You survived the abuse. You’re going to survive the recovery.

It has taken me a long, long time to even be able to speak as candidly as I do about my past, present, and future dealing with depression, bipolar disorder, and self-harm. As a matter of fact, the first time I ever opened up to more than just my very close-knit circle of friends about how I had been struggling with self-harm for over 5 years, I wrote a Facebook status and only made it available to about 30 people. I was afraid of judgment. I was afraid of the stigma attached with what I was doing to myself. I was afraid that people who respected me wouldn’t anymore. I was afraid that I was tarnishing my own reputation, the same way I had inflicted pain upon my own body. I carefully chose the people who I thought would respond in an open, loving manner, and I jumped. The reactions from that first group of friends, family, coworkers, teachers, and mentors was overwhelmingly positive. I wasn’t some broken, inherently bad person just because I was struggling. My brain, though a little sad and sick, and maybe muddling through some faulty wiring, was still valid and worthy of love and belonging. This realization helped me learn that it was okay to share my struggles with EVERYONE. Once I grew confident and comfortable in that, messages began pouring in, from people I knew and people I didn’t, all shouting “me too!” and “I thought I was the only one!” and “This is my story. Will you listen?”

I listened. I learned. I grew. I had the harder conversations, and I asked questions. I cried. I reminisced. I related. And as far as I’ve come with having these very important mental health conversations, it just isn’t enough. I’m only sharing the tip of the iceberg, and the ship is threatening to sink. I’ve painted out the inner workings of my soul for years now, and sometimes I worry that it just isn’t honest, because it isn’t everything. You can’t repair up a broken heart if you only stitch it up halfway.

So today, with my heart threatening to pound out of my chest, I open a new chapter. I open a deeply personal and profoundly painful part of why I am the way I am. One of the hardest things for me to admit in this life is that I have been a victim of extreme abuse: emotional, physical, and sexual. I have been made to believe that I am unloved and unlovable, that I am broken, that I don’t deserve this life. I have learned to cover up black eyes. I have walked much of my life keeping my mouth shut and my eyes pointed downwards, walking on eggshells, playing it safe. I’ve sat shaking in cars in ditches, actually afraid for my life. I’ve been told horrible, malicious untruths from the people who were supposed to teach me about trust. I’ve learned how to breathe despite broken ribs and a head full of the initial blow being replayed over and over. I’ve let the hand who threw me into the wall hold an ice pack to the bloody lump on the back of my head. I’ve said “no” and been smacked across the mouth so hard I wondered if any of my teeth broke. And I’ve been viciously raped. And I hate that word. It sounds to me like the demon it is. A short, harsh word, smacking an uninvited truth to broken, horrified lips. It is a word I fear. It stakes claim on my mind, pulling it along for a dance I never wanted to learn, stepping on my toes and breathing down my neck.

The first time I was really, truly raped, and not just coerced and persuaded, happened in early February 2009. I was thrown to the floor in my bedroom, and when I tried to protest, he held both hands around my neck and shook me until I knew I couldn’t say anything else if I wanted to live. When I cried “too hard”, he’d hit me, and to this day, I can taste my blood on his fist. Sometimes I still wake up in the middle of the night, panicking because I can still feel his sweaty hands holding me down, and my dogs look at me worried and perplexed, tails wagging. They have no words to ask what I’ve been seeing, and they come to me with enthusiastic kisses, and I wonder how he sleeps at night. After the first time, he stood up and told me that if he’d known I’d just lay there, he wouldn’t have bothered. He closed my door quietly, and I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t feel. I just curled into myself and held on, as if I could hold together what was left of me and keep those broken pieces safe. As if there was anything left to keep safe, anyway. When the tears finally came, I didn’t recognize the sobs as my own. I cried until I threw up, and then I bleached my carpet until the blood and puke was gone, but that span of carpet didn’t match the rest. It makes sense though. I will never be able to completely erase the horrors staining my heart and brain either.

