HEALING WITHOUT JUSTICE
Content warning: sexual assault, suicide.
Written anonymously
As I closed my eyes under the cold fluorescent lights of the Title IX coordinators office, I tried to remember any detail I could.
All my memories from that night are surrounded by a cloudy haze, exactly what it feels like after you wake up from a nightmare– your heart pounding and covered in a cold sweat. This wasn’t a dream, or a nightmare. It was my reality only a month into college: I had been raped.
According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, more than 50% of college sexual assaults occur in August through November. Additionally, students are at an increased risk during their first and second terms in college.
And here I was, October 29, 2016, my first few months in college, a statistic.
I could only tell the coordinator that I remembered him bringing me a drink at a Halloween party. Between flashes of costumes and neon pink shot glasses, I remember stumbling downstairs. Away from the noise, away from him.
He was all over me the entire night. It started when he picked me up outside of my dorm for a friend who was running late. I felt his eyes bore into me, searching for the skin hidden beneath my jacket– he looked like a hungry dog.
I remembered him following me down the stairway. When I flailed to get away from him after he picked me up, he sighed and put me on his bed. He shoved my face into his pillow until I stopped kicking.
Just like those flashes of Halloween costumes and liquor, I remembered flashes of pain, I remembered that I was crying– made apparent in the morning by the makeup smeared down my face.
When I woke up the next morning, my clothes were in a pile on the floor, and I had stained his already dirty bedding with blood. He called me a bitch for ruining his sheets. The room reeked of stale beer, sweat and unwashed clothes.
When his roommate found me crying in their bathroom, I said I was hung over.
He drove me to my dorm in the morning, his hand rubbed my thigh and I looked out the window imagining that I was someone, somewhere else.
I squeezed my eyes tightly as he lit another cigarette, the smell burning my nostrils and itching my eyes. I couldn’t tell if the tears I felt close to bubbling over were caused by the putrid smoke or the sinking feeling in my stomach.
The coordinator made that soft hmm noise that people always make when they don’t know what to say, or when they’re unsure if you’re done speaking.
She asked if I could trust my memories.
“You were already drunk, right? He didn’t force you to drink, did he?” She peered down her nose, trying to read my face.
“I don’t know,” I said. That became my mantra for the next three years.
I didn’t know what happened that night, not for certain. The entire night is like a nightmare kaleidoscope of memories, where every image is shattered and fractured into something that’s constantly changing. Could I trust my memories?
I knew that I bled for two days afterwards, I know that I was scared of being touched for the next three years and I know that I didn’t want any of that to happen. But how could I be angry about what I wasn’t sure of?
“You know that he’s graduating soon. This would ruin his life,” the coordinator said.
I knew that.
He was the friend of a friend, 23. He wanted to be a teacher. He had driven me to the party that night because my friend got caught up at work. My friend never came. Did my life matter here? This could ruin my life, too.
“Did you fight back?” she asked.
He had towered nearly a foot over me, was five years older and 80 pounds heavier. The flailing I remember in my fleeting memories was all I could do.
“We’ll contact him to see his side of the story. Do you have anything left from that night? Clothes? Underwear?”
As soon as I got home from that night, I scrubbed my skin in the hot shower until I was glowing red and raw, my face bleeding from where I scrubbed too aggressively. I bagged up my costume and walked to the dumpster behind my dorm. I remember buying the clothes while back-to-school shopping with my mom, the red leggings ripped down a side seam, the new underwear now stained dark brown with dried blood.
“No,” I said.
Throughout the entire time I was talking, the tears flowed freely down my face. She didn’t offer me a tissue, only her business card with a phone number scrawled on the back of the crisis hotline. “In case you think of making any rash decisions.
I felt angry, hurt, scared and confused. Why me? Why was I a statistic of sexual assault? What will I tell my parents? Will I tell my parents? Why me, why me, why me, why me, why me?
I slept for two days, emailing my professors to tell them I was sick. My roommate had dropped out a week prior so I was alone. I moved my mattress onto the floor, shut off my phone and cried between restless bouts of sleep. I played shows on my laptop to help the silence feel less empty–but it was an endless cycle of music and flashing lights.
When I turned on my phone I had a voicemail from the Title IX coordinator saying to call her when I had the chance. The empty ringing on the other end echoed, the secretary patched me through.
“He said that it was consensual. At this point there’s nothing more we can do unless you have solid proof,” she said.
I hung up the phone without saying goodbye, and fell back onto my mattress. The next few months were a blur. I felt empty and scared of the world around me. I felt scared of him.
I didn’t remember much from class, as every day I went home and took a nap, only leaving my room to eat or use the bathroom. My friends became ghosts of my past, people that I could no longer relate to.
Winter quarter was full of snow and depression. I was still struggling to come to terms with what had happened. Why did I go to that party? Most of all, why wouldn’t I ever receive justice? He would never experience consequences for how he hurt me.
As I withdrew further into my own world, I realized how much my heart was weighed down and how wrong the entire situation was. Not only to be assaulted, but to not be believed. To hear in whispers down the dorm hallway rumors that I “asked for it” or that I “wanted it.” People I had trusted told me that I was lying for attention.
From people I held as friends to strangers who heard my story through the rumor mill, I felt as if I was a bug under a magnifying glass: small, scared and weak, being examined from every angle and feeling like I was on fire.
When I would see him pass me across the hilly campus, his eyes would bore into me just as they did that October night. He knew he hurt me and he knew he had power. He knew he had set me on fire.
It’s only now, after three years and transferring to Western, that I took my power back. Even so, it’s still something difficult that I need to process regularly. What he did does not control me any longer and I don’t blame myself anymore. This was a bad person taking advantage of a bad situation, for which I paid a price. No longer do I stare at myself in the mirror and cry. No longer do I wince from being touched in any form. I can hug, kiss, love and cry freely from the constraints of my assault, because I know if I hadn’t come to terms with that I would’ve killed myself by now.
For the longest time, I blamed myself. Stupid girl in a stupid costume who put herself in a stupid situation.
During the spiral of depression that followed after my assault, I thought heavily of suicide. I felt that I could no longer live knowing that I had put myself in the position of being assaulted. I blamed myself for being taken advantage of.
Only recently, I’ve accepted that it wasn’t my fault. I was taken advantage of, I was hurt, but I was not at fault. I’ve been seeing a therapist to help manage the guilt that I feel, and I’ve slowly been having more good days than bad. Days where I don’t think about how I was hurt, or feel him breathing down my neck.
Yet, the bad days persist. I still wake up at least once a month thinking that I was experiencing my assault again. The weight that comes from sleeping limbs felt like his weight pushed onto me. At this point, my only goal is minimizing the bad days and learning how to get through them. I have to remind myself it’s over and that it’s just a dream.
I am angry, but I don’t let my anger control me. Rather than obsessing over what happened and breaking my own heart repeatedly, I’ve done my best to move on. I can be angry at him, at that university, at the Title IX coordinator — at society. But I’m still me and I have the power now. I’m happy, I’m healthy and for the first time in years, I can truly say that I love being alive.
Despite all the bullshit, despite the assault, the depression, the tears, the sleepless nights, nightmares and skipped classes — I’m alive. God damn it, I’m alive.
By choosing to live and move past, I feel like that’s the biggest “fuck you” I can give to him, to the coordinator, to the whispers down the hallway and to the universe. You can push me down, but I’m going to keep fighting to love being alive because in the end that’s all I have. I’m alive and this won’t kill me.