Drugged, Raped and Blamed Is the Name of the Game.

This was the night I lost my childlike view of the world.  This is the night I lost faith in others.  This is what sparked my hatred for men.  This is the night I first tried "alcohol" and this is the night I lost my virginity.  This is where my mess all began.  So if my mess is my message, then this is where my purpose lives.           

You know what's fucked up?  I think about this.  I think about this situation everytime I’m sober and alone.  When there is nowhere left for me to hide; I am here.  I am pressed up against the chain link fence, bra exposed, jeans pulled down around my ankles and consciousness fading in and out.  This is where I live when I’m alone.  My mind takes me back to that day.  My body follows and my sense of self starts to disappear.  

My mind takes me back to walking down the halls the next day in a haze.  I feel everyone's stares in my direction.  I feel like I’m in a high school movie.  You know the one where everyone is covering their mouths as their eyes peak from behind their hand as they gossip to their friend.  Like everyone is in on some crazy story that you haven’t heard about yet.  Only this time it’s about you.  

Dread starts to set in.  My senses start to heighten and I can almost hear the faint words being murmured by my fellow classmates; my people.  I start to hear the words, “Slut and whore” or “What did she do?!”  I want to die.  In this moment I want to die.  I want to run out the locked school gates and I want to hide forever.  I want to bury myself in my closet and never come out.  I want to be amongst my best friends; my stuffed animals.  They get me.  They provide me safety and security.  They see the little lost soul that needs their fuzzy arms to wrap around it.  

This.  This is where I live every fucking day that I’m finally alone, staring at myself in the mirror; no baby, no job, no nothing.  I am here.  Naked and alone.  Pressed up against the chain link fence.  Fading in and out of consciousness.  I’m a slut, a whore.  I’m alone in this.  All my people blame me.  I didn’t have the tools to own it and to face what happened.  I didn't have the voice to speak yet.  Being 14, drugged, raped, and blamed has to be the lowest point of my life.  It still is and I’m still there.  

I know other people may have a different memory of what happened or heard a different story, but this is mine.  This is what happened to me, not them.  I get to face it.  I have to relive it almost everyday.  It’s hard for me to push out other people’s voices and really pay attention to what mine is saying.  Others don’t want to feel my pain so they may say things like, “Maybe that didn’t happen” or “Maybe you’re overreacting”.  I know they mean well.  They want me to be safe and unscathed.  They too want to run and hide in their closet surrounded by teddy bears.  But that’s not life.  

Instead, what I need, is for someone to sit with my pain and acknowledge it.  I want you to sit with me and don’t tell me everything is going to be alright.  I want to hear the silence or I want to hear something honest.  I hear you, I see you and I feel your pain and guess what?  It’s all okay, you are normal.         

What would I want someone to say to me back then?  I ask myself this question.  I ask myself this question because I have a daughter.  What would I ask her if she started acting different?  How would I approach this subject?  What would I want someone to say to me?  It’s hard to say.  I don’t know what 14 year old Molly was feeling.  I don’t know what could’ve been said to her to make her talk about it and to help her find her voice in it all.  

Now what I would say to that 14 year old girl is this, “It happened to me too.  I know the horror and the fear you are feeling.  I know the confusion is almost too much to understand.  It’s hard to realize what happened when you thought the person that did it was hot or that they were cool.  It may feel like you maybe wanted it.  But how could you want something you don’t know much about?  Especially while fading in and out of consciousness.  There was no consent in that.”

Two gulps out of a water bottle of clear liquid does not get you that drunk.  I play the scenario over and over in my head.  I can almost remember how awful it tasted.  It was so chemically.  I remember one of the guys telling me to not drink too much of it.  Now, with my knowledge of drugs, I want to say it was Gamma Hydroxybutyrate, also known as GHB, G, or best known as the “date rape” drug.  The date rape drug.  Some people use it in the party scene.  In my adult life I have used a very small dose of it to party.  But too much of it, you’re out.  You’re an easy target for someone to take advantage of.

It’s crazy as I’m writing this I’m realizing that most of my sexual encounters since this happened have been almost identical to this.  I get so unbelievably drunk, fading in and out of consciousness, and I usually go home with some guy.  Some guy that I think is hot or cool.  It’s like a mirror image of my 14 year old self.  It’s like I adopted this as my reality.  I became what all my people called me.  I relived this experience over and over, again and again.  It has taken me over 15 years to see this.  Why did it take so long?  Oh yeah, I was drunk for majority of that time.  I had been hiding for so long.  I had been in my closet with my stuffed animals hiding from the truth that is my nightmare.  

