- **TW: Rape, violence, disordered eating
When I was a kid, I was completely preoccupied — obsessed, really — with The Moment When Things Go Wrong. Blame it on my obsession with true crime, Friday nights spent tucked away in a glowing upstairs bedroom, hoping that my parents wouldn’t catch me watching Unsolved Mysteries or 20/20 and force me to go bed before Barbara Walters’ thoughtful concluding narration or Robert Stack wondering if me or anyone I knew had information about the cases I’d seen on this program.
In those shows, there was always a critical moment, a turning point at which the victim’s fate was sealed. The second she opened the door, for instance. The moment the car turned in the opposite direction. The seemingly earnest exchange with a stranger that suddenly turns sinister.
I thought about those moments constantly, frozen in terror in my bed at night, imagining myself as part of the scene. I conjured up terrible situations in my head — being kidnapped, perhaps — and thought about The Moment I’d know things had ceded my control and I had nothing left to do but regret it.
“There was no turning back at that point,” I’d whisper into my pillow, ill with fear at the thought.
I was pleasantly surprised — blessed, really — to subsequently live a life devoid of those moments. My childhood came and went without a single kidnapping, maiming, or assault, and I’m not being glib when I say that it was a tremendous relief. I made it to adulthood unscathed, and The Moment evaporated from my consciousness.
It wasn’t until I was 27 years old, living on a completely different continent, that the concept of The Moment would hit me again, a millisecond after I faced what was simultaneously my biggest childhood fear and would become the most catastrophic event of my adulthood.
It was The Moment the door to my apartment closed, and the man who would sexually assault me turned the lock.
I was in a relationship at the time, a serious one with a thoughtful, loving man whose care and earnestness I wasn’t yet mature enough to process. In fact, I resented him for it, allowing my unaddressed childhood self-loathing to serve as an explanation for why he mustn’t really love me — he was just kidding himself. When picking fights and running away proved unsatisfying, I looked for other ways to lash out — on this particular night, I decided to go out with a friend and troll for dudes.
It wasn’t long before we found them, a group of boys who were also either traveling or living abroad, I can’t quite remember the details. My attentions gravitated towards one of them, a tall kid with shaggy blonde hair who couldn’t have been more than 20. I flirted with him mercilessly, spouting off all kinds of suggestive, sexual remarks that would normally cause me to cackle with embarrassment and discomfort. I was a new woman tonight, after all, completely unbridled by the loving partner I’d left at behind to finally realize what a piece of shit I really was.
The shaggy blonde and I got drunk together — very, very drunk — and when it came time to leave the bar, I invited him to my place. In the cab, the conversation remained highly sexual: He talked about liking rough sex, and asked if I liked it too. I tried to lighten the mood, making some terrible joke about punching him in the taint at the moment of climax or tying him to the bed and feeding him only pudding. I noticed that he wasn’t really allowing the conversation to get silly, and somewhere, deep inside of me, an alarm started sounding: This person is far too intense. This person is far too focused on one thing.
I brushed it off, didn’t stop the cab, and continued to flirt. Alcohol took it’s strongest hold, and the rest of the cab ride was a blur. When we got back to my place, we took the elevator up 14 floors. I vaguely remember goofily chatting the entire way — as if this drunken, oddly obsessive stranger was a friendly neighbor who’d just stopped by to borrow a mop. I unlocked my apartment door and walked right in, allowing him to follow me and close the door behind me. Chatting away, I took off my coat, turned on a lamp, and kicked my shoes into the corner. At some point, I realized that he stopped talking completely, so I turned and faced the door.
It was as if his entire appearance had changed; His enlarged stature, the look in his eyes, the composition of his face. I truly felt like I was looking at a monster, though I couldn’t figure out how or why he’d transformed. What I did know, though, was that The Moment had arrived.
“I know what you like,” he said, somehow hushed and thunderous in equal measure.
Then, he locked the door.
Rape victims report having totally different psychological experiences while the attack is underway. Some focus on an object in the room, an inanimate piece of furniture or clothing that they can zero in on in, attempting to force their consciousness to occupy the object itself. Others black out, too overwhelmed by the pain and terror to stay present. Some participate in the act, unable to form any kind of proactive response beyond complicity. All of those reactions — any reaction at all, really — are valid.
By the time my face and body had met its second or third blow at the end of his fist, I’d cast myself in a 1995 episode of a true crime television show. When he wrestled me onto my bed, completely ignoring my screams, I imagined my mother giving an interview to Barbara Walters. When he bit me so hard on the neck I almost passed out, I imagined the Unsolved Mystery, a male vampire who travels the world, looking for women to feed on. When he finally was inside of me, I imagined giving an interview post-trauma, a brave survivor curled up on my parents’ couch, telling my story.
“There was just no turning back at that point,” I’d say.
