This Is How You Heal From R*pe

The Impact Statement I Never Got

Jan 08, 2024

CW: Sexual Assault, Suicidal ideation

I will not mince my words here. I will use the word “rape” because I have not had the luxury of opting out or being uncomfortable by that word — that word is my daily reality. In her memoir, Know My Name, Chanel Miller writes: “it is not my responsibility to alchemize what he did into healing words society can digest,” — neither is it my responsibility now to do the same for what my own rapist did to me. I will not shy away from using the word “victim”, either. People like to redirect that word into something more supposedly empowering, supposedly less weak, like “survivor”. But isn’t denying the identity of victimhood just another way to shame a person who was assaulted? Another way of suggesting you shouldn’t talk about what happened, because nobody wants to hear about something vulgar or heavy like that. Another way of confirming that society does not know what to do with a person who admits to having been broken by what happened to them. We can celebrate engagements and weddings and anniversaries but we are thrown into despair at the hard ones. I understand the desire to not let fear be the default force. But I am also the victim of a crime. The victim. Someone did something to me that was wrong and I am not going to spend the little free time I have by downplaying the reality of it or suggesting it is a little bit more ok by the metric of having ‘survived’ it. It is still rape even though it didn’t end with a knife pierced through my skin or a bullet in my chest.

The anniversary nobody wants to circle in their calendar is the date they were raped. Mine was one year ago, today. I could tell you about that night, the 8th of January 2023. But I have been advised that in the court of justice, my choices work in my favour more if I do not publicly share such details. Also, I don’t really want to put myself back in that room let alone anyone else. There is little point. But I am also aware that by my writing and publishing this now, I am making a decision of sorts. That this is me opting out of having traditional justice. I am propelling myself into the 98.5% bracket of those who do not win their rape cases. The court wants you unchanged, which is to say unhealed. Permanently frozen in time to the night it happened because you are the evidence and evidence must be preserved if you are to stand a chance at trial. My sharing what I am about to, in contrast, shows that in the year since I was raped, I have dated, have had sex. Have since managed to live on my own for the first time in my life. It shows I have drank with abandon — gone to festivals and bars and travelled to new countries alone. It reads, by a defence attorney’s standards: “you can’t have been that affected…It does bring this all into question.” To which I want to state now, for the record: My success is not testament to the damage he did not do but testament to the work I did do.

This is not a perfect piece of writing. There is too much repeated use of the word “crying”. But I did cry a lot this year, that is my truth. And this is my life — one whole year of it. Some of it probably reads as shocking but a lot of it probably reads as mundane. And that’s just it, a lot of it was. Victims of sexual assault walk all around us, 1 in 4 of us in the U.K., in their normal lives, just trying to keep them afloat — working and keeping fed and not falling apart.

Why am I doing this, then? Spending my Christmas break actively falling apart, in order to tell my story? Because I am not a statistic, my life is valuable and this feels urgent. Because through years and years of prior research, I understand how silence kills a person. The disease that rots through the mind and body when a voice has been oppressed. As the pop-star Maisie Peters sings in BSC (that’s bat-shit-crazy, to you): “I kept it in but it wrecked my organs.” I am doing this because there are people who will tell you how rape won’t change how people see you and then proceed to look the other way. I am interested in the people who are willing and courageous enough to look into the darkness, to look at the messy parts of a human and attempt to understand the world, not close their eyes to it.

Thank you to everyone who propped me up this last year, who took my weight under their arms when I was lifeless, empty and afraid. There are many moments and gestures I have missed in this piece; an inability to aptly express the degree of gratitude warranted. But you know who you are. When I could no longer see myself, you saw her for me.

I wake up and need toast, immediately. I have never been one of those people who does not or cannot eat when they are in pain or heartbroken or grief-stricken or a mixture of the three. So toast.

I keep my scheduled FaceTime call with my friend who lives in Spain, I see myself in the small rectangle screen — my leopard print dressing gown and swollen face poking out of the duvet — and I tell her, even though it is heavy, because there is nothing else in the entire world.

My flatmate stays off work, together we walk to buy a new soap dispenser and bath tray. I was raped less than ten hours ago and I am in The Range.

