Apparently, my emotional reaction from the night I was roofied is on a ten-year delay
So I've never been shy about discussing the night in college that I was roofied, and I'm sure I've at least mentioned it in passing on my journal and possibly in other journals on my flist, but as far as I can recall I've never sat down and made a post describing what happened (and what didn't happen, thank God) that night, and how the experience has affected me. But the events of the last several weeks and my emotional reaction to them has made it clear that now's the time to do that, if for no other reason than that it will help me get a handle on why it's suddenly affecting me in a way it never has in the past ten years.
So I suppose I should start off by saying that I was never actually assaulted that night, and I would never compare my experience with the experiences of people who have been sexually assaulted. I can't imagine the level of strength that rape survivors find within themselves to overcome their abuse, and they have my deepest sympathy and admiration. As for me personally, I really had the best possible outcome for that night, given the circumstances. So I'm not really sure why, a decade after a (relatively speaking) uneventful night, this is suddenly hitting me harder than it ever has, even counting right after it happened. I've heard of women who've been assaulted repressing their emotional response to it, and then dealing with it later, usually in their thirties (and, hello, I'm 31). (As an aside, does anyone have any articles or anything about why this happens? I'd be interested in learning why people think the emotional ramifications can sometimes be delayed to a later stage of life.) But I never considered the possibility that I'd repressed anything, because 1) I never felt ashamed of anything that happened, and never hesitated to tell my story and use it as an example of a cautionary tale in the vein of "I never thought anything would happen to me either, but let me tell you that it does", and 2) there was nothing to repress. But for some reason, recent life events (which I'll get into later) have brought it back up to the surface in a way that has left me in tears every morning for the past week, and last night I even had a dream where I came home to find a man waiting in my house to rape me. Clearly, my brain is telling me this affected me more than I thought, and that I need to deal with it.
I'll begin with a description of what happened that night, at least to the best of my memory. I went up to Wisconsin with a friend of mine to visit her boyfriend (who was, if I'm being honest, a hipster prototype, but also a very nice guy). Our last night there, we went to a party with him and some of his friends. We were the only girls, and there were maybe 7 or 8 of his guy friends there. They also seemed like nice guys, and I felt comfortable around them.
At some point, somebody (I can't remember who) decided to pour us all some beers. (I was 21 or 22 at the time, I'd been to enough parties to not think anything about it.) Me, my friend, and her boyfriend (and maybe 1 or 2 other guys? I can't be sure) were all sitting around talking while the rest of the guys made the drinks in the "kitchen" side of the apartment. They were labeling Solo cups arranged on a table and one of them called out to me, asking me my name so he could label a cup for me. Then they brought all the drinks out to us and passed them out. I honestly don't remember if my drink tasted funny and I just ignored it, or if I never noticed any taste difference-although I'd been able to drink for a while at that point, I generally avoided beer, so I'm honestly not sure I would have even noticed an odd taste, since all beer tastes gross to me.
A lot of that night is still fuzzy to me, but I do know that there were a group of at least 5 or 6 guys, maybe more, around that table where they were pouring the drinks. Either the guy(s) that put the drugs in my drink was very good at slight of hand and was able to retrieve the drugs from wherever they were stashed on his person and slip them into my specific drink with a bunch of other guys standing around watching, or he did it with the knowledge of everyone at that table. Which would mean EVERY GUY at that table either stood around and DID NOTHING when they knew I was about to get drugged and raped, and/or they were in on it and were planning to take their turn with me. Just typing that sentence seems unreal to me and makes my stomach churn.
And I'll never know which guy(s) were in on this. I can't remember anyone's faces, but I vaguely recall one tall thin guy with short hair who seemed like he might have been the ringleader, but I don't know if that's an actual memory or just some psychological need to assign a face/identity to my "attacker." I feel like it's a double edged sword: having a face/name to identify as the one who did this to me would be comforting in that it would be someone I could point to and ID in a metaphorical police line up, someone I could know to fight. (The inability to fight off an attack is one of my biggest fears, which is why ghosts and demons have always terrified me because there's no way to defend yourself from a ghost. Which is why, I think, the idea of being drugged and defenseless and unable to fight has an added layer of horror for me. But it's a chicken-or-egg scenario, because I discovered my intense fear of ghosts/demons the same year this all happened (via my first occurrence of sleep paralysis), so I don't know if that fear contributed to my emotional reaction to that evening because it already existed, or if it became a new fear because of that evening.) But at the same time, having a definite face to remember might have just turned into a face to haunt my nightmares. In my recent nightmare, the man waiting in my home to rape me didn't have any face, he was just a dark shape. Would it be better to have a specific person to be afraid of, or to just be afraid of any danger? Maybe if I'd been more afraid back then, this wouldn't have even happened.
