set boundaries (for fear someone might not respect them), it has affected my dating life, and so many other parts of my being. This sort of thing doesn’t go away. So, when I tried to block it out for so long, eventually my body and brain were like, “Not so fast. We’re still here, and we’re not leaving until you deal with us.”
I am in a good place overall now—I can write this story, openly talk about it, and process it without feeling re-traumatized. But trauma has a ripple effect. This will affect me in various ways forever, so it is my duty to continue to work on and rebuild myself so that I can live a fulfilling life—a life that is not defined by that one night.
I am not defined by my rape. It is one piece of the puzzle that makes up me.
- A