[This is one of many posts in the sexual assault series.]
I don’t mean to compare my assault with some giant news-making tragedy… I don’t really believe in comparing trauma, and I personally don’t think what I’ve been through even begins to even kind of compare with what people in the Boston bombing (and other national tragedies) went through…
But through my time in therapy (individual and group), and through talking with other survivors, I’ve found it helpful to think of assault in that lens, purely when you get so bogged down in “if I only I would’ve done this or that, this wouldn’t have happened.”
And yeah, it’s true that technically if you hadn’t been at a certain place at a certain time, then the thing that happened wouldn’t have happened to you…
But how could you know?
How could you know not to go a marathon? To the movies? To school?
You can’t know not to go to these things…
…But I never thought about how tenuous the relationships might be with you and the people who were somehow involved in these things. Maybe they invited you to that movie in Aurora, CO, or even just told you they wanted to see it.
Did they bring the gun in the theater? (No.) Did they have any idea that would happen? Of course not. But are they a big part of the reason you were there? Yeah.
Can your brain get around forgiving them? I guess that depends on a lot of factors.
(This probably also applies to people who were perfect drivers, but a drunk driver still hit them and harmed their passenger, etc etc. Anyone who was not responsible for the harm, but was just close enough to it that they felt like they were…)
As I try to come back to the “real world,” and build some relationships back, I do know that, of course, it is sad that some friendships seemingly no longer really exist, and/or seem to be viable, but at least I can understand why.
I can easily see that maybe I only just met the person after all this happened, and they only knew me as flaky and sad and cry-y, and they have no history with me to fight for, and a person who potentially could’ve been a good friend falls out of my life.
It’s still totally very sad. But it’s completely understandable. I have been such a ‘crazy’ person. Who would be friends with me?
But then, in all of the details I’ve gone over a million times, one that won’t stop sticking out is that I was supposed to be in California on one of the days that seemed to lead up to my (second) assault (but I stayed, because a friend came into town last minute for work, and I wanted to see them).
Let’s all bear in mind, sexual assault guy had already assaulted me once! I was already pretty on edge and showing signs of someone going through trauma. I was already in trouble! There are a million things that contributed to both that one, and the second one. And it is not my friend’s fault who came to NY.
She didn’t do anything!
I hadn’t told her about the first assault (that I definitely was still just kind of trying to think of as like “that was so weird/mean/rude/wrong,” and not understanding it yet as the true boundary-crossing, trauma-inducing thing it was (sorry))… Anyway, she didn’t know. There was no way for her to know how incredibly on edge I was, and how desperately I needed to escape home to California for my long weekend.
She was just someone reaching out to a great friend, saying she was coming into town, and asking if she could stay – totally exceptionally unremarkably normal friend stuff to do.
Did she make me stay in town that weekend to be with her? No, she did not.
Did she make me get into a fight with sexual assault guy while she was at her work thing? Heck no, she did not! She has nothing to do with that.
Did she have aaaaanything to do with the fallout throughout the following week that ended with me crying underneath the man who wouldn’t stop?
She wasn’t even here! She had nothing to do with it.
And yet.
– and this is where I’ll pick up tomorrow.
[This is from the sexual assault series.]