Life as a survivor is a battle

The journey of a survivor is long and winding; a perfect example of the emotional roller coaster experience. My assault happened over two years ago. In the time since then I feel as though I have completely rebuilt my life.

When a person experiences such a traumatic life event, it shakes their entire being. I felt as though everything I was had ever been was completely lost and that my whole world around me had crumbled into pieces. At first, I did not know how to make my life whole again. The thing about rape is that it causes the survivor to truly experience what it is like to lose all control over their physical being and their circumstances. And that is not a feeling that a person can easily forget. Traces of that feeling stay with you, at times encompassing your entire being. The memory of that feeling is the single most anxiety-inducing thing I have ever known.

My life as a survivor has been a life completely ruled by anxiety. The nights are now my enemy, to be avoided at all costs. As the sun dips down lower and lower in the sky, my anxiety increases. I look forward to the summers. Not for the warm weather, beach trips, carefree feelings and other things people normally look forward to about summer. But because it stays lighter longer. I get more freedom, less fear. As the weather gets colder and the days become shorter, I feel myself becoming more anxious.

This anxiety is all encompassing. It disrupts my life in ways I would have never been able to imagine before. It causes the 10-foot walk from my car to my house to seem like a walk through an active battle zone. It causes any strange person within sight to become an immediate threat to my life, never to be trusted. It has changed me, broken me. I have felt so defeated by it at times that I don’t bother leaving the comfort of my home unless true necessity drives me out.

As someone who has always valued my independence, this has been an adjustment that has been difficult to say the least. When I am alone I am not safe. Or at least this is what my brain thinks. This is what my brain tells me. Therefore, I fear being alone. But I am afraid to reach out for help. Afraid to tell a trusted family member or a friend, “I need you here right now.” Because, for me, the only thing worse than being alone is thinking that when others look at you, all they see is your traumatic experience. Nobody deserves to be defined by their traumas. But choosing not to remind people of my assault, even if it is for my benefit, is a risk I’m willing to take.

And so there are many times that I think, “What has my life become? How did I get here?” It is in these times that I feel indescribably high levels of anger and frustration. Two emotions, in fact, that survivors rarely discuss. Feelings of hopelessness, brokenness, and guilt are discussed ad nauseum – and with good reason. But it is the anger and the frustration that serve as the motivation to transform from victim to survivor. This anger and this frustration are what fuels the realization that this was not your fault. They are what drives you to push through and persevere. Because there is no way in hell I would let them win; I refuse to let them continue to control my life. Of course this sentiment is a hell of a lot easier said than done, but it is a goal I work towards every day.

My life has been a battle since the night I was raped. Every day is a new challenge. Not a day goes by without flashbacks, anxiety and fluctuating emotions. But this is my life. This is what I am left with after a man decided to take the fate of my entire life in his hands. And this is the information people need to hear. Because every statistic you hear about sexual assault is a person’s life. And each one of those lives probably looks like some variation of this. And one life lived like this is one too many.

Love will not fix you

Nobody will admit that love does not fix them, that love cannot save them from their pain. Love can heal and regenerate a heart, but it cannot undo a life, a past. Love can redeem, but it cannot erase. Nobody will tell you that sometimes they don’t know how to let someone else love them, that they’ve spent so much time guarding their heart that they don’t know how to not.

The thing about love is that you can want it for so long and then finally find someone who looks at you in that way you’ve been dreaming of, but that you will sometimes be looking for the escape hatch Even when you don’t want to find one. Love can tear you open in all the best and worst ways. It will scrape you clean and it will show you parts of yourself you really didn’t want to see.

It can sometimes seem that the hard part of love is the before, the without. That emptiness that claws at your bones and reminds you just how truly alone you are and feel. You will make a home in yourself, love your skin, touch yourself in the way you want to be touched, and it will feel like the end is in sight. But, love, that finding part, that moment when it clicks together and colors brighten and the world around you both blurs out in the background, that part is the beginning of something else entirely. It can feel like that love part allows you a moment of reprieve, that silent exhale you’ve been waiting for. And, it does. It does. For a moment.

Nobody will tell you that love gives you more reasons to destruct it than it does to save it. Because there is nothing that will reveal you to yourself more than love does. Many people will distract this part away with sex and fights and blames and finger pointing and cheating and little lies and big lies and betrayal and neglect. Oftentimes it’s difficult to see when your unexamined wounds start showing symptoms in the relationship. Two people can certainly bring out the worst in each other in a way that is not healing, redeeming, or pure. Yet, there’s a side to that left discarded. There are many times where two people will hurt each other past the salvation point because they simply refused to examine themselves, to become aware to the ways their pain weaved itself into the bond between each other.

Love will show you where you hate, not just yourself, but others. It will unveil your ugly. That darkness that lurks in the corners of places inside of you that you thought you’d tucked away forever. There’s another side to the beautiful, to the falling in love, to the music that suddenly makes sense, to the heart racing aliveness that is love.

