October 16, 2018.

It’s been three years since I was raped. To the day.

I’m spending the anniversary of the worst night of my life in a stuffy little library on the twelfth floor of New York City’s oldest public hospital at a presentation. As I listen to her speak, that night plays out like in a parallel universe. The clock ticks toward 10pm. He would have been in my room by now, probably; it’s all kind of a blur.

The anniversaries are hard. But this one is different. I’m about halfway through my training as a sexual assault and domestic violence advocate. In a few months, I’ll be starting social work school.

Last year was bad. I’d left my abusive boyfriend and moved back to New York. I was on the wrong side of twenty-five with no job and no idea where my life was heading. I was a wreck. Alone in my apartment, on the anniversary of my sexual assault, I cut my thigh deeply with a razor blade.

I knew something had to change.

A few weeks before I sliced my leg, I’d spent two hundred and fifty dollars on a consultation with a supposed psychic empath I’d read about in Time Out New York. For the record, my psychologist’s rate is less than that, but this was before I’d started therapy. And I was desperate. The psychic told me to prepare a question to bring to the reading.

“How can I heal from being raped?”

Madame LaFae, acclaimed medium, had some choice suggestions. I needed to get in touch with my body, she mused. I could try hula hooping, or interpretive dance. Not likely. She told me that I was raped because my intuition failed me, but she quickly backtracked. “I’m not saying it’s your fault, it’s just…”

I would like to think that LaFae made this blunder because her empathic clairvoyance was so in tune with my energy that she had picked up on my own self-blaming. But needless to say, being told that I bore responsibility for my rape by an overpriced psychic was a low point for me.

A few months after I spoke with the psychic, I started therapy in earnest.

Until right now, I have purposely avoided talking about my struggle with my mental health while discussing the sexual assault, because I felt that if I revealed this in conjunction with my experience of being raped, it would detract from that latter’s legitimacy. I have also placed less emphasis on the subsequent sexual abuse I experienced at the hands of my most recent ex, and prior boyfriends, for the same reason. Sometimes, often, in moments of self-doubt, I still feel this way. But now I believe that it’s important for me to share it, because if you’re like me, I want you to know that you’re not alone. Now, in a way, I feel that these two facets of my life are inextricably linked.

Being raped then felt like a culmination of a lifetime of terrible experiences, fucked up relationships, self-hatred, and instability. It is hard for me to reconcile the truth of what happened to me, and the knowledge that my prior experiences had made me a person who was more likely to be victimized, and less able to defend myself. It is hard for me to make peace with the fact that although my rape was not my fault, and that someone who is not a rapist would never have done this to me, that had I responded differently at the time I may have been able to avoid the situation entirely. That I had been conditioned not to value my own physical and emotional safety, to put others needs before my own, and blame myself for and internalize the abusive or violating actions of those around me. Yes, I could have screamed and fought, insisting he leave, or, probably, got up and left myself. I did not do these things. And, as they say, everything in hindsight is twenty-twenty.

After I was sexually assaulted in my dorm room by a friend I believed I could trust, it felt like there was only before and after. It felt like I’d died, and I knew I could never go back to the person I used to be. My former self was a distant and intangible memory. Who had I been before this happened? Who was I now? I couldn’t tell. My sense of self was shattered. The experience of being raped had caused me to question my entire identity.

I still feel this way. For me, there is no going back. I did die that night, but I did not realize that I would also be reborn. As I emerged from the ashes of my former life — and self — I slowly began to rebuild. It took three years to wipe the dust from my eyes and to see clearly for the first time that a Phoenix had risen from amongst the burning rubble of my life.

This next piece is hard for me to explain. If I could erase the sexual assault from my past, I would. But I would never go back to who I was before then. My eyes have been opened. And everything that has happened, has brought me here. And this, I would never want to change.