Riddled with shame, learning to place blame

“Riddled with Shame, Learning to Place Blame” - compiled from journals in 2022

There is a tree in the environmental studies center of my college that reminds me of home. Not of Colorado, the mountains, or my family. Instead, I am reminded of the corner of my living room where this tree, tall and needled, sat. My dad obtained him when he, the tree, was just a sapling, big enough to sit on a windowsill and reach the sunlight barely coming into an old dorm room. I had a little sapling too, the same species, that sat on my windowsill when I was a freshman. I had bought him to bring me comfort, to remind me of safety after I was assaulted.

I try to close my mind, stop the moments flooding out of the door I’ve unlocked, but they are pushing forward. I can’t stop them now. They are swallowing my mind whole. For a few months, that’s all I am. A shell overrun with flashbacks. I’m not breathing clean air, it’s all poisoned by the past, slowly killing me, cell by cell.

***

The last time, or so I thought, that I would feel rough hands, I was nineteen. I wanted to make it work. I knew Henry wasn’t good, he’d done something wrong to my roommate, but she refused to say if it happened. She refused to admit that what he’d done was something I understood. Yet, he seemed nice. He told me I was pretty and smart. He wanted to be my boyfriend. It was the pandemic, I was lonely. So, I tried to make it work.

He’d come over to my apartment. We’d sit on my bed, with pillows against the wall, and watch movies. Always, every time, his hands would start to wander. He would slide his fingers, rough and hard, into my pants. He would start to touch me. Not in a comfortable way, not in a sexy or hot way, but like a machine, and it would hurt. My clit would sting against his touch. Let me fuck you. He would whisper as he pulled my shirt over my head and he kissed my chest. Not yet. I would say.

He would look at me like a sad puppy. Why? I’m so good, I promise you’ll like it. I shake my head. No. Not tonight. I didn’t want to give into him, I wasn’t ready. I was identifying this tangled understanding of sex and value and I wanted to detangle it. But he didn’t care.

Every night he would ask. He thought that because he fingered me, he deserved something more. But it hurt every time. I never really wanted him to touch me. But he kept asking. I felt drained. I felt lonely and didn’t want to admit I’d been wrong about him. So after a week of asking. I said yes. He slid inside me and immediately, pain. Immediately, discomfort. Immediately, fear. He pulled out, he was covered in blood, my blood. His disgust was so obvious as he climbed off of me. Maybe we should stop. I shook my head, humiliated, upset, in pain. I climbed off the bed and walked straight to the shower. I wanted him off of me. I showered, turning the water to boiling as I had done for the last year, since Nick. I wanted to shed my skin, I wanted no particle of these men left on me.

When I returned, he’d put his clothes on and was sitting on my bed. We finished our episode of television in silence. I felt like I had done something wrong, but I knew that I hadn’t. After the episode ended, he got up and left. He never spoke to me again. Guilt. Shame. Pain. Sadness. It’s all interchangeable at a point.

It was not one moment that cracked something open inside of me. It came from years of sexual repression, emotional abuse, shame all punctuated by a rape and assault after assault. Consent just a fantasy. It came from the deep shame about sexual promiscuity, porn, masturbation, desire. It was painted into my life with a wet brush, staining every area of my perception of sexuality. Homophobia, buried deep in my mother’s words, she didn’t want any of us to be non-normative or even sex-positive. The gentle disgust toward sex, porn, hooking up, lust, all buried in Christian history. I learned, from someone or everyone, that sex is not for me. It doesn’t need to feel good. I learned that sex is shameful. Is embarrassing. Is disgusting. I learned that I should hold shame for failed relationships, escapades. I was told I was always asking for it.

***

Nick’s on top of me now. He’s kissing me and rubbing my body. I thought it felt good. It was supposed to feel good, right? Then he’s rubbing his penis against me, my eyes are droopy and groggy. I drank too much again, I can’t really keep my eyes open as he kisses me. I was sleepy. The moments are coming in flashes, punctuated by black, I’m almost asleep. I feel his penis moving closer to my vagina. I wasn’t there though. I’m drifting into this haze. He’s positioned. He puts the tip into my body and my mind snaps awake. My eyes were open and I said No. Not without a condom. I don’t want to have sex tonight. Did I say all of this with his penis inside of me, did it even mean anything?

