I’ve never really been the greatest at picturing the future.

If I imagine an important event, it never is quite the way I imagined it. Regardless, I don’t think I could’ve pictured spending my college graduation day exhausted, neurotic and preoccupied with the fact I could possibly see the guy who raped me in the crowd.

It’s hard for me to write about it even now, a year and almost five months since the rape.

I remember pieces of it, of the assault, the weeks that followed, the acceptance.

The biggest part, though, was telling people – it was the most empowering thing I did, giving myself a voice again. It was also the hardest. I remember walking down a street with an old friend and telling him about it, because I knew it changed me and was going to make me act differently, and I wanted him to know why. We did that half-hug thing you do when you both are walking side-by-side, like a couple. People driving by yelled at us, “Use a condom,” having no idea I had just used all the strength I had to tell someone what had happened to me. We had to laugh at the absurdity.

It’s never hard for me to tell my friends the truth, but the one that changed me forever was the hardest to say. It was the hardest for me to accept.

That month between the rape and the moment when I finally acknowledged it is painful to remember. It doesn’t even seem real, just a nightmare where I kept weaving in and out of sleep, out of moments of clarity. I focused on school since I had my senior research; that was normal. I tried to hang out with friends, since that was normal. I even tried to forget That Horrible Night and make it into A Harmless Night. I tried to block him out of my life and write it out of my mind by keeping silent.

The denial didn’t work, the school work came to an end, and by the end, I truly had no idea who I was or what was going on.

I’ll go into that time eventually because it’s a part of my destruction and subsequent reformation. I’m left with a new me, because the old me was killed. Every life, every version of my future I ever imagined, was snatched from me. They weren’t possible with this new, psychologically-traumatized me that would never fully heal, like someone paralyzed in a car accident or a soldier returning from war.

It’s not something to pity me for. It’s just the truth.

I didn’t know where to begin with the new me, except to speak again. I knew, but hadn’t fully grasped, that what happened wasn’t my shame. It was always his. I’m fighting every day – sometimes like hell, sometimes just barely – to figure out who the new me is. I’m a new someone, a self I am proud of, someone I love, and to have a life better than I could imagine. I want to be better.

I want to be HER – healed, empowered, restored.

I hope I can help someone else to be HER, because if there’s one thing I learned from all of that hell, it’s that I am not alone – that we are not alone. We are not weak. We are not worthless. We are not dead inside – not forever anyway. We deserve to be healed, restored and empowered to pursue all that we could have been and more – because the strength we developed just to get out of bed in the morning, to show up, never giving up, means we bring more to the table than we ever could have before.

I thank our Director for coming up with this blog, and asking me to be a part of it.

Sometimes, life is nothing like you picture. I have to believe it’s because I’m on the way to something better, and better for me is helping people. I’m doing it the only way I know: one day at a time, one word at a time, because I deserve to be heard. I deserve to be HER.

-The Editor