Part Two – Sexual Assault

    While the familial abuse was going one, something else was happening that scarred my mind and destroyed my perceptions.  I made some absolutely terrible friends.

    When I met them, they all seemed fantastic, and I always had a good time with them.  They made me laugh and smile. They allowed me to be myself. If I needed a place to go, their doors were open.  They gave me a shoulder to cry on and made it okay for me express my rage and sorrow. They truly made my days worth living.  However, I was so busy trying to survive and cope with the trauma that I never had any sexual interests. I also grew up in a conservative household, so nobody ever really talked about sex or sexuality.  While my school did a decent job educating us on condoms and STDs, they would also tell their female students that they were like roses and that each time they had sex, it was like a petal falling off. It terrified me.  It also made me very innocent and naïve. I never understood my friends’ sexual innuendos or why they laughed when I sat on a friend’s lap and then they started bouncing their knees. It truly left me quite vulnerable to them.

    So, when they started groping my breasts and slapping my ass, I didn’t speak up about how it bothered me.  But they made me feel wanted and valuable. I needed someone to care about me, and I felt like they did. I was willing to do anything to feel loved.  What was my personal discomfort in comparison to knowing I had a place where I belonged?

Except it didn’t stop there.  The less I protested, the more liberties they took.  Soon, they had me showering with them. Sometimes they came up behind me, grabbed my waist and humped me.  A “friend” got annoyed with my endlessly apologizing when I didn’t have to. She started pinching my nipples as a punishment for saying “I’m sorry”.  She said it would train me to not needlessly apologize.

When I turned 18, the same friend who pinched my nipples took me to a sex toy shop.  She bought a vibrating wand, and when we got back to her place, she decided she wanted to see how well it worked.  She stripped me naked and had me lay down before she “tested” the wand. I don’t recall feeling anything. I just hoped it would soon be over, but she kept prolonging it.  She said I was close to cumming when I just wanted to put my clothes back on. I don’t remember how it stopped or what we did afterwards, but I have the ceiling imprinted into my mind.  I remember how hard I bit my tongue to stop myself from begging her to stop.

But I wouldn’t say these incidents traumatized me.  I consider myself at fault because I allowed it to happen.  If I had told them to stop, if I had told them not to do that, I know they would’ve respected that and stopped.  I also learned sexual terms and acted like them. When they groped me, I groped back. When they humped me, I would fake a moan and press back against them.

It was someone else that truly fucked with my mind.

His name is Tom.  I considered him a really good friend.  I was constantly at his house. I was eventually given a key to the door so that I could come by whenever I wanted.  I would watch over the house and take care of their dogs when he and his mom were gone. I felt safe around him because he had never touched me outside of a hug.  It gave me a sick pleasure to tease him because I could tell he wanted to touch me, but didn’t.  His nickname for me became Jailbait.

I thought he didn’t touch me because he respected me.

I considered the teasing to be a joke, and for some reason, even though I knew he wanted to touch me, I thought he knew it was a joke.

When I turned 18, he told me about this rule he would implement.  If I tested his patience three times, he would get back at me. I didn’t understand and just shrugged it off.

    I didn’t understand until I pushed him too much.

    What he meant was that if I faked a moan, groped myself, or teasingly moved my clothes (hiking up a skirt a little, showing my bra, etc) three times in one day, he would do what he had wanted to do in high school.  He would touch me. Sometimes he would force me up against a pillar in his basement, pull down my pants and spank me. Sometimes he would take off my shirt and bra and grope my breasts. Sometimes it would just be sliding his hands across my skin.

    It didn’t take long to no longer feel safe or comfortable around him.  I stopped my previous nature, but sometimes over the next year I forgot about his rule and would accidentally break it.  He laughed when he saw my fear. He’d often joke about how I was scared of him, and I would say like “Yes! Yes I am!” and he would laugh because he took that as a half joke and half compliment.  I later learned he thought I was scared of the size of his penis.

    I had moved in with one of my aunts by then, and one of my responsibilities while living with her was to mow the lawn.  One time when I asked Tom for his help, he agreed. We had gotten half of it done when we took a break. I said I’d do anything as repayment for his help.  He took it a bit too literally and said he wanted a blow job. I laughed because I thought he was joking.

    He wasn’t.

He spent the night since it took all day to mow, and he claimed he was tired.  Night came by, and I was trying to fall asleep when he asked me to come to him.  I was a bit apprehensive, but I did so anyways. He took hold of my head and guided it to his penis.  He told me to suck. I opened my mouth to tell him no, but he shoved his dick into my mouth before I could talk.  He made me bob my head, and I tried not to cry. After a couple minutes, I forced him to let me go, and I claimed my jaw started to work.  He told me I’d have to strength my jaw before he started jacking off. I went back to my bed and tried to keep my crying as quiet as possible.

