If Anything Happens to Me
Content warning: sexual violence, mental illness, suicide
O n April 8, 2016, I received an email in my inbox: “If anything happens to me …”
The email was mainly photographs, a bruise-and-blood collage of rape. Photos of wrists rubbed raw below the hand. Legs peppered with purple patches. Scratch marks in short red streaks.
And a Facebook profile photo. A photo of a guy with quasi-curly hair wearing a nice-looking suit and a nice-looking tie and a nice-looking smile. Picture of the guy I’m 90% sure was my rapist is attached, the email read. That part was a complete lie. It was more like 5%, if that. But she knew if anything happened to her, no one would bother to look into 5%, or even 50%. So for motivational purposes, she made it 90.
The girl who wrote the email did so from the confines of a dark, 98-square-foot Columbia University dorm room. The room had white walls littered with thumbtack bullet holes and a conspicuous tan stain on the carpet. The hallway outside the room smelled like cat pee, and slices of the smell slipped through the cracks where the door was too far from the frame.
She typed the email with shaking hands, fingers buzzing above the black keys that clicked too loudly. Tears slid down the gutters between her nose and her cheeks, finally settling in little puddles.
She was drawing a map to a murder suspect. Her murder suspect. The man she thought would finally come back and kill her.
She imagined what her body would look like if it was found. Eyes open and bloodshot? Bruises blossoming on beds of skin? Or a small pool of blood embedded under her long brown hair? That one comforted her. At least let me die with my clothes on, she thought to herself. (That only made her sob more.)
She hid the email draft and opened another email draft, a thank you letter to one of her professors. She’d been writing the letter since February, since her professor looked her in the eyes and told her it was okay she was so “spacey” and coming to school was, in and of itself, a brave act. She scanned over it again. The comma in the second paragraph looked off. She moved it, then moved it back. She knew she should work on the other email, but the thank you email felt equally important. She didn’t know why that was what she clung to, why that email was the has-to-get-done thing on the death bed that had become her everyday life, but it was that one thing magnified by the fear of her impending death. There’s always that one thing, she’d once been told.
And so she transitioned from fixing typos in the thank you letter to uploading pictures she’d taken of her violated body. She only sent one of the emails that day. It arrived in my inbox at 4:30pm on the dot.
“If anything happens to me …”
A lot had already happened to her. And a lot of her interactions with the world were altered.
The way she flinched at the faintest sound of a closing door.
The way she stopped showing up to her queer group meetings because being surrounded by queerness had begun to nauseate her, making her remember her rapist’s whispered slur.
The way the remnants of the work she used to love had been stuffed underneath her bed because god forbid her rapist saw her carrying books about queer and trans issues to the package center.
She remembered back to starting a Gay-Straight Alliance in eighth grade. Standing up in front of her middle school wearing a grey denim jacket and a NOH8 shirt. Planning what It Gets Better videos to show her classmates. Practicing a sing-along for the Muppets song, “Rainbow Connection,” with ten ukulele players in tow. Laughing hysterically when, at the end of the year, a kid came out as straight.
And she remembered back to high school, to applying to college. Eating chocolate muffins and orange juice — an odd combination, she knew — every Friday morning to cope. Hitting electric yellow badminton birdies in the gym, basketballs slamming ominously onto the floor in the background, when she should have been studying for tests. Crying in frustration over that sickening red ACT practice book because she couldn’t for the life of her raise her cumulative score above a 33, which somehow at the time didn’t seem good enough. (Now she wonders why she spent so much of her life on that stupid test.) How she so desperately wanted to go to schools she didn’t think she’d get into.
How much she wanted to be where she ultimately met her rapist.
She hated how she’d been to as many schools as rapes she’d experienced, how her life was spent fluctuating between the three violations like sane people fluctuate between TV shows.
The first time lasted twenty-seven minutes; she’d counted on the clock behind him. (Is that amount of time normal? she still wondered.) Everything got green and blurry after a little while, so it became harder to read the numbers. She remembered thinking about how she’d once seen a spider on the rug she was on, and being scared a spider would crawl onto her and she wouldn’t be able to get away. She saw a particle of dust illuminated by the streetlamp light that came through the window, and she stared at it as it floated. Floated like she so desperately wanted to.
The second time, the most Law & Order: SVU-approved time, was perhaps, in hindsight, the most physically painful. It was a stranger, it was night, and she was in her dorm room totally sober. (So she was a “real” victim, right?) She loved writing, but she still struggled to describe what it was like to wake up on her stomach only a few weeks into college to someone raping her; words like “burning” and “tearing” just didn’t seem to cut it when she tried to use them to describe what she felt. She still remembered how she kept screaming underwater when she swam the next morning, the chlorinated pool that usually gave her strength then only adding to the pain in her body.
And the third time was full of no words she could say. He made a point of being unusually gross so she couldn’t share details — that was intentional, she was sure. Everything was intentional. Intended to embarrass. Intended to hurt. Intended to destroy the parts of her identity she held nearest and dearest to her heart.
That is, if he meant for her to live at all.
And that’s the time where she lay there for a while considering whether or not she wanted to die.