I didn’t sleep that night. Or the next. The next day was when I finally showered, and I stayed in long after all the hot water was gone. I shook because the water was so cold, and I still felt like I couldn’t scrub him off of my skin. I felt smothered. I felt dirty. I felt dead.

He raped me 3 more times over the next few months. And I can’t talk about those right now, and maybe the details aren’t important anyway. What’s important now is the response. The first time I was brave enough to go to an adult about it, I was told “Well, he’s your boyfriend, right? Work it out. Your boyfriend can’t really rape you.”

He can. He did. Yes, my rapist was my boyfriend. That probably gives you a good picture of how skewed my idea of relationships are now. My first love tried to kill me and fucked with my body and my soul. He took everything. At the time, he took everything.

I write this because in recent months, I’ve realized that maybe, just maybe, I don’t belong to him, or my other abusers (who I may write about in time), or what they’ve taken away. That’s why I write these words. Because when I learn more about who I am and what I’m actually meant for, it occurs to me how I’m not the only one who has been abused so horrifically. I’m not the only one who has cried these tears and endured these flashbacks and been triggered by everyday life into just not being able to breathe and wanting to die. I write these words for those who walk this path with me. We are victims, and that is sad, and that is true. But more than that, we are survivors. The abuse I’ve survived is something that happened, something I had to deal with, and something I continue to deal with every day. And the very definition of survive is “to persist, to carry on despite hardships or trauma, to persevere, to remain functional,  to cope, and to live”. I wasn’t in a devasting car crash, and I haven’t been diagnosed with any terminal diseases. But what I went through was debilitating, insidious, vulnerable, and haunting.

I am not what has been taken from me, and if you’ve been hurt by someone or multiple people, you’re not what they stole from you either. You are what you’re giving to yourself, and kid, you have to keep giving. I promise you can live through it. I promise. You survived the abuse. You’re going to survive the recovery. You owe that to yourself, you know? Its not going to be pretty, or romantic, or easy. You will still wake up from nightmares, panicking when you imagine him touching you in places where he has no right to touch you, but you will reclaim your dignity and your heart and you will survive. He will kill the flowers in your brain before you realize, but you can grow them back all by yourself, watering them with patience and time rather than warm beer and bad sex that lies when it calls itself love. You are meant for the promise of better days. Someday your mouth will stop tasting like his fist, and you’ll try ice cream and a really good margarita and another man’s lips when he promises you the world and means it. You are not the hospital bracelet that you ripped off your wrist with your teeth, nor the blood staining your sheets. You are a mosaic, a piece of art comprised of broken pieces that, through time, learn how to sparkle and find light, a piece of beauty in its own right. You might always jump when someone touches you and it takes you off guard, or shudder when people touch you in a certain place, but these are your triggers now, and that’s okay. Some people will be patient with you, and some won’t. That’s okay too. You’re learning who can love you the way you deserve to be loved, and that’s one hell of a good thing. Sometimes, people will have nothing but the best intentions in mind, and they’ll still do something or say something that will throw you into a full panic, even when you truly know that there’s nothing to be afraid of. But you’ll learn how to breathe again. You really will. And more than that, you’re going to have your bad days. I couldn’t get out of bed until 4 PM today, and no matter how tightly I shut my eyes or how fiercely I shook my head, I couldn’t get some images out of my head. But my heart was still beating, still fighting, still winning, still reminding me that I’m alive, and even my worst days only have 24 hours. You need to crumble? Alright, fall completely apart. Did you know that for a star to form, an entire nebula needs to collapse? Maybe you do too. Call it destruction, or call it rebirth, but you know, sometimes strength is wanting to fall into the ground and die and then staying alive just to spite those evil thoughts and evil people.