I’m so happy I’m finally sitting with it.  I’m so happy I'm finally seeing it for what it was.  I quit the running and I quit the silencing.  Most importantly, I quit listening to other peoples voices and started hearing my voice.    

Which leads me to how I’ve been living since I was 14.  These feelings about myself have led me to cheating on boyfriends, to yelling at loved ones while drunk and to being completely devoid of any real connections with people I love and in return I've been used and tossed around by like minded people.  People afraid of their past, unwilling to sit alone and face their fear.  

I have believed that I am powerless for so long and I believed that I deserved to be treated badly.  I was so quick to tell myself things like, “Maybe I deserve this for cheating on so and so” or “Maybe I deserve this for how I’ve been living my life these past 15 years”.  Yes.  In a way this is true.  I did deserve to be treated this way, because I believed that I deserved it.  As horrible as this makes me feel, I created my reality.  

I was sure to break myself down piece by piece.  I was weak.  Riddled with years of running and numbing.  I wasn’t conscious to see what was actually happening.  I may have believed that I deserved it, which created my reality, but what’s great is that I’ve learned that I can change my circumstances at any given time.   

I got out.  I made it.  The hardest part is leaving your old self behind.  Actually the hardest part is admitting that you are stuck in a scary and unhealthy relationship with yourself.  The scariest part is leaving.  Sometimes it feels safer to stay, but it’s not.  It’s never safe to stay with someone because you’re scared to leave.  That’s not right.  It’s hard to see.  It can be hard to face fear and do what’s best for you.  I did what was best for me, even though all I wanted to do was ignore what was happening.  I kept convincing myself that the way I was living wasn’t that bad.      

How do some trauma survivors not resort to drug use or victim mentality?  What do these people have that I don’t?  Why do some people live and others not?  

I am covered in shit, I am covered in scars and aging skin, and wounds from my past.  I am covered in anxiety and stories that I tell myself about how hard my life has been.  

What I did was I created stories about myself.  Then, I would convince myself that these stories were true in order to make my life easier.  So when I don’t go for something I want, I blame my past.  So when I don’t say yes to that experience I want to be apart of, I have an excuse.  

My excuse is that my life has been hard.  I blame my past and my experiences for why I’m not where I should be.  I blame my experiences for not having a career and living back at home with my mom and for becoming a single mom.  I blame all these outside sources.  But guess what?  I’m to fucking blame.  I made this all my reality.  My soul chose a path and this is it.  I thought I was making my life easier by lying to myself, but all I did was create a life I did not want to live.  This is my story.  Now it’s time I start living the way I want to live.

You either get stuck living in that trauma you experienced or you move forward, embracing the trauma, not pretending like it never happened but knowing it happened, accepting that it did, and now figuring out how to make it better and helping others.   

Being stuck at 14 years old, being stuck in a cycle of running and numbing and being stuck with my hand wrapped tightly around a bottle are my battles.  I survived every single one of them.  It’s wild, writing this all out has to be the best thing I’ve ever done for myself.  

I want to help others find what’s best for them.  I want to serve others who have felt powerless or still feel powerless.

Maybe I can help others by telling them to sit down and write out a past trauma.  It doesn't have to be big, it can be small.  It doesn’t have to be about rape, abuse, or drug addiction; it can be anything.  It can be that time your mom yelled at you for not taking out the trash or that time your friends didn’t invite you to that party.

So I challenge you to sit down and write about a trauma big or small.  If you want to share it with someone you trust, great.  If not and you still want to share it, why don’t you leave it in the comments here.  You can leave it anonymously.  Get it out into the universe.  It’s meant to be shared.  With sharing comes not feeling alone, comes connection, comes being seen and heard.  I will read it and I will see you and you will know that you are not alone.

I will leave you with a quote by Ingrid Betancourt, "Remembering is painful. And telling your story involves submerging yourself deeply and intensely in your own past, bringing forth a flood of uncontrolled emotion. You become conscious of your most glaring vulnerabilities. But sharing is also your way out. Every time you tell your story, you can distance yourself from it, take a step back. You learn to remember without reliving, and begin to recover.”