What is my measure of success?
Is it how much money I make?
Is it how much I give back to society?
Is it how involved I am in environmental activism?
Is it how many degrees I have? Or buying a house and creating a family of my own?
To be honest I’m not kicking goals in any of those things
I’m on C-link, I only volunteer for festival tickets, I run a plastic-free Instagram while I eat Ben and Jerrys and Nestle chocolate, I dropped out of a DIPLOMA and failed my first semester of naturopathy (not exactly medicine now is it) and I’ve ticked off exactly 0 “family” goals unless you count my teenage miscarriage and the 4 abortions I had all before 25.
Since I put on weight most people assume my success will be measured in how much weight I can lose.
Everyone who “loves” me, has an opinion about it.
My aunt told me I was like Gwyneth Paltrow in Shallow Hal, that if I could just take off the fat suit I would be SO beautiful. What she meant is I’d be fuckable.
Maybe they all just want me to focus on something achievable and this seems like a thing I would want?
It’s amazing how much of my life has focussed on making sure I was fuckable.
Like that’s the goal right? To be the woman EVERY man wants to fuck? Is THAT my measure of success?
Well, it used to be. I would starve and purge and snort and cut because I was afraid that I wasn’t as fuckable as other girls. But I was and so I fucked, and I got fucked and I fell in love and people fell in love with me and one day I was so fuckable someone raped me while I slept inebriated on a mattress on the floor of my uni friends apartment with 5 other people dreaming around me. He had asked me earlier if I wanted to hook up and I said no, I told him I didn’t feel well and could he just hold me? I remember parts but mostly I remember waking up with no underwear on and the way all of our friends treated me for years after until not one of them was someone I would call a friend again.
I didn’t process that for a very long time and the longer I carried the weight of it, the more literal weight I put on.
There was an amazing man who shouldered my burden for a little while, when I was strong enough we went our separate ways with love and I finally faced my healing process head-on.
I went to therapy, I worked out, I dieted, I gave up plastic, I got my license, I broke a board with my hand and an arrow with my throat, I walked over hot coals and swam in the ocean naked. My healing was NOT linear but I started to feel strong for the first time in the longest time.
I was 98kg and guess what? Not only still fuckable, but still rapeable.
A person I was casually seeing did not heed my message of “I am ovulating which means I will get pregnant if we have unprotected sex so its off the table tonight”. Instead, he waited until I was, for the first time, asleep in his bed, before he climbed on top of me, held me down and raped me.
Apparently, I’m especially rapeable when I’m unconscious. Is that my measure of success?
When he finished I waited for it to get light outside, I honestly didn’t know where to go and I was afraid he would hurt me further if I didn’t pretend everything was normal.
He helped me get the leftovers from the dinner I had brought over out of the fridge, I asked him to pay for the morning after pill and he told me to come by his work after he got cash out.
When I finally got to the car I realised I had left my phone on his floor. He went inside and got it. I can’t remember if I went back in, I feel like I looked at the bed where it happened for an eternity but I don’t remember when that happened in the sequence of the morning's events.
That day is a dissociated blur that I froze for 2(?) months until he attempted to flirt with me on the street and a fury rose in me so fierce I vowed to do something, anything, to show him what he did was not okay. I thought I could exact my own revenge, take something precious to him like he had from me, break into his house and steal… what? His weed? Threaten him with information about himself? say I would tell, make him feel as unsafe as he made me feel? I barely had the courage. It wasn’t until he revealed he had my family’s address and threatened to hurt them that I took the matter to the police. My only witness was the chemist I yelled at for telling me I should go to the police when on the emergency contraceptive form I checked the box that said the sex was NOT consensual.
Now there’s charges and a plea and a victim impact statement and court dates no one tells me about and a woman who wants to meet me to find out if he was cheating on her while he was raping me and it’s just all a goddamn LOT.
And soon (probably next year because “this isn’t Law and Order”) a judge or a jury or someone somewhere will make a decision based on whether there is reasonable doubt and he will either go to jail or keep sauntering around my hometown for the rest of his goddamn life.
Is that my measure of success? Sending a rapist to jail? Exacting revenge?
My measure of success is not defined by the Australian judicial system.
My measure of success isn’t how fuckable I am (although there’s a little voice in my head that still tells me it is), it’s not if I’m hot enough to rape or beautiful like Gwyneth Paltrow (bish please).
It’s not how useful I am to society or many life goals I’m ticking off
It’s that I’m alive at all.
It’s that I’m breathing, right now.
It’s that I’ve been depressed for more than half my life and had so many fucking tests along the way, more than I could ever bear to write, and I’M STILL FUCKING HERE.
And I still have hope that things can get better if I just keep breathing.
