After Someone Hurt Me I Wanted to Hurt Myself (Until I Didn’t)
After I was raped I blamed my body to the point of wanting to cut my hands off
In September 2016, after heavy drinking at a party, I found myself barely conscious and wondering what had happened to me for the next few days. I felt something was incredibly wrong with my body. I was 21 and naive. Of all places, at a party full of so-called friends, I never thought my body could be violated right under my nose while blacked out and unconscious. My co-worker, of all people, told me days later that he saw me stumble out of an alleyway, followed by two men who attended the party and then fled. I passed out.
My mother always used to say that the dreams I had meant I could tell the future—I was a psychic and a clairvoyant with a pure spirit. After my rape, I didn’t feel pure anymore. My premonitions stopped, and I began to have nightmares where cockroaches as big as rats would swarm my room and crawl up my legs to my arms and onto my hands. Of course. Why would the universe choose me to share its information when I had let her down? I had let her so down. I had been weak and drunk and violated.
What a waste, I thought. To have to live in a body that accomplished so much in life at that point and was known by so many jobs and titles, yet was…
