This week has been a bit strange for me and I have been feeling a bit down. Not depressed, just having moments of down-ness. Today, I looked at the date and had an aha moment. I don’t know if I mentioned being raped previously or not, in some ways, the rape was relatively trivial in my life. It was a short spanned form of abuse against a backdrop of years of abuse.
I am not trivializing other people’s experiences, I am just saying how my particular experience is currently fitting into my life puzzle. Don’t get me wrong, it was traumatic, and I have a collection of feelings around it: doubt, blame, shame, secrecy, anger. But while it was a big thing it was not the biggest thing and in many ways it is just one of those things that happened to me. (Watch this music video of Oasis by Amanda Palmer, and perhaps it might make sense with what I am trying to say, maybe not). Perhaps, its something you have to live through standing on the cusp of adulthood when you have just turned seventeen.
But either way, it was at the end of May that it became real to me that I had been raped by my boyfriend, and that the relationship was over. This was the guy who a few weeks previously had spoken of me moving to the United Kingdom with him. Dear god, I was naieve, and desparate to believe that somebody could love me, that I was loveable. Either way, today is a mental health day. Tomorrow I have some things that have to be done, but today, I am taking the day off. Going to spend the day reading, and hiding away…being gentle with myself. Reminding myself that what happened, happened and it was not my fault.
Rage Against The Black Dog 