Picking up from yesterday –
Not only did the whole assault and fallout and everything affect my closest relationship(s), it also affected my relationships with basically everybody else.
Immediately after it happened, I tried to go do something practically every night. I was just trying to keep my mind off of it – stay distracted. So I started hanging out with basically anyone I’d known, at any part of my life, who re-emerged through social media, or friends of friends, etc.
And every time, I was distracted indeed… but not from my problems, my nightmares, my experience of being assaulted. No. I was distracted by that stuff from the people I was supposed to be hanging out with.
I could feel my eyes glossing over, not being able to concentrate on what people were saying.
I also wasn’t able to talk about much outside of sexual assault guy. So, sometimes, even with all this other really wonderful stuff going on in my life, I still wouldn’t be able to help but mention, “oh yeah, boy problems, man.” And I’d talk about this “annoying” guy – not in, like, big detail of what was actually happening (because these weren’t appropriate times/people with whom to be having these giant heavy conversations (that also I wasn’t even sure I wanted to have)… but since it was the only thing on my mind, I couldn’t help talking about it at least a little)…
So, suffice it to say, it was confusing for everybody, I’m pretty sure. “Why is this girl so preoccupied with some random fight with some random guy?”
So, while I don’t think anyone was necessaaaaaarily like, “Oh, I hate that girl,” I also don’t think people were super excited about the possibility of trying to become better friends with this kinda empty, vacant, distracted lady.
And I stopped being into the possibility of going out in the world with other human beings.
It became hard to conjure up the strength to go out with people. And I just started to become a bit isolated.
Not to mention, some of the people who would’ve been the logical people to try to reach out to and be friends with (such as anybody in BMI)… I just wanted to stay away from all of them. It’s hard to totally explain all the reasons why. I don’t know if it was that I didn’t want to “bring them into the drama,” or I didn’t want to feel bad telling them that their friend had done something bad, or I didn’t want to put myself in a situation of going along like everything is fine while potentially hearing about this dude or whatever. So, the easiest thing was just to not to talk to them – to basically not talk to anybody.
So, now that we’ve heard how my closest relationships were ruined (oof), and my acquaintance-ships also suffered (gah! Aye aye aye, what a mess, right?!), let’s also talk about how romantic relationships suffered too – tomorrow.
[This is a post from the sexual assault series.]