You’re a survivor. And no matter if they’re baby steps or huge strides, you’re making them. Today I wrote a blog I told myself I would never be able to write, and already, I’m thinking about the stories I’ll be able to tell next. You can prove yourself wrong too, and in this line of fire, that’s incredible. So do the things you think you can’t. You’re proving your abusers wrong. They couldn’t take you down or out. You’re a goddamn survivor if I’ve ever seen one.

I write these words because I’m not about to watch myself sink. This ship was made for greater things. The waters are not always calm, and the storms sometimes threaten to take me out, but I’m the one in charge. I’m the one who gets to decide how I live now. I lived to tell the tale, and I plan on surviving the recovery.

Aggressively and unapologetically feminist.

When I was very, very little, I remember thinking that doctors and nurses were essentially the same thing, but the doctors were the boys and the nurses were the girls. The doctors were in charge, and I knew they got paid more, but they did the same jobs, I thought. I expressed my “knowledge” to my mother, and she straightened me out, reminding me that there are tons of men who are nurses, and tons of women who are doctors. However, I clearly remember her telling me one point that I was largely correct on: in many cases (but not all), the men are paid more than the women doing the exact same jobs. And so began my fascination with feminism.

There seems to be some confusion, even now, with what feminism actually means. If I tell you that I’m a feminist, many of you will immediately paint me as a passive-aggressive, butthurt drama queen, hell-bent on trashing anything and everything male. But the truth is, and has always been, that you don’t have to be anti-men to be pro-women. (I know that some people are, and I’m going to say that I don’t believe they should be called feminists.) Plain and simple, a feminist is a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes. Recently, I read this article, and while I do see some of her points, I’m saddened that she seems to be so confused as to what true feminism actually is. Towards the end of her post, she says, “I support fairness for everyone, but as long as being feminist means suppressing masculinity, it cannot possibly be called a “quest for equality.”” True feminists have never been about “suppressing men”. I just want to live in a world where, as a woman, I have the same opportunities, and I’m granted some respect. To plainly say that as a woman, you are not a feminist, is to say that you do not believe that women should have the same rights as men. And that baffles me. Feminism is not about picketing and fighting and bad attitudes, and it is not about making women stronger. We are already strong. It is about changing the way society around us perceives that strength.

I need feminism because when I finally had the guts to expose my rapist after multiple assaults, I was told that it wasn’t “really rape” because we had had consensual sex before, and he had been my boyfriend. Never mind that I went in with a black eye and bruises around my neck. I was asked what I had done to provoke him.

I need feminism because I am repeatedly asked by men (who have long-term girlfriends) for pictures of my boobs, no matter how many times I say no. No matter how uncomfortable I am, no matter how often I ignore comments that just make me feel like a piece of meat, I am still harassed because “damn girl those are sexy”.

I need feminism because there are men who seriously think that buying me a drink or holding the door open for me is some sort of entitlement to my body, and I’m a bitch or a tease if I don’t sleep with you “or at least give you a blow job”.

I need feminism because I’ve been told that I have a sailor’s mouth and “no respectable man is ever going to want to date you if you can’t talk like a lady”.

I need feminism because my mother never received a dime from my father to help raise me, because she was afraid that, although he hit her and put his oldest daughter in foster care, the court would grant him custody or give him visitation rights because he had a larger income.

I need feminism because men take “no” as a challenge and continue to pressure me into doing things I don’t feel comfortable doing, but I end up feeling guilty about trying to refuse.

I need feminism because multiple men still think that it is acceptable to invalidate my anger or frustration or sadness as “oh are you on your period?”

I need feminism because I have friends who have had men buy them gym memberships “because baby I want you to be worthy of dating me. This is because I care about you.”

I need feminism because when I was 18 and I told on a 40 year old man who had been touching my thighs and my ass and referring to me as his “future baby mama” at work, no one did anything but continue to make me work with him and make jokes about it.

I need feminism because there are women who truly say that they are against feminism. (See also, Jews for Hitler, or Slaves Against Emancipation?)

