Every April for the past four years, I have gone through a mental Olympics.
Does my story even count? Many others have had it worse than me.
According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, one in four undergraduate women has experienced sexual assault or misconduct, and 43% of men have reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment and/or assault in their lifetime. These are facts that are especially pertinent during Sexual Assault Awareness Month.
To say it bluntly, out of your four sisters, or cousins, or aunts, statistically, one of them has been assaulted.
All these statistics, but it feels almost narcissistic to include yourself into it. Who am I to complain?
To me, I became part of that statistic the night I lost my voice and worse, the choice of having a choice.
Oddly enough, the way that boy made me feel that night was familiar.
That familiar feeling, something I have experienced many times throughout different times in my life.
The feeling of your body being borrowed.
As I stood frozen with a blanket wrapped around me, the bathroom tile slowly bled into a long grassed soccer field. I’m no longer shivering in the bathroom, but my lungs are burning with the sweet, sharp sting of spring air.
My teammates are laughing around me as we scrimmage, and as I run with the wind blowing on my face, the only thing on my mind is the biology test that my partner let me copy off that day, and that my dad was making chili for dinner.
I walk home with a million bruises on my leg, carrying my extremely heavy backpack and equally hefty duffel bag with my disgusting cleats, but with a smile on my face. I untangle my wired headphones, the plastic earbud cold against my ears before the music flares into life.
But it ends. That warm feeling of joy that I get to repeat the next day is stolen once I hear a man honking his horn at me.
That familiar feeling lives in me as I hold hands with my mother, walking across the mall with uninvited eyes trailing down a body that was no longer just mine.
And then I’m brought back to that familiar feeling again when I’m transported to my kindergarten classroom, where my classmate cornered me and stuck his hand up my plaid skirt, or when someone peeked through the slit of my bedroom door to watch me change.
In “The Body Keeps the Score,” Bessel van der Kolk tells his audience that “As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself…The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know.” he adds, “ That takes an enormous amount of courage.”
As you are given the burden of these experiences, it’s important to allow the past to come to the surface and almost remind your brain that you have felt and possibly extinguished that deep intensity of distress.
Kolk also reminds readers that in order for change to happen, people must become aware of the sensations in their bodies.
Somatic therapy has helped me with this.
It seems silly and uncomfortable at the moment, but it taught and still teaches me that my skin remembers what my mind tried to delete. It remembers that the dorm room wasn’t just another statistic, but it was a betrayal. It was heavier because I handed him the keys to my safety, and he used them to lock me out of my own sense of peace.
And what’s even more frustrating is that he will never know how much his actions changed me. He moves through the world, unburdened by the knowledge of what he took. Meanwhile, I am here, doing the heavy lifting of healing and learning to inhabit a body that he made feel like a crime scene.
How could I shrug this off now? I had nothing to compare it to.
He will never know how much he changed me, but for the first time, I know. And as Kolk said, that is the beginning of the end of the war.