Now, I realize I disobeyed SO MANY of the cardinal rules of college parties: Don't take an open drink from someone you don't know. Don't take a drink that someone else poured. Don't take a drink labeled with your name. Trust me, everyone I've told this story to in real life has reminded me of these rules. Included my mother, who drilled these rules into me with a kind of religious fervor (a fervor which I internalized and thus drilled these rules into my freshman and sophomore roommates' skulls as well-this happened my junior year of college). I really knew these rules. I have no explanation for why they seemed to have completely escaped my brain that night. The only thing I can think of is that the ONLY people I'd been drinking around for the last couple of years were all very, very good friends and I'd grown so comfortable that I was no longer living in constant fear of someone slipping something into my drink, and this implicit trust carried over to a group of unfamiliar people who I felt comfortable around.
For whatever reason, I let my guard down, and I've beaten myself up over it for the last several years. It wasn't until very recently that I realized this. Even though I've never been ashamed of what happened to me and I've never felt like I asked for it or anything like that, I did blame myself for being stupid and careless. Like I mentioned, whenever I've told my story to other people I've usually gotten the "But didn't you know not to do A, B, and C?" lecture, and I've always said, "God, yes, I was SO STUPID, I can't believe I did that, I don't know what I was thinking!" And it's taken me a very long time to realize I've been internally shouldering some of the blame for what happened to me. It's a fine line between realizing how depressingly necessary these "rules" are, and then blaming myself for being a "stupid idiot" when none of the actual blame for getting drugged should fall on me. I'm still not sure how successfully I've walked that line, sometimes.
I don't remember how many drinks I had, but I don't think it was more than one or two. Very shortly after I started drinking I don't remember much of anything. I know at some point I started feeling sick, and my friend took me into a separate room to lay down. I then either blacked out or went to sleep. Several times I remember her coming in to check on me and make sure I was okay. But then I don't remember her checking on me any more, and I don't remember if I eventually just stayed asleep, or if she went to bed and stopped checking on me, or if I eventually came out of it enough that she felt okay about leaving me alone. I don't remember if I slept in that room that night, or if I moved somewhere else. I don't remember if I ever locked the door. What I do remember is that the whole night it never even occurred to me that anything was wrong, that I'd been drugged. I like to think that my friend figured out what was going on, or at least suspected, and that's why she kept checking on me, because it would be harder to rape me if there was someone keeping an eye on me. There's no doubt in my mind that if she hadn't taken care of me, something awful would have happened that night. I would have been raped by at least one guy, probably more. Whether she suspected or not, she saved me from a hell of a lot of trauma, and I'll always be thankful for that.
But even though I'm relatively sure that nothing happened that night, I'll admit to having my moments of doubt. Because most of the night is a complete blank. I remember at least some of the times my friend came to check on me, so I like to think if someone came in and did something to me while I was out of it that I would have woken up enough to remember it happening, but what if it happened before the drug started to wear off, and I was so out of it that I never woke up or just couldn't remember? I'd like to think that if something had happened to me that my friend would have at least noticed when she came to check on me, but what if they did something (like groping or touching) that didn't involve much (or any) removal of clothing? I'd been rolling around in a blacked-out stupor before she came to check on me, so would she really have thought much of some rumpled clothing? I'd like to think that with my friend checking in on me every so often, that there wasn't ever any opportunity for some guy to sneak off and do something to me, but what if she just thought I was drunk, not drugged, and some "nice guy" at the party offered to come check on me for her and he used the opportunity to do something to me then? Even now, it's really hard for me to look at these questions too closely, partly because I don't want to consider the possibility, and partly because I'll never be able to know what (if anything) happened that night.
