I keep trying to “get better.” I go to therapy, I’m doing Project 882… I’m trying whatever I can do to try.
And it all helps. But the one thing that helps more than anything else, is being SO far away from him.
I already deferred school, I already don’t set foot in even the whole entire borough he lives in.
And yet. The world is small. It feels like I’m often with people who know him. He comes up.
I feel best when I’m in *my* world – when I go to a place he’s never lived, where he doesn’t work, and he’s just so unbelievably far from me that there’s practically no danger of ever running into him, ever hearing a story about him – just getting to be away from him.
And it is probably the greatest push/pull of my life – the complete and total freedom of feeling so far away from him and that part of my life, vs the desire to stay in the city I have dreamt of living in my whole entire life.
Everything just feels at odds with each other.
And at this point, I’ve talked to a fair number of people who’ve been assaulted. And a lot of the people I talk to just left. They left their lives. It seemed easier to start anew. A bunch of people even got full new careers.
And some of them loved what they’d been doing! Some had been in similar situations as me where they got whatever that dream was they were chasing, and then they left it! Because it just seemed impossible to continue on.
Their current life had basically ended as they knew it. They wanted a brand new life, and they went and got it.
And everyone I’ve talked to in that category loves their new line of work, and their new friends, and their new scenery. They seem *really* (truly) happy.
And sometimes I imagine just changing my name to Sara (or who knows what) and going to school and becoming a doctor, and just living away. Forget musical theater, forget New York, even forget “Aurora.” Just go start utterly anew…
And even if I *could* have an amaaaazing life as Sara the neurosurgeon, I don’t think I want to.
I don’t want to have some incredible option B that turns out well, because I don’t want option A taken from me – and I certainly don’t want to just acquiesce option A myself.
And maybe that’s foolish – when you see over and over how happy people are with their option Bs, when their option As were set on fire – to just stay in the inferno and be like “I’m stronger than the fire!”
But maybe I can find enough water, or fire extinguishers, or blankets, or who knows what.
I just don’t know.
[This is from the sexual assault series.]