Things I Was Never Told About Rape

No one ever told me that I would be raped one day. I don’t think anyone ever really mentioned that I could be raped, although I obviously knew it was a possibility, but I was never actively warned about it. There certainly weren’t any posters instructing me on what I should do if I happened to be raped in the men’s bathroom at college; however, there were enough posters telling me what to do if I suspected one of my female friends was in danger of being raped. But in my second semester of my sophomore year, it happened to me, and it came with a plethora of things that I was neither prepared for nor expecting.

See, nobody ever mentioned that my rapist could be an otherwise nice guy. It feels weird to even phrase it as such, but in all honesty, he was really kind to me before and directly after the act of cruelty he committed. He was probably one of the sweetest guys I’ve ever been on a date with, and that still confuses the living hell out of me. It took a couple months to really come to terms with the fact that I was, in actuality, raped twice by this man because I just couldn’t wrap my head around how someone could seemingly be so nice while also being capable of such a heinous act.

He held me in his arms afterwards, and he kissed my forehead, and he made me feel utterly safe with him in those moments. I felt confused about what had just happened: I knew something was done to me without my consent but I didn’t know if I could legitimately call it “rape”. After all, it’s not like he beat me up and I wasn’t physically harmed by any means – he just prevented my movements and ignored what I wanted (which I would have told anyone else was actual rape… but how infrequently we take our own solid advice). When he wrapped his arms around me, when he offered me affection directly after it, it made me think that maybe what he did wasn’t so bad. He then kept insisting that I was his “reward” for his “good karma”, which planted a little seed in my brain that insisted that what had happened to me was deserved.

I wasn’t told, and it seems not many people are told, that it might take months (maybe even longer) for the trauma of the event to actually hit you. Directly after the event, I mostly just felt kind of weird about the whole ordeal. There was no physical injury, so I figured I was fine. I’d been in various situations where men had specifically stopped because they could tell I was uncomfortable, so this experience of someone not only ignoring my body language but also my explicit requests was entirely new to me. A month or so later, it started to really sink in and it bothered me, but it wasn’t until summer (a few months later) that I had a full-fledged major depressive episode because of it. Sometimes I could smell his cologne around my apartment. Other times it felt like his weight was pressing into my back when I tried to sleep. Even though I didn’t think any of them were going to hurt me, being around men started to trigger an anxiety response.

What was often told to me about rape was that there would be guilt and self-blame. Though I never really gave it much thought, I never thought that I’d be someone who would blame themself for rape because I so vehemently believe that no one is ever responsible for being raped. But I was wrong. I blamed myself because I let him come to my apartment on the second date. I blamed myself because I allowed myself to drink a little wine. I blamed myself because I was willing to be naked with him and there were certain sex acts I wanted to do with him. Truthfully, I still blame myself for what happened. I can intellectualize that it wasn’t my fault, but I still feel the guilt and I still think I’m largely to blame.

There is also a great deal of shame that came with it, which was something I was expecting but I didn’t expect it to manifest in the ways it has. I didn’t think I’d feel ashamed to tell most of my closest friends, or my family, and I didn’t think it would take so long to tell my sister. Every time I’d go to tell someone, there’d be this moment of hesitation where I’d think, “Is this really worth telling? It wasn’t even that bad. You’re just dramatizing the whole thing, aren’t you?” Perhaps because I already had pretty low self-esteem, I have found myself occasionally thinking that I should have just overlooked the rape and dated the guy anyway because at least he was into me, and that feeling in of itself has created a great amount of shame. I’ve never even said those words aloud to anyone.

Some days it feels like this never even happened to me, and other days it feels like I can’t stop crying because it did happen to me. Nobody has the right words to say because there’s nothing that will make this feel better. Because no one can make it so this never happened, and that’s all that I want. But I’ll learn to live with the knowledge of what has been done to me. Two years ago I wouldn’t have been able to write about it, and it will take so much more time to fully heal from this. And maybe I never will, but I at least have hope that I might.

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