I could go on, but I think the point is made. In the article I spoke about earlier, she says, “Respect is earned, not demanded.” That’s bullshit. I absolutely demand that I be treated like a human being. I do not have to justify my emotions, my feelings, my rights, or my choices in general to men. Ever. If I say no, I damn well mean it. My body isn’t an item for you to barter on and persuade me to give you. And sure, boys will be boys, but that should mean that sure, they’ll fart and burp a lot. It should never be an excuse to lay a hand on a woman, or treat a woman like she’s nothing but a set of tits for their viewing pleasure. Do I think dress codes are great? Absolutely. I think everyone should be covered in school and work, out of respect for themselves and those around them. But I do not think that a tiny bit of cleavage or my bra strap or my thigh is a “distraction to boys” and should be covered so that “they can learn easier”. Nor do I think that if I dress to show off any part of my body that I am “asking for it”. Unless I say “have sex with me”, I am never asking for it. I don’t think that all men are rapists, and statistics tell me that 4 out of 5 girls won’t be sexually assaulted, but my rapist told me to “shut up and be glad someone wants to have sex with me” and police told me that someone I knew so well couldn’t actually rape me. I was told that I was overreacting. To this day, I have panic attacks when anyone touches my neck, but I must have overreacted when he tried to choke me. After all, “he just loves you. Maybe you should stop fighting it.”

No. I shouldn’t have to fight to have the rights I deserve. I deserve to show off my body however I feel comfortable doing so. I deserve to be able to go certain places at certain times without feeling like I have to take my brother or another bigger man with me to protect me. I deserve, as a teacher, to make the salaries that the male employees are making to do the same job. I deserve to wear v-necks without being told I’m dressing “slutty”. I deserve to be mad without having my hormones and my uterus questioned. I deserve to put my middle finger up and drop f-bombs without being told that I’m not a lady who could ever be datable. I deserve to wear what I want without being told “you know that men don’t actually find that attractive, right?” as if I dress for men and not for myself. I deserve for men to look me in the eyes and not in the breasts. I deserve the chance to be with a man and not continually question why he wants to be with me. I deserved to be told that I’m beautiful, and not “damn girl you’re doing those pants a favor” and I shouldn’t be put down when I don’t see crude catcalls as a compliment. I deserve to view my body as a temple and not as damaged goods. I deserve to feel empowered and not ashamed.

All men are created equal, they say, and that’s true. All people are created equal is true too. Regardless of gender, ethnicity, religion, color, sexual orientation, social status, beliefs, ideas, and what have you, we are all human beings who deserve compassion and love and respect. That’s the point. We are all incredibly important to this world around us, and this world is only going to grow in a positive light if we treat people the way we all want to be treated. No one is better than anyone else. We are all special to this place, and its time we started treating each other like that. However, we cannot for one second assume that we don’t still need feminism (feminism = equality, remember), or that rape culture isn’t very real and prevalent still today, or that all feminists are crazy ladies drowning in misandry. There are so many important things to keep focusing on, learning about, and growing with. We all have the potential for truly great things, and we need to better embrace that of all people. No one has the power to invalidate me, but we all have the power to empower each other. That starts by accepting the problem(s) for what they are, educating others, creating realistic goals, and working to achieve them.

I am unapologetically feminist down to my core, and you should be too. To say that men are still not in power in this society is to turn a blind eye to reality. Imagine if we lived in a world where men were as disgusted by rape as they are by periods. Imagine if we lived in a world where a man held a door open for a woman just because its nice, not because he expected a sexual favor in return. Imagine if we lived in a country where a female could be president some day, and people wouldn’t joke about her being “too emotional” to do one hell of a good job. Imagine if we just lived in a world where we were nice to one another, and accepting of differences, ideas, and lifestyles.

I ache to live in a world like that. Until then, here’s some girl-power dust, because we all need it. And here’s some human-power dust too.