It’s all still in my head.
This is what being a victim feels like. Cyclical, lonesome, anxiety inducing. I tell myself that others have most definitely had it worse, thereby minimizing and potentially invalidating my own traumatic experience. It’s a fact, it could have been worse for me. I could have dug myself a way deeper hole than I was already in. He’ll never understand. 7 months he’s been by my side, 6 months he’s listened to my broken-record complaints, 6 months he’s reassured me of his loyalty and his determination to see to it that I come out of this victoriously and fully recovered. He’ll never understand, though, not unless he experiences it himself.Â
It’s cyclical. I’ll still walk into my room and expect to see the man I impulsively married sitting on my computer chair, with his obnoxious Alienware gaming laptop stationed on my desk. There are still marks from the imprints of the edges of his laptop printed on my white desk. A constant reminder that everything he touches, he ruins. Whenever he was in one of his online matches, nothing else mattered. The rest of the world and my own concerns, it all disappeared. Some would call it passion, I call it a need to be good at at least one thing because he was mediocre in just about everything else in his life. Maybe that makes me sound bitter, oh well. I call it cyclical because he’s no longer here but he’s still here. Despite the 6 months I’ve spent recovering from the past year, learning to love and value myself again, creating new memories with friends, mom and a new love, I’m still plagued by flashbacks, by bad habits instilled in me by him, by the same anxiety and tension he brought into every room he walked in, I’m still craving cigarettes after the year I spent smoking on a weekly basis with him. I have new pet peeves now too, I assume this comes with the trauma of having my livelihood sucked out of me.Â
My room looks emptier since he’s been gone. At first this realization knocked the wind right out of me. This was probably the day after he came to pick up his things. I walked into the room one day and everything hit me all at once. I saw him as vividly as I would in a dream, and he was sitting on my chair that I had to learn to refer to as our chair. He was in his own world. There was a skinny but tall cabinet he picked up off the street in my room, sitting in a corner. It had most of his clothes in it, on top were a few of his toys. His bag was always on the floor somewhere. I bring up these details because they became a part of my life for the better half of a year, and I have a serious love-hate relationship with them.Â
Everything became so much more detailed after I realized the extent of my trauma and how it was capable of affecting me months, maybe even years after everything that transpired. I still have my guard up whenever anyone even remotely assumes a dominant stance over me, fear of getting hit is still as realistic as the last day he put his hands on me. I assume a defensive stance whenever I’m told what to do and how to do it, yet somehow I’m still as stubborn as I’ve ever been. He never liked being talked back to, which is exactly what I did on numerous occasions - which in turn is exactly why we got into so many arguments. I’m not sure where I lost my backbone, maybe it’s when I challenged myself not to walk away from difficult situations as I’ve always done. I chose the wrong person to challenge myself with, I admit my stubbornness played a large role. This is not to say that he’s faultless. If anyone else knew him the way I, and his family knew him, they’d see why he was engaged 3 times. They’d see all the red flags I ignored in order to prove to myself I could be strong and tolerant, accepting, resilient.Â
I am a victim of sexual assault. I never thought I’d see the day when I could admit to something like this, because I always thought I’d be too headstrong to put myself in a situation like that. I’m not the type to go out clubbing in revealing clothes, I can count with my fingers the amount of times I’ve been out drinking with friends, I admit i have low tolerance with alcohol which is why I never have more than a cup. I’ve never willingly put myself in a position to be raped, molested, etc. Yet somehow it happened. The statistics say that rape victims are most likely to be raped by someone they know rather than a total stranger, and this couldn’t be anymore true. I never thought I’d be raped by my husband, 3 months prior to our wedding day, and I never thought I’d end up letting it slide - because I was convinced that 1) it would not happen again (his reassurances were lies), 2) a man who wanted to marry me would not take advantage of me in this way deliberately, 3) that it was some kind of misunderstanding between us regarding consent, and 4) love would weaken me so much to the point where I’d rationalize and internalize with myself the notion that rape wasn’t rape it if wasn’t violent.Â
No amount of apologies can make rape seem like a mistake - an accident. Rape is deliberate. Rape is a power play. Rape is establishment of dominance. Rape is completely disregarding consent, and seeing a body as simply a pleaser rather than a human being with feelings, emotions, dignity.Â
My rape - my very sober and physically exhausted rape - was not violent. It was me realizing I have no control, no power, no strength to fight it. It was him establishing his dominance over me, because I was practically his wife already, his possession. He felt entitled to me. It was him watching me break down shortly after and telling him that this is not how we love people, and him quickly gazing over at the cable box to check if he had time to leave and forget he committed a crime. It was not violent. It could have been if I hadn’t been in a car accident a few hours prior to the crime. It was me being so destroyed and broken that I did not have it in me to properly process what had happened to me. He did not give me the chance or the time to process it. He wanted to sweep it under the rug, so he turned on the charmer and I obliviously played right into it.Â
At this point in time, I do not forgive him. I’m too full of resentment to forgive someone who stole the livelihood right out of me and made me apologize for being who I am on multiple occasions. However, more than anything, I do not know if I am able to forgive myself again, or trust myself, enough to remarry. I no longer trust the concept of marriage and everything it supposedly entails. At this point, if I could spend the rest of my life divorced and living happily with one person, I would.Â