I send a polite email to my therapist, alerting her to what has happened. I reassure her I’m fine, only that my soul is broken. She extends my sessions, due to end that week, by another month without faltering.

I swallow a sleeping tablet and hope I might never wake up.

I take the train to work the next day and I cannot feel my body as it moves through St. Pancras station. There is a temporary deafness in my head, like earplugs are wedged close to my brain, my vision a blur. In the office I lock myself in the bathroom, my friend calls and I open my mouth to speak words I can’t make come out.

I sit in Pret with my manager and have a panic attack, she grips my hands and says anything you need. Good news: I have passed my probation. Bad news: I was raped.

The friend I spoke with earlier puts me on the train home and my flatmate waits there to collect me at the other end. My train is diverted and I end up stuck in a petrol station in a sleepy through-town at night, not a soul in sight. The woman behind the counter brings me a stool so I can sit down. I don’t need to say a thing, sometimes there is only a look in your eye and a kind person can see it. She tells me stories about the customers that come through her door— the bad, the mad, the mundane. I am struck by the normalcy, at witnessing everyday life when mine is anything but. That here in the fluorescent light there is tender humanity and I don’t know how to take any of it in.

I get home and there are flowers on my doorstep. Because I will bloom again, the note says — written by the friend who offers me a room in her Spanish city. I cry when the flowers eventually die, for there is grief in the time passing, the knowledge that life will at some point have to continue and it will continue without me.

I don’t know how I got through that day.

I keep forcing myself out of the door so to not risk never going outside again. I walk myself back into a body that has deserted me, my heart pounding against my chest, mostly in the fear of bumping into him.

It takes three days for my friends to convince me to go to the SARC centre. I don’t want to make a fuss. Nothing makes sense nor is quite real enough for that.

The centre is discreet, behind a police station. My Uber driver drops me off nearby and I am stumbling about on a main road trying to find the building.

I drink hot chocolate whilst giving my statement. Nibble biscuits whilst wrapped in a blanket before am I handed emergency contraception and I hand them the underwear I was wearing in return.

I snap the string of the ankle bracelet my sister got me for Christmas whilst changing into my hospital gown. Pearls bounce to all four corners of the room. I collect them up and slip them into my bag, in silence, unwitnessed.

I lay back on a bed, a video recording me with my legs spread, my feet wired through stirrups, for the forensic examination. The nurse picks up my limbs, measures and marks the bruises.

I look at my body for the first time. I had been too afraid to do so before. There are more bruises than I anticipated. I am both so tremendously sad for my body and proud of it for not keeping its pain to itself. To demand its pain be seen, if only by these two women in white lab coats.

I get swabs and shots, give blood and piss. Repeat the process again and again over the next three months. Spend £70.55 on the trips to the hospital.

I discover BBC’s The Traitors with my flatmate. We both hurt in the throat for screaming at the screen. It’s an evening balm when the days remain something to merely get through.

I make the trip to my parents’ house. I brace the countryside elements, my dad asking if it’s colder out today when I return inside. I say, I don’t know, I cannot feel a thing.

I have a funeral for my old self. I lay in a treehouse, buried in blankets. I let a shaman spin my chakras back in place and I watch myself leave my body as Tibetan bowls ring around my head. I see myself rising into the heavens, slowly enough to get a good look. I let her leave. I do not want her anymore.

My Godmother picks me up and we go to an ice cream parlour. The rows and rows of every flavour and every colour are too much to choose from — I get a tuna sandwich and chips instead.

I stop counting time in any practical way. Begin depicting the time only since. One week since. One month since.

I tell my friends, one by one, on cross-country phone calls or clutched to them in the soft light of my bed. I am gone, my soul is broken, are the only words I use.

My grief asks me to throw my life away but my reserve of resilience buried within somehow, miraculously, says: persist. Says: survive.

My mum comes and cooks for me; makes enough for the entire week. She washes the clothes I was wearing at the time.

I try not to think about how long it might be before I can touch someone again or be touched.

I become consumed with the needs of my ‘trial self’ rather than the needs of myself in the moment. I don’t really want to go to the hundredth hospital appointment but worry if I don’t show up, defence will use it against me. I try to be a good victim.