And, when it went on for what felt like hours, I changed fantasies completely, invoking alternative imagery from the crime and horror content I was so fascinated by as a kid: I was a dead body in the ground, and dirt was being shoveled over my face, soil blocking the light bit by bit until everything was black.
I passed out.
When I woke up the next day, I was completely naked on my floor, covered in bruises and bites. I stayed still for awhile, terrified that I’d look onto the bed and he’d still be lying there. When I finally summoned the courage to sit up, I realized that he’d gone, surprising myself because I could still conjure up the sensation of relief. Shivering, I walked to my kitchen towards the bathroom, and noticed something stuck to the fridge.
“Amanda,” the note read. “I’m sorry.”
I went to the bathroom and vomited, dressed in the first piece of clothing I could find, and fell asleep for the entire day.
Society deeming you a shitty victim doesn’t end with being flirty, or getting drunk, or dressing provocatively, or inviting a stranger into your home. Shitty victimhood carries over into your response to assault, too. I woke up that day to the sound of my phone ringing. It was a friend, and she asked me about my night. I told her a version of the story that made it sound like a mess of drinking and debauchery, a sexual escapade that I’d consented to. My boyfriend called next, and gave me step-by-step directions on how to make spaghetti sauce, which I executed while routinely glimpsing at the note I hadn’t yet taken off my fridge. I was a drunk, a cheater, a flirt, a slut — I probably wouldn’t even make it onto an episode of the crime show I’d conjured up in my mind, because there were too many unacceptable, unsympathetic holes in my story.
So, like many women, I told no one. I didn’t seek help. I internalized everything as best I could, which turned out to be not too well at all. I moved in with my boyfriend after telling him I was afraid I was having a breakdown and needed a safe space outside of my apartment, but refused to go into any more detail. He scratched his head and lifted up his wing, only to find that the person who’d been difficult to love before just got a whole lot harder.
The following two years were spent in an endless cycle of terror and fury, first barely leaving the house and then barely leaving my bed. My eating habits became disordered, only drinking coffee for hours a time and flying into a famished rage, before eating one huge meal and falling asleep. Unable to find pleasure in anything, I started shopping online to try and muster up a sense of anticipation and excitement, racking up tens of thousands of credit card debt in the process. My entire universe, once filled with friends and fancy dinners and weekend trips, shrunk down to one or two rooms filled with dingy coffee cups and unopened packages, visited at regular intervals by a confused and frustrated boyfriend who was becoming more of a caretaker and an ill-prepared psychologist by the day. I have an excellent support system, but I convinced myself that I was lucky to live so far away that I didn’t have to answer to anyone.
There were bright spots, as there always are, but nothing about my assault or the aftermath played out according to the rules people are supposed to follow, both to avoid becoming victims and to play one convincingly after the fact. It’s been four years, and I’ve just barely scratched the surface, only recently aware of the magnitude of what I experienced. It was only a year or so ago that I was able to a true feeling of joy, and it hit me so hard I started laughing uncontrollably in the middle of a crowded subway car. As New Yorkers know, this is highly irregular behavior.
I’m not supposed to say this, but there are a lot of things I wish I’d done differently, both before my assault and in its wake. The conversation surrounding rape culture has changed, yes, and many more people are blessedly realizing that there is no scenario in which it’s okay to place blame on a victim — unfortunately, this leaves few practical solutions in place for the moments in which victims not only want to blame themselves, but have to: Not necessarily for to inflict punishment, but to cling onto some modicum of control.
It’s the most fucked up thing I can imagine, but the idea that I could have made better choices, that I could have done something to change what came next — well, that idea has comforted me, even though I know deep down it’s false. This notion of control has the power to transform someone in the trenches of deep and unrelenting sadness into the brave hero in their own one hour true crime television show, the intrepid almost-victim who thwarted the evil perpetrator’s vicious plot. For that person, trauma is a near miss, an almost disastrous cautionary tale.
I know that none of us are that person. We’re blameless, but we’re also completely devoid of control because we exist in a world that was, at least in part, built to ensure that we would be. The Moment that all of us have experienced — perhaps some of us even at similar times in our lives — was one that would have happened regardless of the decisions we made before it. It will also exist in our minds forever, no matter what we decided to do after it was over. We’re not responsible, but the experience of sexual assault and its outcomes don’t give a shit who’s to blame.
All we have, then, is our ability to share our Moments, to take some kind of comfort in the fact that it wasn’t just us who felt that overwhelming surge of fear and helplessness and grim comprehension the instant it all went wrong.
For me, I’ve remained attached to the idea that my assault wasn’t unlike the true crime shows I watched as a kid: The story of my own victimization playing out in front of me. My understanding of the situation as it was happening, bathed in an eerie, flickering glow. Watching The Moment unfold, unsure how I’d survive the night afterward, unable to tear myself away.