Insanity
I’m never going back to who I was before that night.
For a while, all that was left was that scared and hurting woman who just wanted to find answers as to why a man had never treated her like a person, and why she couldn’t enjoy life anymore because of it.I also had to confront who my real friends were. One of them began to sleep with D. I remember trying to warn her at the bar, but there were two problems. One, I had to warn her…but I didn’t know what exactly to warn her about, as I had not yet confronted the rape. Two, D had told her that we slept together and his version of events meant she just politely nodded while I talked and then dismissed me.You ever have someone look at you with condescension when you’re trying to explain that the guy they’re seeing ripped you apart? It sucks. It damages you. It means two girls who you don’t know as well as you’d like hang out with you for the rest of the night and walk back to the school with you, knowing something is wrong. It makes you have panic attacks for a solid 24 hours and call your dad three times in one day because you can’t stop crying. The most self-assured man I knew sounded lost over the phone when listening to me, when he knows me better than everyone, and that’s when the voice inside me screamed the loudest - something had happened.It makes you email your professor who you know had panic attacks before and ask for advice. It makes a true friend call you because your texts are freaking you out. It makes another friend come and see you and take his sweatshirt without another word when you ask him to. It makes you lose eight pounds in a few days when you’re already rail thin, because you can’t eat anything. It makes you spend hours in the library trying to work because you need something to hold onto. It makes you have to leave a fraternity’s charity event early because HE is there and you can’t explain why you can’t stand to look at him. It makes you go to another fraternity event you always attend and you don’t know why you can’t stop looking at where he’s at, because, of course, it’s his fraternity, and it’s not because you want to talk but because you want to scream.
It makes you insane.
But, insanity is a funny thing. It means that one day, you spend a bar crawl with people who are not screwing the guy who hurt you nor are friends with that person. Something about that day makes everything click, a moment of realization that you aren’t you – maybe the handsome guy who wanted to sleep with you and you can’t go through with it? Maybe it’s laughing really hard, truly enjoying life, and realizing it’s been the first time in weeks? Whatever it is, the day following the bar crawl marks a month and a day after That Night. You’re on Facebook, you see something about rape, you talk about it with a friend of yours who’s been assaulted, and you finally say it to yourself: he sexually assaulted you.Another fun thing about being insane through pain: you realize who has not hurt you, or rather, who you know would never seriously injure you. Who would never smile condescendingly when you tried to tell them something in a bathroom, because they can tell that something is seriously wrong; who you can trust with your life’s biggest secret, because deep down they already suspected.After telling my secret to a friend, I finally emailed my professor about an emergency. She asked if it was schoolwork. I said no, and she said okay. I went to the academic building to meet her in her office. She was early and rushed up to the lab where she knew I’d be, kind of breathless, looking at me with concern. I followed her to her office, and I finally said it out loud: “I’ve been sexually assaulted.”Her face softens, like a puzzle is solved, and she doesn’t tell you you’re wrong. Instead you can breathe again, because she says: “Oh sweetie. I am so sorry.”Belief. Someone believes in you, and that’s when you realize you finally can again, too, because you’re not insane at all.