She remembered the first time in life she knew she wanted to die. Like, really die. When she reached that point where everything that could go wrong seemed to and she dreamt of jumping off a bridge and slamming into salty smooth concrete below, drinking bubblegum-favored diphenhydramine for breakfast, or feel the stinging of a cold kitchen knife against her skin.
She was thirteen, her doctors flipping between the depression and bipolar disorder pages in the DSM more often than she flipped back and forth between wanting to live and not. (She knew, of course, that she really had PTSD, but how can you out yourself as having that without also outing yourself as a survivor?)
She was in the big bathroom stall at her middle school, the first day she realized she wanted to die. It was the bathroom that smelled like gym shorts, even though no one bothered to wear gym shorts for gym. She was crouched in the corner between the toilet and the wall, head leaning against the smooth white paint, hot tears rolling in slick rivers down her cheeks. She didn’t remember what the exact thing was that made her curl up in a ball, but she remembered the feeling of nothing but fog around her. Her head pounding with every mean thing anyone had ever said to her. Her body repeating her violations in overdrive. How much she just wanted to scream, Make it stop, over and over again. How much she realized she wanted to actually make it stop. Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop.
Years later, she had that same feeling lying on the floor of her dorm room. After the third rape, when he left her bound and bleeding on the floor. She was given the choice: try to live or be lazy and die. And she lay there pondering the latter for a while, every part of her body still in pain. It would be a fitting end to how she perceived her life after her rapes: laziness. Not making any attempt. Giving up. Worthless. (Ironically, it was the grossness of his assault that motivated her to save herself; she didn’t want anyone to know the details, so she forced herself to live to hide the evidence.)
Soon the same thing she longed for — death — simultaneously became her greatest fear.
O f course, she couldn’t think about any of what had happened to her and fears about her safety without also thinking about the Columbia University administrators who got more dollars in a day than seconds she thought she had left to live.
The first responders more interested in questioning her queerness than telling her what her rights were under Title IX.
The report about her October rape to Columbia’s Student Conduct and Community Standards office (SCCS) that lay dead, accruing as much dust as she accrued permanent scars, months before her perpetrator raped her again.
The way Columbia’s Title IX coordinator, Marjory Fisher, turned and walked away silently when she wondered aloud if she would matter more as a corpse than as a living person.
The administrators, like Jeri Henry from SCCS, who leaned forward over their fortress-like desks and “encouraged” her to leave, asking things like:
“Are you really happy here?”
She’s still pondering how she’s “really happy here.” She’s been asked why she’s still here a lot. And she still finds it hard to explain that for every person at Columbia who makes her want to leave, there are people who help her stay. The people that make life worth every tear-filled, orange-juice-chocolate-muffin day.
The professor-turned-friend who had five-hour coffee with her a couple months after her third rape, the coffee filled with more silence than anyone had ever given her to occupy. (She didn’t realize before then that there would be some quiet gaps in the world if she wasn’t alive to speak.)
The professor who paid out of pocket for her to get medical attention when she was still in physical pain long after her rapes.
The fellow activists who marched up eight flights of stairs with her to Columbia’s SCCS office in solidarity, the same people who brought her Oreos and crunchy chocolate chip cookies when Columbia told her that doing basic things to investigate her rapes was “futile.”
The girl who hugged her as she sobbed at having to tell a friend that their best option was to report their assaults to the same Columbia offices that had so wildly failed her.
The friends (and even casual acquaintances) who sent her pictures of baby animals when she was stressed or triggered.
And now, after all of that, she sits in her dorm room and braces for facing suspension or expulsion. She doesn’t know whether or not she should laugh at the fact that the “anything” that happens to her might end up being disciplinary action, not murder. Disciplinary action for audio recording meetings during the “investigation” into her rapes. For recording Columbia administrators saying they weren’t going to bother to do anything to keep her safe.
As long as Columbia is deliberating whether or not to punish her, she feels she must deliberate whether or not playing a 30-second audio clip of one of her meetings at a rally was worth risking everything she’s fought so hard for. Worth every practice test, bathroom breakdown, try-not-to-flinch-when-you-sit day.
In reading about Dean’s Discipline last week, the thing she potentially faces, she found that if Columbia tried to punish her, she’d have to write a statement of no more than five single-spaced pages (2,500 words or so) explaining herself. She knew the goal of that was apologizing for her behavior.
But upon preemptively sitting down to write 2,500 words explaining herself in the event Columbia decided to threaten her, she realized her explanation was this: a retelling of how hard she’s fought to be “here” in every sense of the word. She didn’t want to apologize; she didn’t want to hide what she’d done; she didn’t want to hide the ways in which she’d almost given up in the past.
She realized that there’s space on this planet, like the space the professor on the receiving end of her thank you email gave her, she can occupy.
If anything happens to me, know I didn’t give up; I, and all other survivors of sexual and dating violence, deserve to be here.
[Note: If you’re interested in helping prevent aforementioned disciplinary action from happening, consider signing this petition demanding Columbia allow students to record meetings with administrators during the gender-based misconduct process on campus.]
