One Year of Being Awake (TW)

A year ago, a friend woke me up from an 18 year sleep.

We began to talk about bad drinking experiences and I told her a little about my experience with the woman who eventually raped me. I was still calling it something else then. I was still denying my pain and blaming myself.

She calmly told me, "you were raped." I took a breath and the walls started to crash in on me. Waves of panic, fear and shame competed for my attention as the realization of her words began to take root.

I was raped. Me. James. Raped. Victimized. Hurt. Those words carry so much weight and I could not acknowledge them for so long. Now I was unexpectedly forced to confront them.

My body was used without my permission. A woman took something she had no right to receive. In her wake, she left me emptier, sadder and confused.

I felt victimized. Nauseous. Powerless. Ashamed. Emasculated.

How did I not see it myself? How did I go on about my daily business for so many years as if nothing had ever happened? Why did it feel like a switch had suddenly been flipped in my brain that lit up that dark room in the corner where you hide your ugliest fears from daylight?

Well, the answer to that is that I didn't go on unaffected. I simply did not recognize how the psychological damage had been manifesting itself in my life and in my intimate relationships with women. It would take several months, tons of therapy and a lot of talking and reflection to see that picture more clearly. I'm still sharpening the focus on a daily basis and I stumble around blindly on occasion. Nearly 20 years of cluttered up denial takes a great deal of effort to clear away.

A year later, I'm less raw in some ways. I have faced down some of my demons, but there are many left to purge. As more layers of denial have been peeled away I find new things to confront, new challenges to face, and new reasons to be sad, angry or numb.

Going forward, I'm going to try to remember how far I've traveled over the last year. I'm going to ignore that mixture of shame and numbness that has been creeping into me lately, as it seems to do in unpredictable cycles. I'm going to begin my second year awake with the knowledge that I now know what happened and I've faced it as best I could with the tools at my reach.

I will keep building on the progress I've made. I'm going to stop beating myself up for feeling bad on days like today, when the anxiety, shame and sadness take turns occupying my head and heart.

I'm going to live.

This entry also posted at: http://jameslandrith.com/content/view/3425/79/

Cara of The Curvature on University of the Pacific Says Date Rape is Not Rape:

I want to point out is not why this man is an asshole, or why students definitely need to get SAFER on their campus — it’s how the general rhetoric surrounding rape upholds this man’s views. It’s why I frequently put the "date" in date rape in scare quotes. Because I believe it’s a shitty phrase.

I think that in some ways, the phrase "date rape" has indeed been useful, in the sense of getting out the idea that there’s more than one rape scenario, and it’s not all men jumping out of bushes. And I also know that some survivors, including a close friend I had once, find it comforting and prefer to use it, rather than just the term rape. And I have no interest in taking away people’s right to identify and name their experiences as they wish.

But far too many people have taken the concept that there is more than one "kind" of rape and twisted it into a hierarchy. Yet again, we’re back to the concept of "real" rape and the idea that most rapes don’t deserve the label. Now, we have two different classes popularly accepted in society — date rape and rape. Or, it could be said, date rape and real rape. After all, the "date" modifier is there for a reason.

Cara is responding to ridiculous and unnecessary comments made by Richard Rojo, a spokesman for the University as reported by Recordnet.com:

Pacific spokesman Richard Rojo said Thursday that the school does not consider the incident to be a rape.

"We would call it date rape," he said.

Rojo said the university considers "outright rape" and date rape to be different, in that date rape does not involve "a rapist jumping out of bushes and attacking people randomly."

He said, "These are people who knew each other. ... It's a social situation and unfortunately an all-too common problem at universities.

"It doesn't make it right. It's a sexual assault, and that's why the university took action in this matter."

Rojo is clearly downplaying the seriousness of the rapes by using deliberately weaker language while simultaneously trying to appear to take the matter seriously. It is a transparent and repugnant display and one the University needs to address immediately. Why is this arbitrary distinction so desired and important that Rojo felt the need to elaborate at length?

The woman who raped me did not jump out of the bushes. She used a spiked drink to subdue me, and then employed blackmail to keep me compliant once the effects of the drugged drink wore off. Given that I met her earlier in the evening, I guess that just makes it a "social situation" and not "real rape", regardless of the outcome.

Ugh. Somedays I really just hate people…

Relevant Links:

http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090529/A_NEWS/905290324/

http://thecurvature.com/2009/05/30/university-of-the-pacific-says-date-rape-is-not-rape/