    He left the next day, and I did my best to push the incident into a dark and forgotten corner of my mind.

    A year went by, and I was 19.  I had healed a little bit from past mistreatment, and I was more able to stand up for myself.  I was at Tom’s house, and I had stayed late, so I decided to just sleep at his place. We had watched something in his room, and we were laying down quietly after it was over.  Then we started talking. Politics, science, philosophy, religion, and our pasts. He didn’t have an easy life growing up either, and it often became something he needed to talk through.  It’s honestly moments like those that made it seem like we were best friends.

    But then it got quiet, and I was comfortable.  I was about to get up to go to the guest room when he asked me to take off my clothes.  I said no, but he started to do so anyways. I tried to push his hands away, but he just grabbed them by the wrists and held them against the headboard.  He was strong and heavy. In high school he was a football player. Afterwards, he worked at the Renaissance Festival, and it wasn’t long before he worked within the Viking Encampment there.  Basically, he’s a strong and heavy motherfucker. I then did as I had done with my abuse growing up. I froze and waited for it to be over.

    After he’d gotten my clothes off, he groped my boobs and sucked and bit on my nipples.  Once he was done with that, he started fingering me. I can still feel his fingers moving in and out of me.  Once he was done with that, he got between my legs and grinded against me. He was wearing boxers, but I could feel his penis rubbing against my vagina.

    Even with all the discomfort from previous interactions, I’ve never felt so disgusted and violated, and I know it’s because he ignored me.  He ignored my no’s. When I tried to stop him from taking my clothes off, he easily restrained me. It’s because he took my choice away.

    I’m grateful he couldn’t get satisfied from just grinding against me, and he didn’t try to rape me.

    It wasn’t long before I had my first boyfriend.  Despite him being a huge abusive douche bag, I had sex with him.  I hoped it would get the feeling of Tom rubbing against me to go away, but it just made it worse.  Doug would blame me for his dick not staying in on my thighs being too big. He also constantly “complimented” me by saying that he normally didn’t date women of my size but made an exception with me because I was cool.  He broke up with me not too long afterwards.

    I was 23 by the time I told someone about what Tom did to me.  I was at the State Fair with my mom, Aunt Lora, and Connor. It had already been a long and very stressful day for me when we got in line for some fries.  I had a panic attack while in the middle of the line because people were getting too close and touching me, and after a day of having strangers touch me and being in crowds, I couldn’t handle it anymore.  My Aunt Lora followed me and asked me what was wrong. This was when I told her I was sexually assaulted, and that it’s very hard for me to be in crowds because of it. She was horrified and started crying.  I’ve since told a lot of people, but it’s still hard. My family doesn’t try to deny it or shame me for it, but the middle sibling, Connor, constantly tells me I need to get over it. That I need to let it go.  My mom has said that it wasn’t that bad since I was “just fingered”. When the #MeToo movement had just started and a lot of women were coming forward about their experiences, my dad has said “Why has it taken so long for these bitches to come forward?”  I was infuriated and said it took me four years to even tell one person and that in the future he should be mindful of who is in the god damn room.

    Even though I’ve gotten better and can tell people “I was sexually assaulted”, I still can’t bring myself to talk about what happened in person.  It took me a month of building up the courage and willpower to write this out. I have a mild form of PTSD from the attack. I have panic attacks, and if I get really bad and really stressed, I have flash backs.  I have gotten trapped in my own mind reliving that moment. I’ve flinched away from men I know I can trust. I’m a part of a club I absolutely love at my university, and when we last held a big event, I was walking to the building during the sunset when I heard someone running.  My mind immediately went to “someone is chasing me” and I freaked out and had a panic attack. I soon realized it was just a local going for a jog, but I was still having my panic attack. I contacted some friends who have also been sexually assaulted, and they tried to help me calm down, but I couldn’t.  At the meeting I was sitting as far away from the men as I possibly could. The tables were arranged in a square, and the only way in or out of it was by where the men sat. I refused to walk past them. I crawled underneath the tables to avoid going near them. I was so embarrassed and ashamed of myself that I apologized for my actions and explained why I was being so jumpy.  They apologized and ever since have been mindful and always letting me know that I’m safe around them and that if I don’t want them to touch or be near me that it’s okay to tell them and let them know. I’m constantly fighting the urge to ask someone to walk me to my car if I stay at school late because I’m terrified of something happening to me on my way to it. I’ve talked to people about having campus police escort me, but I’ve just never gotten around to calling them.

    I take medication to help me manage my PTSD and depression.  I talk to friends when things start getting to be a bit too much for me to handle, and I know the attack wasn’t my fault.  It took me some time to accept it, and there are times when I still struggle with that, but deep down I know it wasn’t my fault.  Deep down, I know I did the best I could in that moment to stop it from happening

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