Receiving a friend request from one of the men who raped me when I was in high school was definitely a surprise for me, but once I got over my initial shock, I received this as a welcome invitation to share a few things with him.
Before I post my response to him, it’s important to emphasize the amount of healing work I’ve done around this experience—years of healing work, so much healing work that I wasn’t triggered by this friend request and was able to process through it somewhat quickly.
I share my message to him from this space, from the framework of someone who was prepared to send him my thoughts knowing that I had no control over his response back to me. I had to let go of all expectations and understand fully that he could come back at me with accusations, gaslighting, name calling or worse. I also knew that I needed to feel strong in my body, all the way down to my bones, and that I needed grounded support from my partner and a couple of friends that I talked to about it.
It’s a blessing that I can measure my personal growth through this lens. After so many years of working to strengthen my voice, to heal, to write about this, to continue to go deeper and deeper into who I knew myself to be beneath the trauma of this experience, I was able to rise, to hold my ground and to claim my strength. All of the words that had been rattling around in my head for over three decades found a doorway to pass through and I was grateful for it. It came to me as an opportunity, a gift from Spirit. I had already taken my power back—after years of feeling victimized—and I got to stand in it and say the words that needed a place to land. From that arose this (names have been changed):
“Imagine my surprise when one of the men who raped me sent me a friend request. It’s really one of the last things I was expecting.
I wonder if you don’t remember it or if you deluded yourself into thinking that it was something else, so I’ll give you a little refresher of what happened:
I was at your house with several of my friends. You, your brother and Dan got me really drunk.
The next thing I remember is someone being inside of me. I came to in a bedroom and you and Dan were there with me. One of you was actively raping me; I don’t remember which one. I called for my friends, but your brother was outside of the door and he wouldn’t let anyone in. (Did he rape me too? He told John [one of his friends who I later dated] that you all took turns with me, but I have no recollection of him except for being outside the door.) And I don’t remember everything that happened, but I remember someone—was his name Josh?—climbing up to the balcony outside the French doors to the room, coming in and sitting on the bed with me, holding my hand, telling me that he was going to help me. You guys came back into the room though and then he was gone.
At some point I just gave in. I was scared and desperate; not feeling like I had any power in the situation was terrifying to me. This part would also really haunt me for years. But I know now that my nervous system went into a functional freeze; going along with it—after completely dissociating from my body—was a physiological response to the trauma I was experiencing.
You see, that event—being abused in that way, being violated when I had not given any consent, not being able to get away from you—traumatized me in ways that you will never understand. It happened 34 years ago, and it created issues for me mentally, emotionally and physically. I’m still dealing with trapped energy patterns in my body, though after 20 years of intense healing, I’m finally in a pretty good and resilient place, a place that allows me to not be re-traumatized by this friend request.
I see that you have a little girl. Ask yourself how you would feel if this same thing happened to her. If she was over at someone’s house who she trusted and they gave her a bunch of alcohol or drugged her and then when she passed out, they raped her. (Lack of verbal consent due to intoxication or unconsciousness does not equal consent; it equals rape.) And then continued to rape her even after she came to and said, “no” and “stop.” What would you want to do to the man/men that did that to her? And what if afterwards, they told people that they took turns with her, like she was somehow a willing participant in this whole thing? How would that feel?
And what about if you knew that she would suffer for years from PTSD, that she would struggle to have healthy sex, that she would be challenged to be in healthy relationships? What if she had health problems because of the effects the event had on her nervous system? How would any of that feel?
I know that I wasn’t the only one. I heard other stories later, from girls who both felt betrayed by the trust they had in you, by girls who remembered the room the same way I did and the events unfolding similarly.
Know this: Your actions were wrong. You raped me. You hurt me.
But you did not take my power. You may have for a long time, but what I’ve found since I’ve started healing is a power within me that I may not have ever known I had. The pain I experienced as a result of your actions ultimately led to my greatest liberation.
So you can just basically fuck off.”
Which he did, after denying that any of it happened.
That’s not really what matters to me anymore, though. I didn’t need to hear him say anything. I know what happened and I’ve done the work to trust myself and feel my own worth in the face of whatever adversity might come my way. To me this is a tale of personal triumph and what happens on the other end of it is irrelevant.
And I didn’t need to hear anything also because I’ve already forgiven them. I see the bigger picture and I see how it has contributed to my overall growth. But that doesn’t mean that I condone their actions or that it doesn’t feel amazing to set that cold, hard boundary that I didn’t get to set so many years ago. Forgiveness doesn’t mean that I have to have them in my life; it does mean that I’m not holding onto the resentment anymore. And that again, took so many years to achieve. I tried to forgive many times before I actually could because I needed to work with the emotions and the pain of the experience before I could arrive at that point.
Do I have any regrets? I wish I had been stronger way back when, but it’s not really a regret, more of an observation. I wish I’d been a 16-year old girl who had even a fraction of the power and confidence that I do now so that I could have reported them. I found out about one of the other girls a few years after the fact and another just a few years ago, at the onset of #metoo. I have no idea what the sequential order of us was or how many more there were and that saddens me, deeply.
That said, I’m not blaming myself. I did the best I could. That trauma was built on top of other trauma and what played out was an extension of what came before. It’s all a trajectory, one that isn’t perfect, and yet is at the same time. The warrior within me has awakened and she can be powerful and fierce. I’m different now, different for this opportunity to use my voice, to stand up for myself, to assert my worth. Something within me is transformed, and I’m embracing it.
Editor’s Note: This essay originally appeared on Medium.com and is published here with the author’s permission.
