From Broken Glass into Art: Sexual Assault Survivor’s Story
Trigger warning: Sexual Assault, Suicidal Reference
Names are the social contracts we have with our world. In this story, I will not give him power; he will simply be referred to a letter, X. Not a main character, just a simple letter.
I never minded being one of the boys. For a long time, I was fully immersed in the made-up ideology of “I’m not like other girls.” I identified myself as a tom-boy, which I thought made me different and unique in some way. My Dad would joke all the time that I was the son he always wanted. So, I gravitated to being friends with guys because I felt like I didn’t really click with the girls at my university.
I met X during my sophomore year at college, and within a year and a half we became best friends. Both of us were night owls so we would have “insomnia runs” where I would walk to his dorm and we would talk about everything on our minds. We would talk about anything from who we had crushes on, to inside jokes, and even past life experiences. He was the person I would send funny memes to and call if I had boy issues. I quickly became part of his ROTC family. I felt like one of the boys.
X was training to be an officer and part of his duty was to go away to a training boot-camp. I wrote to him once about what I had been up to during the summer, asking how he was, and included a picture of me with a puppy because I missed him so much and knew how much he loved dogs. It started on my 21st birthday earlier that summer when I drank way too much and sent flirtatious messages to pretty much anyone with a penis who I knew; to say I had histrionic tendencies was an understatement. And this included X.
The next day, after a very hung-over morning, I saw what I had said and apologized to him profusely, explaining that I did not mean any of it. I knew he had a girlfriend; that I loved them together and didn’t want to get in between them in any way. I reassured him that I was only interested in mutual friendship. We both agreed and had a laugh about the whole thing.
I thought that this event was what caused what happened to me; that I deserved it for flirting with him.
On August 15th, X came back from boot-camp wanting to see me. When I went to meet up with him, he was coming back from an outing with the boys. I thought it was going to be like one of our regular insomnia runs where we’d hang out and talk. On their way out, one of his buddies whispered to me, “be careful, he had a lot to drink.” At the time, I didn’t think anything of it. I had been around X before while he was drinking, and besides, he held high honor in the community. He was my best friend, and I thought he would never hurt me; that nothing would ever happen romantically. I trusted him.
X and I were hanging out in his dorm and things felt relatively normal until they really, really weren’t. He kept trying to kiss me. I kept telling him, “no, you have a girlfriend,” but he kept pushing. I started to feel afraid. This wasn’t like him, I thought to myself, what happened to my best friend? I ended up kissing him back, hoping that would make him stop.
It did not stop him.
As it happened, I froze with fear. X was much taller and stronger than me. I couldn’t fight back. He tried to take my pants off but I kept holding them up. “Please no, I don’t want this,” I said. He bared his fangs and said, “Shut the fuck up. I know you do.”
I told him no again, but it didn’t matter. I was frantically trying to think of ways out of the situation so that he would not penetrate me. I gave him head in the hopes he would not insert himself inside me.
It did not stop him.
I remember looking at the door right beside his bookcase, too frozen to move, too frozen to fight. All I could do was try to dig my fingernails and bite hard into his skin in the hopes that it would hurt him enough to make him stop.
It did not stop him.
When he was finished, he came inside me. I was in complete shock. I kept thinking that a friend wouldn’t do this. I had never experienced this kind of interaction before and it didn’t feel consensual, so what was it? I kept repeating like a parrot “I can’t believe we did that,” over and over. I could not fathom him crossing that line.
On my way home I stopped to get some Plan B. I felt numb. When I was home, I got into the tub with the hottest water possible raining down on me in the hopes of burning where he grabbed me. I didn’t want to feel his touch anymore.
I called him later on that day to talk about what happened and he told me to watch what I said because he had friends over. I was taught forgiveness can tackle anything so I decided we could still be friends. I told him I did not want sex, and he sincerely apologized for his actions the night before.
I believed him.
It took until the following month to know we could never be friends.
We were both at a party together when he took the opportunity to grab my ass underneath my skirt. I was shocked to see him smirk at me after grabbing, because then I knew. The apology was a lie and he would be more brazen the next time he attacked me, after all, his girlfriend was also at the party.
It took a long time for me to discover I had PTSD, consisting of a drawn out process of googling my symptoms, having a full break-down at the library, going to therapy, and then dying, cutting, and dying my hair some more.
I used to compare my sexual assault against others, telling myself “well, he didn’t do that, so maybe in some way I wanted it,” or, “it wasn’t so violent, maybe it wasn’t actually an assault.”
That’s simply not true.
I am here to tell you that if you say no and they continue, that is assault.
Physical pain is linear, while emotional pain is fluid. Pain isn’t a thing that can be measured and defined in a hierarchical style. One person’s pain cannot be compared to another’s, our experience is individual but our healing is transformable. Some days are better than others, but it stays with you to an extent, maybe not as biting, but you remember it.
The stages of grief are also part of dealing with sexual assault because you are coping with the loss of that person and your own personal trust for others. The symptoms don’t always go in a specific order. The first for me was denial. I thought, “I didn’t get sexually assaulted, that didn’t happen,” Next was depression in which my line of thinking was “I want to kill myself and leave this hell that is now my life. He is everywhere and I can’t hide.”
The stage that helped me the most was anger. For me, it was a simple inner dialogue of “I am going to look him in the eyes with all the fury I can muster so he knows I am not scared of him” which led to “I am going to stay alive, so he doesn’t win.” I used the rage I felt inside me to light my will to live and when you don’t know if you can survive anymore, spite will save you.
Once you are in a different environment from your attacker, you shouldn’t sit with spite any longer because it will create spikes on your beautiful heart.
You will get through this, but you will change from how you were before, and that is ok. You won’t trust as openly as you used to. You might feel like your emotions are plastic wrapped; you can see what they are but you still have a tough time feeling them. What happened isn’t your fault, nothing made this happen to you in order to make you stronger or more faithful. It happened because of an asshole person who wanted to feel powerful by hurting you.
The abuser broke the jar that held your heart, and now you have shattered glass. Your job isn’t to put it back together, but to create a beautiful mosaic with the pieces like stained glass in cathedrals.