I let a friend pick me up in my pyjamas and take me on midnight drives around the city when I can’t sleep. I push down the fact I am in love with this friend, for the time being, because I’m not really alive enough to hate him for not loving me back in this moment — I just let him take care of me in this way he can.

He tells me, this shouldn’t change how anyone sees you, and then he is the first one to back out of my life.

I walk up to St. Pauls cathedral on my lunch break. I am not religious but I recognise in the moment how a person could be: those who’ve been to hell and back. I want something sacramental to witness me, something holy. I want somewhere to scatter the ashes of my old self, I decide it is here. And then I walk back to work.

I go to bed at ten, I no longer need the sleeping tablets, sleeping is the only thing I want to do.

I spend month two in the loneliness of my grief now that no one is checking up on me in the rhythmic strides they’d first weaved into their daily routines. I need to be strong enough to wade through the suicidal ideation that aloneness brings.

I go and get my top lip waxed because I will try anything to feel just an inch more confident in myself.

I go to stay in Spain with K. The trip is the thing I give myself for what I endured, what she gives me in unwavering generosity. I fill my cracks with Valencian light. Let the sun graze my skin and let it turn a different shade to the one it was at the time. My mind feels calm for the first time in three months, my body remains in a state of fear.

Twice a week before work I begin going for hot chocolates and turmeric lattes, iced mochas when the heat picks up. It becomes my sole reason for continuing to live — those £4.20 iced coffees in a morning doing more for me than a mortgage ever could.

D delivers the care package. It takes a village to heal from rape.

C does my food shop from Germany. It doesn’t just take a village, it takes a village around the world.

In my head, I go through the evening with a fine tooth comb. I regret picking up the newspaper with my byline, where he sees my full name and lives in a world in which he knows my full name. He finds me on Instagram after. I turn my social media profiles to private for six months.

Scientists believe you can only experience emotion for 90 seconds at a time so I sit in my guilt for one and a half minutes. I breathe into it and then I breathe out of it. The guilt that says I shouldn’t be going back to work quite so soon. I shouldn’t be writing again. I shouldn’t have moments where I let a smile in. It wasn’t really that bad if your life isn’t completely shot to pieces, says my inbuilt defence attorney. I become so familiar with my grief I forget that my life is completely shot to pieces — shot to pieces is my new normal.

I date a holy trinity; a quick succession of three men. One who has me yawning into my French martini, one who is fun to play pool with but nothing more and one I fall in love with from the moment he says hello.

I have sex, once. Hungover and tired and it is fine. He ghosts me afterwards.

I spend month five in a perpetual hangover. The drinking becomes a chase. Running far and wide until I crash, until I begin to speak less and less for fear that if I open my mouth only full-bodied tears will come out. And they do.

Snot too — because I am sick often, now. My nervous system wrecked, my immune system a sorry state of affairs.

I think, often, about how he raped me and then afterwards, after I was a broken thing who bawled hard in the bathroom, he told me this: your shoes are ugly.

I sign on the dotted line - the waivers that say I am not allowed to talk about what happened, to not contaminate the evidence, that say my therapy notes are fair game. I make it known I do not morally agree with such a system but acquiesce because what else am I supposed to do?

It’s a year since Johnny Depp won his defamation suit against Amber Heard. I don’t care about either celebrity. I care about the precedent and the irreversible damage the case has done. I knew at the time the way it would change history, would kill women on the spot. I didn’t know, couldn’t possibly fathom, that a year later I would be seeking legal advice myself — concerned at my own risk of being sued for defamation. Being sued for saying to the world this is what happened to me and it is not ok.

I stop avoiding my gynaecology appointments — as useless as they are — I consider I might not know what the damage is down there.

I turn 27 and am no longer the age I was when I was raped. People tell me, in jest: stay alive, don’t join the 27 club, now. They don’t know how much I am on the verge of doing the opposite.

It takes me six months to realise I need more than two days leave off work. I don’t realise how suicidal I am, coming up to this mark. The ok days seem far away, not even a small respite. It takes my Independent Sexual Violence Advisor (ISVA) to tell me to stop now, lest I be forced for months and months leave later.

I am signed off sick from work. I use the time to walk, to write, to try and turn a corner.

