there’s no ‘Condolences’ card for sexual assault (or: on uncomfortable responses to uncomfortable revelations)

I was fifteen the first time someone told me about being sexually assaulted. Seven years later, and it’s just as difficult to respond.

Obviously, the fact that it’s something that’s happening is a whole other level of difficulty.

The thing is — what do you say? There’s no textbook answer, nothing coded into our vernacular or literature. There’s no Condolences card for rape. ‘Sorry for your loss’ is never quite going to sit when the loss is innocence or mental stability or happiness. You don’t accidentally drop your virginity along with your phone at the train station.

There’s no guaranteed unawkward position for your facial muscles when someone throws “I was raped” your way. But it’s not really very easy to be on the other side of that. 20 minutes of action? 20 minutes of action in another person’s life is an irreversible change to mine. But that change is so different from person to person. And irreversible doesn’t mean stagnant.

For instance — when the wound was fresh, meeting ‘I’m sorry’ with ‘thank you’ was easy. There was no space in a mind for awkwardness on top of shame and fear. The discomfort and unease (mixed with pity or sympathy or concern), and the accompanying ‘I’m so sorry that happened to you’ didn’t matter, because it didn’t change how I felt. There was no room to care.

Now, mid-rant about systemic gendered violence and the idiocy of victim blaming, I see my audience’s expression shift. When my afterthought or anecdote inspires the same face and apology I was getting a year ago, I have to ready myself. What for depends, but either way it’s always an exercise in not running away.

Because either way, the words never sit right. ‘I’m sorry’ leaves ‘you didn’t do it/it wasn’t your fault’ swallowed hurriedly down. ‘I’m sorry you had to go through that’ stirs up a quickly-suppressed rant on the lie of inevitably (I didn’t have to go through anything, it didn’t have to be part of my life the narrative the way it has nevertheless become.)

Something about ‘that’s horrible’ is unsettling. That is interwoven with my life now, and horrible is not a word I want brushing up against my skin ever again.

It was horrible. I’ve worked pretty hard to get it away from me.

The things that are the least awkward are the things that are the least rehearsed — and the most genuine. ‘Why are people’ is the best I’ve ever heard; it’s as incoherent an expression of sheer emotion as sexual assault warrants.

What I’m saying is, there’s no right way to say I’m sorry to someone. There’s no way to hear ‘my physical and emotional being was violated at some point in my life and it’s still with me’ and look them in the eye with words dripping out your mouth without a hint of awkwardness. There’s no way to say ‘I’m sorry’ unless it really was you that night or day. There’s nothing to forgive except the shared shame that we hold in our DNA the capability to inflict horror (and no one has time to absolve humanity.)

The best thing we can do is to keep the awkwardness within. To hide the predictable platitudes, to let your own feelings infect that person who’s voicing the shittiness that they’ve already had to carry. The thing I dread now, most tangibly, is the awkward waving of my hands and the ‘no no it’s okay, I’m fine now’. I dread feeling like it’s my role to comfort; ‘don’t worry, I’m fine talking about it; it wasn’t your fault; I definitely didn’t mean to drop that on you!’

Because that’s a lie; all of that. It did suck. It still sucks. Sometimes it’s a prickling irritation and sometimes it becomes a gaping void. I don’t know that I’m ever going to be fine in the way that I (sort of) was. I am fine talking about it, except that I know you might not be. I didn’t mean to drop that on you, but it wasn’t an accident. I wanted to say it, I wanted you to know for some reason.

There’s no right thing to say to that.

(But hey — the effort is appreciated. I promise.)