The next morning, I remember I still didn't think anything was wrong. I was tired but, from what I can remember, nothing was amiss. I'd been black out drunk before (once, after a LOT of alcohol) so while I thought it was strange that I'd done it again, it honestly never occurred to me to even consider the possibility that I'd been drugged. It wasn't until we were already on our way home (and had been on the road for maybe an hour or so) that we started having the typical "Oh man, I was so wasted last night!" recap that I realized I couldn't actually remember how many drinks I'd had that night, that I remembered getting my first beer and then INSTANT BLACK OUT. I kept trying to turn that over in my head, and slowly, the idea that I'd been drugged began to hit me. But as we were discussing the rest of the night, I didn't even want to bring it up, because what if my friend took it personally? What if she thought I was attacking her boyfriend by association, saying he hung out with rapists? Eventually, though, I did broach the topic, and she was surprisingly receptive. (Another reason I think she might have suspected it herself the night before.) I tried to be dismissive about it, to kind of make a joke about it, because I wanted to tread lightly and not upset her. I said things like, "Well, nothing happened, so it doesn't matter anyway. And maybe it's all in my head, maybe I just had a bad night. The only way to tell for sure is to go to a hospital and get tested." And then (this is how amazing my friend is) she said if I wanted to go to a hospital and get tested we could do that. I honestly wanted to know, and I was tempted to do it, but I eventually decided against it, because 1) we still had a 10 hour drive ahead of us and class the next day, and 2) I had heard that one of the reasons roofies are used so often is because they metabolize so fast they can't be detected the morning after. (I've since realized that this is false, but at the time I thought that delaying our trip for a drug test that would most likely be negative even if I had been drugged was pretty pointless, so we drove on.)
After that, I mostly forgot about the whole thing. I considered it a very close call that had taught me a valuable lesson about not ever letting my guard down EVER, and honestly sometimes I'd completely forgotten it happened, like I'd hear a story on the news or see a similar situation in some Lifetime movie and it would take me a minute to realize: Oh, hey, that happened to me too, I forgot! And it wasn't just me, I had to remind the people around me too, like my mother, who I told about the whole thing the day after it happened. Looking back, I think I was, at least partially, distancing myself from what happened to me. Like I would see some girl get drugged in some Lifetime movie, and it would take me a moment to be able to identify with the girl on screen. I had to overcome the "me" and "rape victim" disassociation, because nothing ever happened so I wasn't a "victim," and I'd never thought of myself that way (even though now some part of me acknowledges I was, at least in the most superficial sense). It just wasn't something that I carried with me, I never considered it something that affected me or shaped who I was. It wasn't part of my identity, it was just something that happened to me one night. When I talked about it with people, it was always along the lines of: "Yeah, that one time I got roofied, LOL. Hide yo kids hide yo wife. It can happen to you!" I think, maybe, that was my way of dealing with it from a sideways angle, acknowledging that it had happened without ever having to look to closely at it and face the harsh realities of what may or may not have happened that night. Even now, I feel like what happened to me is this foggy grey area that I can't really put a word to. Because on some level, I was victimized, but I feel like to call myself a "victim" of sexual assault is not only a technical fallacy, but it also diminishes the events of "real" victims who've suffered far worse than anything I have.
And that's basically how I've been dealing with it consciously for the last ten years or so. Subconsciously though, and through my involvement with the amazing fangirls found the online community, I feel like I've internalized a lot of feminist ideals (strong women/abortion politics (women having control of their own bodies)/living in a "rape society") so strongly because they've struck a chord with me in a subconscious way, again connecting me to my narrowly-avoided assault without having to deal with it head on. An indirect result of having all you wonderful ladies and gentlemen on my flist is that I feel like I gained a community of support that's allowed me to build up to the point where I am now, where I feel like it's time to deal with it in a more direct way.
So now, speaking of more recent events, there's been a lot of seemingly insignificant things that have snowballed, mostly dealing with people being blind to the way women are treated in society, which for some reason unknown even to me, I've started to associate with the emotions I still feel about that night.
