To the writer of ‘Water’:
I received this email a couple hours ago, another beautiful soul keeping it transparent and sharing her brokenness and triumph. She has given me permission to share it here. All names have been changed to preserve anonymity. You can read my post, ‘Water’, here.
I just wanted to say thank you, thank you andone last time: thank you. I found such freedom through your story and God is on the move. I attend a Christian society at my University and just last week we had an altar call for those who had experienced any kind of abuse or violation in their life time. I never ever thought I would get up in a room full of the “enemy” – that is men – and acknowledge that I had allowed one of them, their kind, to do mortifying heart breaking things to me when I was on the cusp of womanhood aged 17. But I did it! And five other women joined me which was one of the greatest moments of my life – we stood in a circle in front of the whole room and wept and wept some more as the room stretched its hands towards us and prayed fervently for us. Someone stood up and gave a testimony that they could see Crowns on our heads as a sign of our being overcomers – as are you!!
My story begins with a move back home to my home country in 6th form in order to attend a boarding school which offered A’Levels instead of the customary IB in my parent’s country of residence. I was angry and disillusioned about the move as I felt like my parents had dumped my sister and I in the middle of nowhere and I was not a happy camper. One weekend, my new friends and I went out to a barbeque being hosted by one of the rugby team members at our brother school. A guy approached me and asked me to come outside for a moment. Feeling somewhat confused, I rather naively followed him out to the back garden. He told me his and name and barely before I knew what was happening, he reached down and kissed me. I stood mildly stunned at this unexpected exchange but then thought “well if this is my first kiss, I might as well get it over with!”. It was, unbeknownst to me, the start of a passive attitude towards what men did to me – a feeling I had learned I believe as a child where my Dad’s raging temper was something you just had to live with until the storm temporarily ceased.
I then returned to the lounge where everyone had been sitting and found the room abuzz with news “That new Marie* chick just hooked up with Sam* and they met like five minutes ago!”Even my new girlfriends were shocked and told me that they had not expected me to be that type! The rumours continued all throughout the week at school but I tried to convince myself that the guy really must have liked me to move so fast. He made plans to see me in town the next Friday when boarders were allowed to go and do their shopping for tuck. I went in expectant and tried to look as cute as you can in an unflattering school uniform. But disappointment came in the form of his friends taking one look at me and deciding from a distance that I was not “fly” enough. “What was Sam thinking?” were the exact words used I later found out and my self-esteem plummeted to new lows as I tried to let this incident slide off my back. Soon, my friends and I began clubbing and partying over weekends as was the norm at the school we attended – it was surprisingly easy to book ourselves out over the weekend under the guise of staying with family as Seniors could sign themselves out.
One weekend in November, my friend Ella* and I went to stay at a random stranger’s house with a group of other girls form school. That was another risk we exposed ourselves too- boarders who wanted to club on the weekend would stay with guys who were deemed “safe and cool” to chill with but who we actually knew very little about! I thank God for what he protected us from although there were a few dangerous times when we stayed with men who were untrustworthy and plain shady! On that fateful November weekend, my friend and I were in particularly high spirits as we had just completed our AS level exams. We were dressed to the nines and there was a guy also staying at the house we were in who happened to be dating a fellow boarder called Tina* at the time. When Ella wasn’t looking, he slipped me his phone and asked for my number. I am not proud to say but I handed it over even though I also was in an intense long-distance relationship at the time. We got back to school the next day after a weekend of partying and I waited eagerly for the guy’s message which eventually came. We began to talk all throughout the Christmas holidays and I just couldn’t believe my good fortune – a hot popular guy seemed interested in talking to me! I returned to school in January and we were unofficially “seeing each other”. One weekend, we had a school dance and went clubbing after. We got back to where we would be sleeping and my friends soon crashed in exhaustion in the room we were all sharing. Meanwhile, my boyfriend took me into the lounge and poured me a huge glass of vodka and lemonade. He told me to drink it which I obediently did. He then led me to a green minibus parked outside and we began to make out. I dutifully allowed him to remove item by item of clothing but as usual when he tried to go all the way I didn’t let him. My mum had raised us as Christian as she knew how to and had always asked my sisters and I not to have pre-marital sex. But my boyfriend was insistent and said “Why are you doing this to me” repeatedly when I tried to say no. Suddenly he shifted all of his weight on top of me and forced my legs open. I became very still because the threat of violence in my alcohol – numbed mind suddenly became very near. Before I knew it, he had gone all the way and I was just numb and freezing cold as he took advantage of my body. The sun eventually began to rise on the horizon and he got off me and even helped me out of the car. I couldn’t look him in the face and just went to the room and tried to sleep, ignoring the blood which now stained my inner thigh. I went back to school the next day and confessed to my friend what happened. She was sympathetic but really, there was little anyone could say to make it better. My conscience screamed at me that I was used goods now but what made the entire incident more confusing was the guys text the next day :“Hey was thinking about last night and I am sorry about what happened.” I didn’t know what to say and didn’t talk to him for three weeks – a lifetime for a teenage girl “In love”. I did not in all that painful time realise I had been raped – I honestly thought I had somehow consented by getting myself into that situation and that I was simply an immoral girl who had given up her virginity before marriage.
