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I am still in contact with my very first psychologist, Dr. Mike. A few months ago he emailed me to see how I was doing and thanked me for my contribution to the “No Means No” program for first year students at The College of Wooster. I stopped reading, I read it again. I had written an anonymous monologue about being raped. I was surprised to hear that it was still read each year. It was first read when my brother was a first year, I wanted it to be anonymous because he did not know it had happened. It was read by a female behind a white curtain, so only her shadow was seen and her voice was heard. I wanted people to hear my story so that they could understand the dangers of alcohol and drugs. I wanted them to know that even though I was under the influence of these substances, the rape was not my fault. I didn’t go to the police because I thought it was my fault since I had chosen to drink and smoke pot.
Back in February, I asked Dr. Mike to send me a copy, because I had never saved one for myself. It arrived on a few days before my birthday in February and it has been sitting on my dresser for 4 months. I opened it two days ago, and read it. It was my plan to post it on my blog, but it is very disturbing and if you are struggling with PTSD, I suggest you not read it. I will be writing a follow-up to this post, after-all, it was written 6 years ago.
So here it is, written in 2004, edited…. my voice.
***I have removed the first half of this essay because I felt it was too graphic and disturbing. I will just say that I was raped, alcohol and drugs were involved.***
I never told anyone. I never went to the police, or to an emergency room to be examined and have evidence collected. I was afraid. I didn’t want my parents to know that I had been really drunk and high. I didn’t want my father to know who the men were. If I couldn’t be sure of what actually happened, how could they know whether they were guilty, it was their word against mine. If I could keep my doubt to myself, the world would still believe that it had order, and that would keep it still somewhat safe. I didn’t want it to affect anyone else but myself. So, I shut it out. I took care of the physical needs, and stopped thinking about it. I tried to convince myself that it never happened, that maybe I was just this drunk whore who had accidentally hooked up with two men who were almost 10 years older than me.
Everything that I imagined became truth, because I believed it, and I lived it as if it were true. I became what I imagined, in the moment I imagined it. I sat in silence and suffered. I became severely depressed. I stopped eating and focused on exercising excessively. I went in and out of relationships, shutting men out if they got too close. I had extreme anxiety issues, and small panic attacks if I thought too much about what had happened. My friends noticed my mood deteriorating, as well as my weight.
That happened to me when I was 20 years old. After that day, I had no concept of a life without that apartment on Lake Avenue haunting my every thought. I knew all had changed. I knew by what had happened, I would never be the same. As time passed, the silence and the secret, my secret, cultivated shame. Every morning, every day, I wished with all of my heart to make it go away. I felt dirty and used. I no longer felt pure, carefree, and innocent, I was different. If only everyone knew how gross and bad I was on the inside, they would think I was awful.
The darkness I felt inside for so many months existed without my realizing its devastating effect. The more I seek to understand it presence, the more I understand the relevance of the act of purging and restricting food. For whatever reason, the action of purging through physical activity and severely restricting my calories somehow made me feel like could reach the pain, the misunderstood and misplaced darkness. I felt I deserved to hurt. The insides were bad, dirty, nasty, and weird.
What I did to myself seemed only fitting for what I knew was looming beneath what we all saw. Obviously, I would do anything to take the darkness into the light. I wanted to stop hiding, stop running from the poison that consumed me. My futile attempt to make the outside perfect caused an immeasurable amount of pressure. I held my breath in the hope that it would work, that I could make the outside so right it would change the inside back to clean and normal. I don’t attribute my eating disorder to one thing. It’s had to say to how great an extent the rape contributed to my eating disorder. In reality, its magnitude is irrelevant. Recognizing and working through the pieces is my primary concern.
I felt as thought I was a victim. Today, I am not. I am a survivor. This is one of many ways I can show myself, and you, that I will walk on, continuing to make the most out of a hideous, disgusting, life-changing event.
I know I am not responsible for their sins. I will be damned if I let them have one more day of my life.
I certainly didn’t get here overnight, or in a few weeks. I denied it for a long time. The most important part of my healing process, and it is a process, has been through helping other people. I have been helping survivors through a program that I have volunteered for two summers. I offer them information, advice, and make sure they know their options. I have been seeing a counselor, for years here at the college. I have accomplished many things in my short life, but the accomplishment I am most proud of is the decision to ask for help. My counselor, Dr. Mike Malmon, has been my saving grace, and without him, I would not have made it this far. I continue to see him on a weekly basis. I am so proud of how far I have come.
It’s in my nature to want to make a happy ending. That’s what I did for so long, through saying I survived and was fine. Now it’s important that I say instead: ”The story does not ever really end. There is no ‘fine’. I no longer have a strong need or desire to forget what happened to me.