Nobody will tell you that every instinct within you that wants to ruin your own happiness out of a belief that you do not deserve to have it will scream at you. You will concoct subconscious plans to self-destruct, plans that you will not even realize are percolating in the background of your mind. A fight is never just a fight. Money is never just about money. Lack of commitment is never about lack of feeling. Nothing is ever about the thing it seems and that’s what love does. Love can make a home and love can break a home. Love can be weaponized against or for you, depending on how you wield it. Love can ruin you or it can purify you.

Nobody will tell you that you can feel lonely with love. You could need more from your life and they will be incapable of giving it to you and that won’t mean it needs to end, but it means confronting that they cannot be everything no matter how badly you want them to be. People won’t tell you that you could be angry with yourself and that anger could be synthesized into anger directed outward. They won’t tell you that you could be having a crisis of esteem, that you could have lost faith in yourself, and it becomes difficult to believe that this person, this love, could believe in you when you don’t believe in yourself.

People will tell you that you should find someone that makes you be a better person, but they won’t tell you about that process of betterment. They won’t tell you that sometimes this is a process of many revisions That before you can become better, you must become much, much, much worse. People don’t tell you that in order to heal, you must first confront that which you need to heal from. They don’t tell you that in order for you to weather the storm, there must first be a storm. There’s always a bow tied up on the package, never the before. Never the not-perfect. Never the not-shiny.

Love can be everything. It can transform you in all the ways you need to be transformed. It can be that heart-stopping intimacy that feels like your body is on fire, like your heart isn’t yours anymore, but belongs entirely to someone else. It can be all those things, but it is not solely those things. And, I think a part of me wishes I had known that, a part of me wishes I had my expectations set straight. Because, with love, everything is heightened. The bad can be so bad. But the good!

Oh, the good can be so good. 

Why do I hate my body?

I don’t get it. I don’t understand why I hate my reflection. I don’t understand how I can be so many things, so many brilliant things, but that sometimes it feels like the only thing that matters about me is how I look in a fucking crop top. I don’t get it.

I guess, intellectually, I understand it. Media. Beauty standards. Magazines. Advertising. Greed. Hollywood. Photoshop. It all makes sense in my head. I see it. I get it. I understand how that kind of shit can just sneak its way into my brain and start camping out in there, dictating my thoughts and behavior like it owns the place. I see that.

Like, intellectually and logically and rationally, I understand how I can get to the place of viewing my body in a very negative light, considering the kind of nonsense I am unaware of digesting on a daily basis. That being said, I’m conscious. I don’t just consume without thinking. I don’t buy magazines. I watch the shows I like on Netflix and that’s it. I’m not bombarding myself with all these unrealistic images of women.

And yet...

Even with that, even with a conscious effort to not be exposed to the kinds of shit which sneaks its way into my brain, I still hate my body. I still go to sleep with exercise plans in my head. I still see eating bread as the ultimate sin. I still avoid my own reflection. I still hide away parts of me I don’t deem as acceptable. I still flip past pictures of beautiful women on Instagram and automatically assume their lives are better, that they are better. I still look at myself through a critical, harsh lens. I still have this tiny lingering belief that my shinier, happier life happens the moment I fit into a size 0.

I’m accomplished. I’m successful in many ways. I’m intelligent. I’m ambitious. I’m kind and compassionate and thoughtful and witty and funny and passionate. I care vdeeply about helping when I can for who I can. I try to be genuine. I’m trustworthy and I think most people would have a pretty high opinion of me (humble brag!). I’m a self-taught graphic designer. I'm a published writer.

But...

I am not skinny.

I am not hot.

How the latter two characterizations completely overshadow my many former achievements and virtues, I will never know. I will never quite understand why being a woman and being beautiful and thin deserves more recognition than anything else that I could possibly do in my life. I will never understand female admiration that is doled out simply because of the way a woman looks. I will never understand why talent, fortitude, perseverance, intellect, compassion are less virtuous than being hot.

To be hot is to be everything. To be hot is to be afforded the luxury of having not be anything else. Female hotness is the ultimate aspiration. And. I. HATE. it. Maybe I would hate it less if I were hot, if I was profiting off the system, the game. But, you know, I think I could be hot. I could devote my life to being hot. There are means. There are ways.

Maybe this is a rebellious stance to take, but fuck off. I don’t want to spend my life trying to be acceptable enough. To try and pass as "good enough." Good enough is the prison women are kept in. I think, if I can be good enough, passable, enough of something, then I will be fine. I will be okay. I don’t consistently aspire to be brilliant or great or accomplished. I aspire to good enough, as if being good enough affords me much of anything. If I can just look like how I’m supposed to look, then I will be fine. If I color in the lines, follow all the rules, be a good woman, I will be fine.

Good enough is a trap. Being good enough is NOT good enough. It’s not enough of me! It’s a passing grade, a consolation prize, a participation trophy. And I want none of those things. I’m not trying to hit the limit of who I am by being good enough. Fuck good enough. I want to go straight past good enough and right into being brilliant. Straight to genius. Straight to change, growth, potential, passion. Good enough is the "meh" of life. And I want none of it.