A few months ago, when I was in DC for training, I went to a bar with a bunch of my friends/workmates. While I was there, I got grabbed THREE separate times: once on the dancefloor (by my elbow) and twice just walking through the bar (by my wrist). Each time I was grabbed and pulled. Each time I was instantly filled with panic and my fight-or-flight response kicked in. I never looked at whoever grabbed me. I just wrenched my arm free and moved away as fast as I fucking could. Afterwards, I was riding home with some of my friends and discussing how creepy I found it, and the girl I was riding with thought I was being ridiculous, that "It's a bar, you're gonna get grabbed" and "how else are people gonna get your attention in a bar?" and joked that I was just being a prude. I told her it wasn't acceptable for a guy to think he has a right to my body simply because I'm female and present in the same room! But nothing I said would make her understand how I felt, and I didn't want it to turn into an argument, so I stopped trying.
And then, more recently, there's been a confluence of events that are all sort of inter-related. I've started dating a guy from work, my first relationship in several years. And I've never had a "serious" relationship ever since before that night in college (though I'm not sure if there's a correlation there, because I also broke up with the guy I thought I was going to marry right before I went to that party in Wisconsin, and that relationship took a pretty serious emotional toll on me as well). Anyway, he's been very patient and so far seems willing to go at my pace, and we haven't even gone on an official "date" yet (he just finally asked me on a real date this week) so he wins points for that, and he's got a heart of gold and has been there for me when I had a family crisis a few weeks ago and seriously he gets like 100 billion points for that, but he's also made a few distressing mistakes. Short version: he joked that his work ID wouldn't get stolen because it's got a "rape whistle" and then brought over a movie with TWO male-victim rape scenes that are played for laughs. The good thing is he at least seems receptive when I talk about why things like that bother me, even if I haven't yet mentioned my personal experiences. (I've had more than one chance to bring it up in conversation, but I never have, which isn't like me. Like I mentioned earlier, I've never had trouble talking about it, until recently.) However, he's also a big fan of Game of Thrones, which is pretty pervasive in its misogyny.
Speaking of GoT, we come to the next event that's been bringing all these emotions up for me: namely, the on-screen implied rape of a woman sold into marriage (aka sexual slavery), which pretty much EVERY ONE of my work mates who watches the show (half the department are all fans) dismisses as "part of the story" and "historically accurate" and which made me nearly burst into tears when I watched it. Even my mother, who was watching the episode with me, thought I was being too sensitive. Meanwhile, I cried for about three days, every time I thought of that scene. Even thinking of it now, it's hard for me to keep it together. (Basically, it's like a night-and-day difference from ten years ago, when I had to struggle to identify with a roofied girl in a tv movie.)
So the ramifications of the systemic victimization of women by media and society, and the way people are desensitized to it, has been weighing heavily on my mind lately. And the fact that I seem to be the only person who notices this victimization makes me feel isolated, while at the same time bringing up the emotions associated with what happened to me. And yet I also still feel like a big whiner because nothing traumatic actually happened, and combined with everyone around me (friends, coworkers, my own mother) acting like I'm a big whiner, that just compounds the problem. I think that's the root of what I've been feeling, but I still don't know why it's hitting me so hard, other than maybe just being at a point in my life where I'm mentally and emotionally ready to deal with it. Except that while I feel like I need to deal with it, all the above has made me feel like there's no one in my real life that I can talk to about it, and that no one would understand anyway if I did want to talk about it. Even in my own head, I still feel like I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill, because bottom line: nothing happened.
So, if you've gotten this far: Wow, thank you. This was mostly written for me, as a way of working out my own feelings, but as you can see, there's still a lot I'm struggling to understand about the whole thing. If you'd like to talk to me about this, or share your own experiences, I would welcome that. If what I went through can serve to open a dialogue or even just make people think, then I'll feel like some good has come out of it. And like I said, I'm still working through a lot of this, and talking to people helps me do that. Also, just FYI, anonymous commenting is enabled, so if you're more comfortable commenting without your name attached then feel free. :)
For right now, I'm going to leave this as a public post, because I feel like everyone should have a chance to join in any discussion this may cause. But I will be locking this post down at some point in the future, because I'm planning to print out at least some portions of what I've written here and give them to people in my life who need to hear these things, and I'd rather they not be able to use it to find my journal (or, okay, more realistically: that it would be more difficult for them to use it to find my journal).