Of course. Sorry. He pulled his penis out and moved to sit up. I felt dizzy and confused about what had just happened. Did it happen? He moved backward too far and fell. We were about 5 feet off the ground and he landed hard. At that moment, I thought it was funny. Now, I think it was poetic justice. His head missed my roommate's bedpost by a few inches. Maybe his torment could have ended there. Instead, he got up, laughed it off, and put his clothes on. He waved me goodbye as I sat naked in my bed. Then, he left. I don’t remember if I felt anything. I don’t remember getting dressed, getting reading for bed.

I told a few friends what had happened the next day. I didn’t use words like assault or rape, I didn’t know that’s what it was. Instead, I said he had put the tip in and that I had been shocked that he did that and that he wasn’t wearing a condom when he did that. I had told them that I didn’t want that to be how I lost my virginity, that I wasn’t sure if it even counted. The ones who had listened fed me the liberal concept that virginity is a construct. That it did not have to count if I didn’t want it to. No one said anything about the lack of consent. No one said anything about the amount of alcohol I had consumed. No one said anything to see if I was okay. So, I swept it under the rug, letting it go into the dark parts of my mind. No one said anything, so I said nothing.

Nick is everywhere now. There was a time that he was nowhere and everywhere, simply haunting me, but now I see him on the street, in a lunch line, at the bar, at a party, and it’s actually, physically him, and I can’t hide. All I can do is look past him, holding power in my avoidant stare. He is always in my mind. When I’m with a lover, and they’re on top of me and I feel them against me, Nick is on my eyelids. He is provoking me, scaring me. I am forced to open my eyes to shoo away his form, to look at the person beside me. I think, I whisper, I chant, I am here with you. I am here with you. And when those words come out, embraced by the tip of my mind, I feel angry. I feel sad. I feel the unfairness and the injustice.

Why did he ruin this for me? Why is he permanently etched into the darkest parts of my mind? Physically and figuratively, he will not leave me and I hate it. He stands next to me or across from me. He tries to catch my eye as I scan the room. I know I am looking for the things that threaten me, only for my greatest threat to be right in front of me. I want to curl up into a ball of oblivion, swallow him up in my darkness, and birth light through these clouds that cover my eyes.

***

My mind snaps awake, my eyes are open. I’m sitting on the hill in the dark with the joint in my hand. I lock up those parts of my brain again, I can’t bear more than a few moments with them. They hurt so much. I buried that moment with Nick under blackouts and weed, under sex and abuse. I didn’t want to believe myself. I didn’t want to have had the unthinkable happen to me when I was drunk. When I was defenseless. When I was young. And here I was, sitting in the dark, alone, smoking a joint, trying to forget. Maybe not forget. But trying to wade through it, know what’s worth remembering, what’s worth dealing with, trying to find the point where I can let go.

I wish I could let go, but instead, I feel disconnected from every fiber of what I thought I was. Having spent my entire life trying to collect the pieces that make me me, it’s painful to look in the mirror and not recognize anything. I feel like nothing belongs to me, not my clothes, not my hair, not my nose, not my fingers. Sometimes I wish I didn’t know what I looked like, it would ground me better because I wouldn't believe that I could be quantified by my image.

I have one small mirror in my room, it’s slightly too tall for me, so all I can see are my eyes reflecting back on me. I don’t know what my body looks like most days, which allows the disconnection to not feel as strange. I honestly am okay with not feeling set in my body. I sometimes wonder how it would feel to be centered in the flesh that people identify as me, but that idea of knowing myself through my body was taken a long time ago.

***

I never understood why they looked at me on the street. I couldn’t imagine that my body, one that was riddled with illness, fat, exhaustion, and rejection, could be something enticing. I would drive down the street and men, much older than me, would roll their windows down. They would stare, they would ask Where are you going, baby? You going home? Can I come? And I would stare forward, I would not have any expression, nothing to give them a reason to continue. When it persisted, I would take a long way home, curving through neighborhoods I knew well.

Sometimes when I drive, I still stare forward. I still fear looking at others in their cars, I can sometimes feel their eyes on me. Thinking, quantifying however they want to. My image is theirs, at least, that’s what the world made me feel.

***

Purple, yellow, blue. That’s what I see when I look down at the edges of my breasts. Finger prints. They’re fingerprints, left from the day before. They peak out of any shirt I try on, I can’t hide them. I take my phone and open Snapchat. I see he sent me another message. I open it but don’t read it. I click on the three dots in the corner of the conversation. I select block.