I read a report that comes out. It states there were 63 allegations of sexual misconduct by police officers in my district alone in 2022. It is the first time I think about how I will never win my case. How strange it stings to realise winning was never on my radar, winning was always only an abstract entity.

I find myself with ovarian cysts. Or my gynaecologist does. She doesn’t ask for my history, isn’t concerned with what factors led me through the door. She’s only interested in ushering as many patients in and out as possible, ramming that speculum inside of me with little to no care. She is not here for the why, the story. She is here for the scribbles on the anaemic green slip of paper, dosage instructions and discharge. But it’s there in the pools that try not to slosh out over the rims of my eyes. The student nurse who sits in to observe surely sees, the chaperone nurse too. Trauma, I think. My body is riddled with it. It’s all over my face, but all up inside of me too.

I wake up on the last Saturday of July and feel like I am in the wrong life.

I get busy — busy, busy. I look for a new flat - one in which I can have to myself, where I don’t need to hide my grief. And in the process I don’t have the chance to think about what happened. When I cry I don’t know whether it is because I forgot or because I remembered.

I call my mum and she says your life is so busy and we both laugh until, at more or less the same moment, we realise why it’s busy. The appointments, appointments, appointments. Nobody tells you of the admin involved after rape, no one who spouts shit about false accusations realises no one would voluntarily put themselves through this process.

I can’t ever see my mother and not cry. I tell her how alone I feel and she says she feels that aloneness for me too.

I sit next to a policeman at a wedding breakfast, listen as he tries to defend his institution “a few bad apples”. “You can’t do anything these days”, “Everyone with Google thinks they know more than those of us inside”. Actually has the audacity to say the names Cousins and Everard, and I chase my mushroom around my plate, bite my tongue as hard as ever, that wants to spit: you are the problem. That wants to throw the statistics back at him. But it is not the time or place. But then: when is it the time or place for institutional misogyny? When is it the time or place to be raped?

I go to the Women’s Centre for a psych evaluation, in order to keep my place on the 18 month waitlist for counselling. With the therapist, I go over my history like it’s a black and white film reel. She thinks I am an overachiever, thinks I have a drinking problem. I am numb for the rest of the day.

I cry watching Taylor Swift cry as she says “You don’t feel any victory when you win because the process is so dehumanising” in her Miss Americana documentary. I don’t know how I will ever be believed or get anyone to believe me. Not when so much of me doesn’t yet, even still, believe it myself.

I open an unsolicited dick picture whilst I am waiting in line for the drink-with-the-stupidly-long name in Starbucks. It is from a man I went out with three years prior. I walk to the nail salon and have a two hour long silent panic attack. I meet S afterwards, and fall into her arms on the street. I am sick in my bones of the shit women have to put up with, the shit men get away with. Later, I tell the guy, I never want to hear from you again.

I move out of the flat I lived and endured through what happened. It no longer feels like home. Leaving is an immediate weight off my shoulders.

I lose friends not because they have done anything but precisely because they haven’t.

I cry on the aeroplane, on the way home from visiting another friend, as I realise I can decide to be ok, that I am allowed to enjoy life. I dab my eyes from the aisle seat and wonder if those around me think I have a fear of flying. Turns out, only sinking.

I move into an apartment in the city centre. Living there, having the place to myself, is the most successful I have ever felt. Most content too.

I spend the equinox with a small group of women, eating cockles and lavabread. Sipping on a thousand different wines, the Sommelier encouraging us each and every time. Toasting to Autumn, to us, to the blessings of the season and the honour of this life.

The allegations against Russell Brand come out and spread across the mediascape like wildfire and it feels — the rape — like it was only yesterday. I think about how little peace victims get in this economy of endless bad news, in this epidemic of violence against women.

I say goodbye to my manager as she leaves for a new venture, and I realise how much of a safe haven my job has been all year. And that it seems insane to say I am lucky when I consider what has happened, but lucky I am to have someone like her in my life, lucky I am to have so many of the people that are in my life.

I crack open a fortune cookie which threateningly tells me: “be careful with whom you share your confidence with”. I think to myself, half deadpan, half amused: as if I have any confidence left to spare.

I land with a two-month course of antibiotics on my lap. My skin has become an external manifestation of what I feel on the inside. My stress is palpable, the welts a red landscape across my chin.

