Hitting Close To Home . . .

I find it kind of ironic that during Sexual Assault Awareness Month, I am doing a paper of rape prevention as part as my Project 3.

For the simple fact that we have had two rapes occur on campus, it starts to make me think. What exactly is happening on campus? Is it an over aggressive male wanting control, or have they been miscommunications between parties. I just have been starting to wonder, what is happening. I am not scared to be on campus because I do take most of the precautions that I have learned about while doing my paper, and also I hate walking alone.

At first I started to think that most of the girls put themselves in the situation, and at being that they are at college you should know that you have to be more careful. However being a sexual assault victim myself, I realized that that’s not a fair assumption, and rape nor sexual assaults is never justified.

Just the other week KU had a program called “Take Back the Night”. I heard about this program through hear-say, and I thought it sounded interesting. This program sponsored by KU’s Women Center, allowed women of sexual assault to come and share their stories through poems, paintings, songs, whatever. I thought that this program sounded great, and I wish I would have went, but I am not yet comfortable to trust a whole bunch of individuals with my insecurities, fears, and stories.

Now, I know that this post might get a little personal, but after researching rapes it all seems so related. I don’t usually like to vent but I feel like it’s easier to write into a computer and have someone else read my troubles, rather than me having to tell someone or a group of people face to face. Regardless of this blog being a project, I think it’s a good means of creativity and self expression.

NOTE: The following is true emotion and feeling behind every word.

They always tell you that the person that hurts you the most will most likely be a person that you trust. Think about the person you trust the most.  Hopefully they are the person that you least expect to hurt you, they are the person you confined all your secrets in, they are the person that loves you no matter what. Throughout my life, I have been cautious of who I trust, for that very reason. I have prepared myself for that very event.

But what I didn’t prepare for was the person that I loved with all my heart, in which I had spent the last 3 and half years with, in which I shared my secrets, hopes, and dreams with

 to rape me.

There is no worse feeling then losing all your trust and strength in a matter of minutes. The pain of someone forcing themselves upon you will forever stay in your heart. Sometimes I wake up in cold sweats because I can still feel his fingers running up and down my body, and I can hear my saying NO over and over. I can still hear my screams getting louder and louder because for those 30 seconds of my life, I felt invisible, I felt like no one could hear me.

Welcome to the life of a victim of sexual assault.

You think the person that is going to hurt you isn’t going to be the person you love. You will always assume it to be the guy who walks behind you a little to close when you are headed home past curfew, or the mailman who you feel as though is waiting for the perfect moment when he knows no one is home to enter. But nope, in my case he was my boyfriend, my best friend, a person who had been there from what seemed like forever.

My heart goes out to those girls on campus that had to experience such a thing. The feeling of not wanting to talk about it, because you feel like it’s your fault. The worry that no one will believe you, the doubt in your head that maybe you didn’t say no. But you know you did. The embarrassment from slowing becoming another statistic, the fear that people will see you different. And the pain that forever lives inside your veins. ALL THE INSECURITIES.

I have much insecurity that still lingers with me from that night. It is very hard for me to trust people in new situations. It sometimes gets hard for me to believe that if I tell my current boyfriend that “I don’t want to have sex tonight”, that he will not force himself upon me. Insecurity can eat you up alive if you let it.

But I am learning that sometimes very bad things happen to good people, and even though you will never ever forget that day, you have to let go.

I no longer look at myself as a victim, but as a survivor.