***

I swipe, left and right. I look for people my age in my school. Tony. He pops up on my screen. He’s smiling, throwing a baseball. We connect. He thinks I’m pretty. He says nice things. I agree to meet up with him, but I’m three glasses into a bottle of rosé with my friends and they say, aren’t you too drunk? I shake my fuzzy head. The boy I think I love doesn’t care about me. I’m fine. I want something that I can control, I can’t control myself, can’t control how this boy feels. But I can control this. I can go. Kiss a little. Feel a little.

I walk up to his room. It’s starting to get cold outside and my fingers sting from the short walk over to his dorm. He opens the door, his room is warm and his bed looks even warmer. Maybe I am a little drunk. He crawls into his bed and pulls the covers back, an invitation. I slide my boots off, and leave my jacket on the chair by the desk.

I crawl into bed next to him, his body is warm and instantly, my tense muscles, frozen almost, begin to relax. He slides one arm around my back and I breathe into his kind embrace. He turns on the movie he was watching on the television monitor that covers his small mirror and we’re quiet. A few minutes later, he kisses me. It’s fine, I don’t think he’s kissed many people. Then the other arm creeps up my body to my chest and he grabs my breasts. He tugs. I grab his hand and move it down to my waist and turn away from him. We do this dance for the rest of the movie.

When the movie ends, I strip the covers and his arms off of me. I sit on his chair and pull my boots on. He smiles at me. I smile back. He wonders if I’ll come back again tomorrow, classes don’t start for a few days. I nod, pull my jacket over my body, and leave.

The next day, I keep my promise and I come back. Feeling cold again, I slide easily and excitedly into his warm bed against him and shiver. He holds me close to him and I feel something different. I feel unsure at this moment. He turns on a movie and begins to kiss me. He starts pulling at me again. It’s starting to hurt. I whisper, gentle, but I don’t think he hears me. He keeps pulling. Then he whispers, with his hot, harsh breath, blow me. I shake my head. Come on. Again, I shake my head and pull his hands off my breasts.

But they creep back. They pull harder. He demands, blow me. I shake my head vigorously, but I can see his erection from his pants and his hurting me. I look at him in the eyes, I’ll touch you. But no blow job. He shrugs, that’s enough for him. He tried to touch me through my tight leggings, but I push his hand away. I just need to get through this, I think. He cums, I shake. He smiles, I’m quiet. I pull myself out from underneath his covers. He asks me where I’m going. We haven’t finished the movie. I don’t say anything. I leave. I tell no one, out of embarrassment, but the bruises say more than I could. Yet no one says anything. It’s not the first time, nor that last.

***

I have thought about my story for a very long time, for many years keeping my experiences of assault kept tightly away in my brain as if they were a dirty secret, something to feel shameful of. As I’ve worked through my healing, I have slowly broken down the sturdy door that kept those things hidden away, fought through the flood of jumbled, disordered flashbacks. Even with the poison leeching out of my body, I still struggle to speak about my experiences. I have rarely been interested in sharing what happened to me, when I was 15, when I was 17 when I was 18, and multiple times at college in varying degrees. Now, into adulthood, I am still not free from harm.

I don’t like to hear my voice as it shakes and my eyes get blurry and I start to feel afraid and disassociated. This used to happen every time I told the story of my assaults. But my experience, my identity, as a survivor is not just the men that groped me, raped me, bruised me. It is the story of the aftermath, the trauma, the unfathomable pain and confusion, the fight to heal: that is my identity as a survivor. My assaults have changed so much for me. How I date, how I look at my body, how I walk across campus in broad daylight and in the darkness of the night, how I am held by a partner, how I enjoy sex.

Everything is residual. I feel it every day in the labored breath when I see a hickey right where his fingertips bruised me. I feel it every night when something touches me in the dark. I feel it when a scarf is wrapped around my throat. I couldn’t breathe most days. I’m still relearning to breathe.

***

There is a tree in the environmental studies center that reminds me of home. It sheds its needles all across the floor, marking its protective circle and I want to be that tree. Vicious and brutal at first glance, soft and gentle at the touch. This tree eventually grew too tall for our low-ceilinged house, and we found him a new home with two lovers just starting off, beginning to write their shared family history where he might watch over another little girl who will long for his courage to draw a protective circle around her own sacred branches.