I don’t want to cave or cower to a pervasive belief that says a woman’s ability to be hot is more valuable than her ability to be literally anything else. What kind of world is this? What kind of disempowering bullshit is this? And, why do I stand for it?

Why do I hate my body? Because I think I should. Because I’m punishing myself for not being good enough, for not being hot, for not being thin. I hate my body because I have nothing or no one else to hate. I hate my body because I am angry and it is an easy thing to focus that anger on. I hate my body because it has defied me, because it isn’t naturally thin, naturally hot. I hate my body because it seems like the thing I should do. It is what I’ve been taught. It is what I know and it is what everyone around me does. I hate my body because I choose to hate it. Because I think hating it will inspire me to change it, which will give me the acceptance—the good enoughness—I think I want. I hate my body because I haven’t decided to feel otherwise. I haven’t decided yet that my body is worth loving, that I don’t need to earn its favor, that it can be anything it wants to be and I will continue to love it. I haven’t yet chosen this.

If you fall in love with me

If you fall in love with me I can’t promise you it will be pretty. I can’t tell you I’ll make you breakfast on lazy Sunday’s. I can’t pretend that I won’t love you too much some days and not be able to even love myself others, when you wake up you may find me in a pool of my own tears or you may not find me at all.

If you fall in love with me, I won’t fall too fast, too hard, or endlessly, I have tried to love like that before and the results were nothing short of tragic. If you fall in love with me, I won’t change myself for you. I won’t give up parts of myself to make us work. I won’t plan a future with you that doesn’t include all of the things I want to do and be. My feelings for you will grow and change as they are supposed to and I will only be able to hope yours do the same.

If you fall in love with me I will show you how independent women love others. I will show you off to my friends. I will encourage you every day and help you achieve every goal that you are working towards, there is nothing more attractive than a partner with aspirations the same size as mine.

If you fall in love with me, I will share my interests with you and will hope you do the same. I will hold your hand in and kiss you goodnight. I will listen to your favorite song even if I hate it. I will try to hug you often. I will tell you my secrets and listen to yours, you will only have memories of the girl with every defense strong and steady.

If you fall in love with me, I will not be your everything. I will not tell you lies. I will not say that it will never end because I know it more than likely will. I will not beg you to stay if you no longer want to. I will not fight for us if you are not fighting for us. It does not matter how deeply or truly you love me I know when things must end.


If you are brave enough to fall in love with me I will try not destroy you.

When a writer falls in love

When a writer falls in love, her writings can either make you fall or will break your heart. When a writer falls in love, she may actually stop writing.

Ideas about love, relationships and heartaches are reality to some but for the writer, it is only but a dream she has yet to experience. For she is the writer who only learns about dates, kisses and break ups through the stories she heard. And when she writes, she tries to sew it all in the most perfect way. In ways like how movies and songs are made, with happy endings. She can only imagine.

Behind every chic flick, novels and songs are writers who works hard in portraying the emotions and feelings that people have felt- a feeling that she have not even experienced at all. She writes stories about her parents unconditional love or her friend’s break up but she has never written her own. It is an ironic event where one tries to make everyone feel something that she herself have not yet felt.

But then she fell in love and she stopped writing. She did not only stop writing, she stopped doing everything. She spent less time with her family, with her friends, with her studies and even to herself because she only had time for them.

Late nights out, dinner for two, movie nights, warm hugs and deep conversations. The writer fell in love with the simplest thought that she can also be loved. That she is capable of being loved, that she can be seen as a potential lover and no longer just the friend, the younger sister or the storyteller. The writer has become a reality of her own.

When the writer fell in love, she loved so hopelessly and very deeply. The writer who wrote fictional characters and imagined episodes became human. She became an actuality of her own, with someone whom she thought can only be found in her dreams. She was not conceptualizing drafts for others anymore- for she was making her own.

Of all the stories the writer has made, she always questioned as to how can people be so senseless when it comes to love. How can people become so helpless when they are in the state of being in love?

The writer sees it all now. One can not have a single definition of love, for love is universal. For love is experienced in different ways and in different levels. For the writer, she has accepted the fact that when you fall in love, you are not yourself anymore. You are a person blinded of love.

The writer no longer thought about herself but instead the welfare of her love. She no longer had time to write for she would rather look at reality- for this is real and words are not. The writer no longer writes because she’s afraid that if she would let even a minute pass, her reality might disappear.

And true enough, like the ones she have heard and seen, there will come a time when everything will fall apart. It was all gone as fast as it came. They disappeared leaving her breathless and perverse.

No more late night conversations, no more dinner out, no more ridiculous doings- no more them. There is no happy endings unlike what the other writers made everyone, including her, believe.

When the writer fell in love, she was sure that what she gave was pure and genuine feelings. But because there is no better expert of heartbreaks than a writer, she knows that she will no longer love the same. She knows how to restrict herself now for she already recognizes the feeling of falling back first and not looking if there’s even someone who’d catch her.

When the writer falls in love again, she’ll no longer expect pixie dusts, exciting glows and firework shows. When the writer falls in love, she’ll expect both an eternity of happiness and pain all at the same time.