Denial
Trigger warning: sexual abuse
I remember being young and thinking to myself: “I hope one day I will be so emotionally unavailable no one can faze me.” This is an exploration into how that happened, quickly and without intention. This is also a big fuck you to all the people who keep promoting on Instagram to be cold and heartless, as if that was something hot girls should do.
It would start without me noticing. There were slight constant actions and reactions that drove me towards emotional unavailability. I was trying so hard to protect myself, to shield myself from all the negativity and fear I had. I would not allow myself to cry, because that meant I cared. I would not allow myself to stop and think how negative comments affected me, I just forced myself to laugh and accept them. This resulted in me completely tearing up my identity. When you do not allow yourself to feel hurt, you lose the ability to be hurt. When you lose the ability to hurt, you lose the ability to be vulnerable. When you lose that, well you lose fucking everything. Looking at the woman I am now, I see scars that are only starting to reveal themselves after years of negligence. I see someone who was armed with a spoon in a sword fight.
This next part I guess comes to no one as a surprise. Yes, I am the one out of three women who has been sexually abused.
As a woman (or as anything else I suppose), when you go through sexual assault, or assault of any kind, it leaves a deep wound which we are told to cover. So many of us go through these things alone, in our bedrooms, trying to convince ourselves that it is all in our heads and we are hysterical. We say idiotic things like: “I’m sure he did not mean to fuck me in my sleep” or “ I’m sure I really did want it in the end.” I remember a couple months ago talking about a time I got fucked in my sleep, like it was nothing. And my friend looked me dead in the eye and said “You do realize that is rape?” Hell the fuck no. Not the r-word.
I had been avoiding the R- word and the memories associated with it so hard, that today I realized I do not even remember one of the assaults. A situation which I kept downplaying so much I have finally convinced my mind it did not happen at all. After many long moments trying to remember what exactly had happened my mind opened a little window into that memory. It’s a memory of me closing my eyes. At the time I thought the best thing to do is just keep pushing through life, just keep smiling; it will be okay. I thought if I do not think about it, if I do not speak of it, it is like it never happened. Then I got assaulted again. In the span of three months I got sexually abused twice. My way of coping was complete denial, act like nothing had ever happened and keep consistently downplaying what you have just been put through.
But, I did not see how obviously this coping mechanism was not helping me. Instead of dealing with that trauma on an emotional level, I denied it. Instead of dealing with my body image and the way I felt about men in relation to me , I started dressing and acting differently. It was like my brain said we have got to do something, even if you do not want to. Emotionally I was not dealing with it at all, but trauma like that needs to find some sort of way to show itself. And it got reflected onto my personality. And onto a few tattoos. And it showed itself whenever I was approached by a man, or whenever I would go somewhere alone. I turned cynical. I lost the joy in dating, instead I now saw it as something to play with (hello and fuck you to you hot girls who idolize being cold hearted).
I thought I was being so strong dealing with all this by myself. Now later on while I admit it did take a lot of strength to go through it like that, completely alone, I realize it was the wrong sort of strength. I was fighting every day, but I would never win. I could only survive. I am only now, almost two years later, starting to unravel all that I had put into an airtight box and thrown in the attic of my brain. And there is a lot. I find new things constantly which I realize have been affected by all of this, behind every corner jumps another monster.
So I fucking beg of you, stop thinking it’s good to get through shit by yourself. Stop thinking it’s cool to be cold and emotionless, because trust me the process to get there is shit to say the least and the end result is worse. It takes years to get back what you have buried.
And lastly: it's not called the r-word, it’s not your fault, it’s not a small little thing. It’s fucking rape.