I wobble and kiss a man who doesn’t respect me. I let abandon take me and let him stand in the life I have made, all my own, when he has no business being admitted there. I refuse to tell anyone what he does to me. There is only so much violation one is allowed to complain about in a year.

I schedule in for an emergency appointment with the Women’s Centre. And then bottle it. Reschedule it later and this second time, keep it.

I get a tattoo of a teddy-bear, drawn by a trusted long-time collaborator and friend, to reclaim and reconnect with my inner child.

I hear a stat about the first Sunday after Christmas being the most popular day for people to download dating apps and I freeze a little bit inside. Dates too, it would appear. Which means, also, rape.

I meet a man who treats me unlike any of those gone before. I’d be mortified for him to know to what extent. He books the restaurant on a Saturday night, picks me up and doesn’t let me pay for a thing. When I tell him that night, of that night, I wasn’t expecting to. Nor was I expecting him to not run. I try my hardest to not let my mind race, for my anxiety to not ruin a good thing.

I sit in his kitchen, his hardcore music playing through the tv, watch him cook dinner. I buy him vegan chocolate in exchange, and we fall asleep on the sofa gripped tightly like we are trying to climb into one another’s skin.

He breaks my heart in the kindest way. Attributes it to something about timing. We wish each other well and I am grateful for what passed between us. I am glad we wasted no time, that we kissed within 5 minutes of meeting, that I loved what we had together, when we both had it.

I am reminded, point blank, that good men exist.

I say to my Independent Sexual Violence Adviser (ISVA) that I don’t know whether I am in a state of dissociation or acceptance. That I have begun to chuckle at the twists and turns life leads me down and then abruptly changes its course with a side-dish of whiplash. By the end of the call we have decided together: it’s acceptance.

She tells me she’s proud of me and I feel it too. I cry for how far I have come, for the work I have put in. And the way nothing will ever make what happened better but how I was always going to come back stronger, more real. I feel it for the first time: something like peace.

I recognise that allowing moments of joy do not discredit what I have been through nor do they erase the moments of hurt. That pain is not more convincing if it isn’t respited by joy.

I try to move on too soon from the good man but I realise those old tricks no longer work. I recommit to being alone, to knowing I am better off that way for now until someone shows me they are the real deal.

I am stranded on a train home from work until gone midnight. There is something very end of world about it and yet — I know I will survive, I always do.

If I can make it through this year without relapsing from my eating disorder it is my hope that there won’t ever be a year going forwards in which I do.

I put my Christmas tree up, I make the effort to do so given it’s my first time living alone. I make the effort to do things for myself, for my benefit alone.

Tragedies happen, continue to swell in different shades. This time to a close friend, the lottery draw of this fragile life. And it is my turn to repay in kind, all the consideration she has continued to show to me.

I make a care package for S when she is sick, write a card to congratulate A on her new job. I am slowly trying to come around to acts of kindness, to gestures of love, after a year of feeling only swallowed by my inability and incapacity to see beyond myself.

The nightmares canon, continue to spill violent visions across my visual sky.

My free time, my time to rest from long busy days at work are not spent unwinding, they are spent winding in. Thinking through feelings, considering the judicial process, spiralling with anxiety.

I spend Christmas Eve re-reading Chanel Miller’s memoir, Know My Name, because I know I want to blow the lid off my silence, to publish this piece of writing, to do the exact opposite of what the court wants. I need Chanel’s bravery of enduring the court system whilst enduring my own journey down a different road to not-quite-justice, not-quite-peace, but somewhere between the two.

I am told to prepare myself for the potential backlash from these words. But all year has been a practice of distinguishing those who don’t want to know me because of what I have been through and those who do, in spite of.

I could continue this list forever, it is infinite in its edges. Because it’s how I live life now, it is the life that is mine, even if it is not the one I wanted. And it will always be something to make strides against. To move away from. Like the tide, always rocking back and forth. This is not a culmination of my bravery. It feels braver to stay alive, day after day. To keep going. To fight in my own way, undefined and unrestrained.

Find your nearest SARC Centre here - even if you have no intention of reporting your assault to the police, you will find support and aftercare in these important and necessary spaces.
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