[This is another post in the sexual assault series.]
I’ve talked about some of this in here before…
For instance, how I think in some ways, it’s easier for us if people are cartoon villains… It’s easy for us to see that Donald Trump is a bad guy. But nuance? Nuance is hard! To think someone we think we know, or someone who appears as a good guy, is capable of something we can’t imagine… it’s really hard.
And I have this exceptionally irrational fear that one of these days, for some reason, someone will do a giant deep dive into all of my communications or interactions with sexual assault guy from every thing they can piece together from any source (including old texts he probably still has or whatever), and they’ll see one good or non-pressuring thing he said, and all of a sudden, it will be unbelievable that he did something bad.
First off, this is a crazy thought. Who do I think I am? I am not a famous person. No one cares enough to get that much in the weeds about my life and everyone who’s ever been in/around it.
Secondly, even if somebody hacked me, I deleted all of my communication with sexual assault guy. My goal was that I never wanted to remember any of it. I thought it was the “healthy” thing to just wipe everything – not focus on it or spend too much time overanalyzing it…
[Hahahahaha, I say as I carefully unpack tiny details at least once a week with a therapist (sometimes more with group therapy, or also endless hours with my friends, etc.)… If I’d have know it hurts potentially more to have basically nothing to look back on to help you try to see the situation from a sliiiightly more birds eye view, I would’ve saved everything (though I could also totally see how that would make it all worse, who’s to say?)…]
Anyway. Even if someone hacked me, I’d have nothing. I even went to a data recovery place (two actually(!) – one for a second opinion/try when the first place couldn’t) when I realized (as I said above) that it might give some clarity (maybe?) to see as much communication as I could again, and see places he scared me, and got too mean, etc. etc. (to hopefully make me feel less crazy when I (hopefully?) see reality in front of my face)…
Anyway, neither of those places were able to help. Two teams of professionals couldn’t retrieve anything. So, I think it’s all pretty unretrievable from my end…
And maybe that’s for the best. The world doesn’t happen through text. How many thousands of minutes did we have in real life or phone conversations? Texts would only tell a small part of the story (ultimately), and seeing them might not have helped me really understand anything after all…
Anyway, I guess he could potentially decide to release some communications. (But why would he drag himself into this mess and out who he is?) But again, this isn’t a world-turning story. This is a simple story on a blog…
Think of all the “dramatic” things that have happened to actually wildly famous people. Did we ever get a giant published printout of Rihanna and Chris Brown’s text messages? To my knowledge, we did not (just as we should not have – I’m just saying, if it didn’t happen to famous people, why would it happen to me?).
I mean, where am I living? In the world of Scandal or How To Get Away With Murder or something? Where I think there’s some highly trained team constantly around who can hack anyone at a moment’s notice – and even if there was, that me and/or sexual assault guy would be the target of that? Of all the people in the world, our dumb text messages is what the world would be after?
And yet, even after all that logic, I have this weird fear that somewhere along the lines, someone will find some old text message, or email, or something. And maybe they will find one time he was being kind or non-pressuring…
And then somehow that’ll mean that he never forced himself on me.
He was not awful, and pressuring, and mean (and even criminal) every single moment of every single day. (That’s not how abusive relationships work… How do you think they start? By someone being terrible to you 24/7? Why would you even allow it to start then? No. It starts with love bombing, and rainbows, and happiness so that then you questioning every time you desperately want to get out after that, because you know it to be a “good” thing…)
He wasn’t awful all the time. That’s part of what makes it confusing. And so, sometimes I have this totally irrational fear that someone is going to find some piece of evidence of a time or two or whatever that he was “decent”, and then they’re gonna decide all of my pain and all of this was never real. And that has been a peek at my weird brain today.
[This is another post in the sexual assault series.]