If you’re getting notified about this, FYI, this post is old.
Picking up from yesterday –
At that point it really felt like, “I’m not going to school. I have no apartment, and no job. What on earth is keeping me here?”
(I mean, I guess to some extent, my therapist. But… you can’t really stay in a city purely for a therapist, I think… I mean, you can do whatever you want. But with no place to live and no source of income, it seemed like maybe New York wouldn’t be the correct option, no matter how great my therapist is.)
And yet. I found a job. And an apartment. And I “stayed.” I put stayed in quotes because I stayed without staying. After everything happened, I “stayed” in New York, but I was traveling nearly every weekend, and definitely on every hiatus. So, at that point, was I even actually “staying”?
And throughout this process, I just kept asking myself, “What would Hillary Rodham Clinton do?” To me, she is potentially the strongest, most resilient woman in the world. So… What would she do?
On the one hand, she would never be intimidated by a man. She stakes her ground and stays firmly planted in the things she earns. So, maybe she would’ve just stayed in school, even with him there…
But, she’s also human. And she’s super savvy and strategic and brilliant. So, taking all that into account… What if she had been suffering from PTSD? Maybe the “smart, strategic, savvy” move would’ve been to go and get better and then come back to school with a fresh start? (That’s what I chose, so I hope it was the right Hillary Rodham Clinton-esque choice.)
I know she never backs down from a fight. But she also thinks about the long game, and the overarching goals of her life. And it all just seemed like nearly impossible decisions. and I wanted to make the Hillary Rodham Clinton choice – the strongest, smartest, resilient-est choices…
And I don’t really know if I did. I didn’t know what to do. It’s been confusing. But I tried. And I struggled with the decisions. And I just always thought I should talk a little here about how I came to those decisions. So… now, I have.
[This post is from the series on sexual assault.]