In each year of my life, I can look forward to shedding more. Each time I stumble, the memory grows easier, and I move a little closer to peace within myself.
Thank you.
Click on the link below and check out pages 9 and 10 in the February 2011 edition of “You Are Not Alone.” Page 9 is written by me and 10 is written by my Mom!
The Support Letter is a monthly recovery ezine filled with personal recovery stories, inspirational sayings, special guest interviews with eating disorder experts, authors and survivors, recovery and body image tips, poems, artwork, give-aways, and more. The main messages of the Support Letter are “you are not alone” and “recovery really IS possible!“
Since my move to Boston, back in 2007, birthdays with friends has been a challenge. My 25th was spent with my then boyfriend and all of his friends, a party he organized. I attempted to have a 26th birthday party with girlfriends in Boston, but realized I had very few. There were girls I wanted to be friends with, so I tried making my 26th celebration about “making new friends”, it didn’t work. My psychologist wasn’t surprised, “You haven’t laid the groundwork for a friendship with any of these girls, you can’t expect them to appear at your door on your birthday when you haven’t given them the time of day otherwise,” she told me. And, she was right. I was so wrapped up in my romantic relationship, I hadn’t made any real friends. I ignored my 27th birthday in Boston, but celebrated at home, in Ohio, as usual. Then, 2011 arrived.
ED has always told me I wasn’t good enough to have friends. He told me that people didn’t like me. I believed him. ”Why should people like me?” I asked myself. ED made me feel unworthy of love and desire. ED told me that I didn’t deserve friendships. He made me believe I was fat, ugly, disgusting, repulsive, and dirty. He told me my hair was out-of-place, my skin was crawling with imperfections, and no one could be friends with someone who had thighs the size of mine. Just like a bully in middle school would have said, only it was ED instead, “Don’t bother inviting anyone to celebrate your birthday because no one will want to come!” ”You’re stupid,” ED told me, “a wonderful man broke up with you in August because you weren’t good enough for him, you dropped out of graduate school in September because it was too hard to work 50 hour weeks and attend 2 classes, you lost your babysitting job and a third of your income because you could no longer starve yourself and take care of two children.” Awful, I know, but sadly those words ran through my head, constantly.
Isolation is a huge part of my eating disorder. I hate saying that, because I really do enjoy “alone time” and I don’t think there is anything wrong with wanting to spend a Saturday with just my dog. My treatment team thinks otherwise, so I try to do something once a week that involves other people. Try doing this when you have a very loud voice (ED) in your head screaming, “STAY IN BED, WATCH ANOTHER DVD, TAKE ANOTHER NAP, DON’T SOCIALIZE!” It’s extremely difficult. Two weeks out of residential treatment, I was feeling rather brave and decided to have a 28th birthday celebration in a few weeks. I have a roommate now, surely she would celebrate with me! I had now known my co-workers for two years, surely half of them would be able to celebrate! I also have quite a few friends I made through ED treatment since November 2010. So I did it. I created a cute “evite” and invited 24 girls to celebrate with me. Yes, I was being ambitious by inviting that many, but I did it anyways. I looked up each email address through Facebook and sent out the cute invitation a month in advance of the party. This was the easy part. The hard part was waiting for responses. I received (here comes ED with the numbers and comparison) 6 “yes” and 1 “no”. ED and I justified the 1 “no” because the friend was going to be out-of-town. I continued to wait, and wait some more. I checked the evite every few days to see who had received it (evite has this great application that shows you when the person read your invitation so you can be sure they received it and then question why they couldn’t press “yes, no, or maybe”!). ED was loud, “See, I told you no one would want to come, why did you even bother? This is so embarrassing!” I told him to shut up and resisted my urges to cancel the party. My black and white thinking was taking over… either everyone comes or no one comes at all!! Again, I fought back. Three days before the event, I sent a text message out to the girls who had RSVP’d “yes” and asked if they were all still coming. Two didn’t respond, one apologized for not being able to come, and four were still coming. I had two choices, I could cancel and be angry at the people not coming, or I could make the reservation for 5 and give myself the opportunity to have a nice time. We all know which one ED wanted to do… So I called the restaurant, reserved the table for 6 (just in case!), and picked out a dress to wear.
A co-worker, my roommate, and three girls from treatment met at a trendy restaurant on Newbury Street for a few hours of stories, drinks, dinner, dessert, and laughter. I had a wonderful time! I left ED at home and lived in the moment and felt so thankful for the 5 women who had celebrated my 28th with me. Instead of dwelling on the 18 people who never responded, I embraced the 5 who did respond. And that, my friend, is a huge accomplishment for me.
xo
During therapy groups, people often discuss whether or not they should share information about their eating disorders. I have had an ED for the past 9 years and have been in therapy for 9 years, so I often just sit back and listen. I don’t remember contemplating over sharing my struggle with ED but I do remember struggling to share my experience of sexual assault. I believe that this struggle made my ED stronger.