I eventually asked him for a break from us but found my self-esteem couldn’t cope without a guy by my side. We got back together – only after I seduced him by going to his house and tempting him in every way I knew to do. He claimed I had hurt him and implied I should sleep with him to make up for asking for a break. Which I did. A few weeks later I was back to my old ways and my friends and I went out with him and his boys. We went to a lodge deep in the city and there was little light outside. My boyfriend was pouring shots of gin out and I noticed a green flash of light in the bottle of gin. Something warned me that he had slipped something in the drink but I ignored it. I drank a shot and my body instantly went limp. The same thing happened to my friend and she then began screaming and running around in a fit. Meanwhile, my boyfriend led me to the bushes and tried to violate me again in a very degrading way. To this day I believe he had planned to all along as punishment for my breaking up with him after he first raped me. I was sick after he was done from the gin and his friend also took advantage of me. We eventually had to go back to school and never really dealt with the events of that fateful night as we nearly got expelled for returning to school drunk as prefects. (I know right, to imagine we were prefects at the time!)
A few weeks later, I began to really question my so-called relationship and wonder if it was worth the price I was seemingly always have to pay. At that exact time, a friend in art class began talking to me about her encounters with Jesus and I was extremely intrigued. If God could visit her in such a powerful way, why not me! We also had an unexpected visitor: a lady from America came to talk to us girls at school and told us about her own promiscuous past. She told us how she contracted HPV and God healed her and how he had an awesome plan for our lives and even for our husbands in the future. At a school where inappropriate relationships and promiscuity were rampant, her words rang so true that day. I sat transfixed as all my life I had never known that Jesus could be as relevant and interested in something like my love-life! A few weeks later, I gave my life to Christ in my hostel bedroom and I have not turned back since.
I blocked out a lot of what happened with my ex and it came back to me in flashes in my second year of uni. The memories and stress of being an international student led to my having a nervous breakdown. I had to take two semesters out of uni to recover but I thank God that I eventually graduated! I then took another year out as I was still severely depressed and was fortunate to have understanding parents who paid for my therapy. In that season, I encountered a therapist who was the first to lay it down like it was. I had always carried an extreme sense of guilt over my past and wholly believed based on my exposure to incorrect Purity Doctrine that I had engaged in pre-marital sex. My lovely therapist instead showed me gently that I had not – I had been raped because silence is not agreement in a sexual context. Furthermore, she showed me that although I had always guiltily believed I was responsible for returning to my boyfriend and sleeping with him on “my terms”, I had actually engaged in what is called psychological rape. This is where you return to intimacy with a past abuser but you do not and psychologically cannot truly desire or enjoy it – it is not unlike an abused woman returning to her abuser. You may think you have a choice but you are actually in bondage to that person’s manipulative actions. This set me free in countless ways –so much that the very same week you posted “Water”, I publicly acknowledged my past abuse by going up in Christian student fellowship at my Uni and receiving prayer with fiver other girls who had been abused as children. I never ever thought the day would come when I would acknowledge to a group – of men especially, forget the other women there – that I had been through such trauma. God is doing something – can you see those golden overcomer’s crowns which await his victorious daughters? I hear those chains falling sister and I pray you can too!