I began sharing my experience with my very first therapist, “Dr. Mike”, in college. I also shared it with a then boyfriend at the end of my freshman year. I went on to have a relationship with him for many, many years, and I believed that he was the only one who could know this secret and still love me. A part of me still believes this, which is part of what lead to my anorexia relapse in August 2010. He moved to Boston in 2002 and I followed in 2007. We lived together, talked about getting married, adopted a puppy, went on exotic vacations, but ended up, mutually, going our separate ways in April of 2009. I have told other men, but “J” was the only one who ever stuck around. I have tried sharing my experience with men I have dated over the past year and half, but each one of them ran the other way. They felt sorry for me, which is not what I wanted. I wanted a way to explain my addictions. My horrific experiences have made me who I am today. I have not dated anyone since a break-up in August 2010, I was too focused on ED, and now I am focused on recovery. I plan to tell more men that I date and to use it as a “weeding out” process. I don’t share my story right away, but I do share it after a couple of months when I feel comfortable. I still hold on to that original boyfriend because he has been the only one that truly loved me, in spite of my experiences and addictions.
I wrote essays for “Take Back the Night” and “V-day”. I read these, out loud, to my peers. I even wrote a piece that has been read every year at a freshman orientation program known as, “No, means no!”. This essay was extremely difficult for me to read, and I never actually saw any of these performances. My therapist, Dr. Mike, organized everything and had a female voice read the essay behind a white curtain, so only her shadow was revealed. Dr. Mike told me it is the one “constant” in the “No, means no” production.
My memory of writing that essay is blurry. I can’t even remember what I said, I just know that I felt very ashamed but wanted to help others at the same time. I never saved a copy of the essay because I never wanted it to get in the wrong hands. Now that I have started this blog, I may ask Dr. Mike for a copy and put it on my blog.
I NEVER intended on sharing my sexual assault experiences with my parents or brother. I wanted to protect them. My thoughts were, “These terrible things happened to ME, why should I let it happen to them also?” This kept me stuck. I slowly started sharing my story with close girlfriends in college, but my family remained in the dark. I felt it was my job to protect them. Like many people with EDs, I created the worst possible scenario that could happen if I told my family. I thought of Law & Order: SVU episodes, Hollywood movies, Lifetime movies, novels, and memoirs. I combined all of those stories and had myself convinced that my family would fall apart if they knew. My mother and younger brother would sink into a deep depression and maybe even commit suicide. My father would be so angry, he would demand to know who raped me and then seek revenge by murdering the men that hurt me. It was black and white thinking, but I couldn’t be responsible for the downfall of my close family. So I remained silent.
Many years later, my mother and I were sitting in the Metroparks in Rocky River, Ohio, having lunch on a Spring day in April. I continued to struggle with ED and she said something to me… “If there’s something that’s keeping you stuck in your ED, I don’t want it to be me, so I need to tell you that I know you were raped.” My stomach dropped, my throat tightened, my chest hurt, my eyes widened, and I couldn’t look at her. I began to cry, and demanded to know how she knew the story. Had she known all along? Had she just found out recently? Had my Aunt told her? She told me she knew, for awhile. I don’t remember this but she said I wrote about it in my diary and then ripped out the pages and threw them in my bedroom trashcan. She found them one day, and read them. She became sick to her stomach and vomited. She didn’t share this with my father right away. She, too, was scared of what he might do. She didn’t share it with my brother. I still don’t know if she shared it with anyone. But she had to suffer by herself. Eventually, she did tell my father, and years later, she told my brother. And here’s the thing… nothing bad happened. My father didn’t seek revenge, my family didn’t fall apart, in fact we grew closer.
An amazing thing happened. I was able to let go of my secrets, which allowed me to let go of the guilt, blame, and shame I felt. Once these feelings started go away, my ED started to go away too. So my mother was right, my secret was keeping me stuck.
Now, as my reader, you too know my experience. In fact, writing this blog also helps me shed guilt and shame. It’s out there, for the whole world to see. This isn’t me, but it is something that happened to me. I share this blog with you so that you can maybe begin to think about sharing your experience with someone. It doesn’t have to end badly, like I had thought.
I will be, forever grateful, for that ripped out diary entry in my bedroom trashcan and that April Spring day by the river.
Do you struggle with sharing your experiences, whether traumatic or an addiction? I’m interested to hear your stories! You can leave an anonymous comment (fake name/email) below!
Best, Lindsey xoxo