Thanks to all of you for listening. I really do feel like my flist and the amazing friends I've found online have been instrumental in helping me through some of my hardest times and given me one of the greatest support networks out there. Even if we're all coming together through tv shows and porn, we've all stayed together because we're all awesome and we recognize that about each other. Rock on, flist! I love you all! ♥
This entry was originally posted at http://ras-elased.dreamwidth.org/319765.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
So I suppose I should start off by saying that I was never actually assaulted that night, and I would never compare my experience with the experiences of people who have been sexually assaulted. I can't imagine the level of strength that rape survivors find within themselves to overcome their abuse, and they have my deepest sympathy and admiration. As for me personally, I really had the best possible outcome for that night, given the circumstances. So I'm not really sure why, a decade after a (relatively speaking) uneventful night, this is suddenly hitting me harder than it ever has, even counting right after it happened. I've heard of women who've been assaulted repressing their emotional response to it, and then dealing with it later, usually in their thirties (and, hello, I'm 31). (As an aside, does anyone have any articles or anything about why this happens? I'd be interested in learning why people think the emotional ramifications can sometimes be delayed to a later stage of life.) But I never considered the possibility that I'd repressed anything, because 1) I never felt ashamed of anything that happened, and never hesitated to tell my story and use it as an example of a cautionary tale in the vein of "I never thought anything would happen to me either, but let me tell you that it does", and 2) there was nothing to repress. But for some reason, recent life events (which I'll get into later) have brought it back up to the surface in a way that has left me in tears every morning for the past week, and last night I even had a dream where I came home to find a man waiting in my house to rape me. Clearly, my brain is telling me this affected me more than I thought, and that I need to deal with it.
I'll begin with a description of what happened that night, at least to the best of my memory. I went up to Wisconsin with a friend of mine to visit her boyfriend (who was, if I'm being honest, a hipster prototype, but also a very nice guy). Our last night there, we went to a party with him and some of his friends. We were the only girls, and there were maybe 7 or 8 of his guy friends there. They also seemed like nice guys, and I felt comfortable around them.
At some point, somebody (I can't remember who) decided to pour us all some beers. (I was 21 or 22 at the time, I'd been to enough parties to not think anything about it.) Me, my friend, and her boyfriend (and maybe 1 or 2 other guys? I can't be sure) were all sitting around talking while the rest of the guys made the drinks in the "kitchen" side of the apartment. They were labeling Solo cups arranged on a table and one of them called out to me, asking me my name so he could label a cup for me. Then they brought all the drinks out to us and passed them out. I honestly don't remember if my drink tasted funny and I just ignored it, or if I never noticed any taste difference-although I'd been able to drink for a while at that point, I generally avoided beer, so I'm honestly not sure I would have even noticed an odd taste, since all beer tastes gross to me.
A lot of that night is still fuzzy to me, but I do know that there were a group of at least 5 or 6 guys, maybe more, around that table where they were pouring the drinks. Either the guy(s) that put the drugs in my drink was very good at slight of hand and was able to retrieve the drugs from wherever they were stashed on his person and slip them into my specific drink with a bunch of other guys standing around watching, or he did it with the knowledge of everyone at that table. Which would mean EVERY GUY at that table either stood around and DID NOTHING when they knew I was about to get drugged and raped, and/or they were in on it and were planning to take their turn with me. Just typing that sentence seems unreal to me and makes my stomach churn.
And I'll never know which guy(s) were in on this. I can't remember anyone's faces, but I vaguely recall one tall thin guy with short hair who seemed like he might have been the ringleader, but I don't know if that's an actual memory or just some psychological need to assign a face/identity to my "attacker." I feel like it's a double edged sword: having a face/name to identify as the one who did this to me would be comforting in that it would be someone I could point to and ID in a metaphorical police line up, someone I could know to fight. (The inability to fight off an attack is one of my biggest fears, which is why ghosts and demons have always terrified me because there's no way to defend yourself from a ghost. Which is why, I think, the idea of being drugged and defenseless and unable to fight has an added layer of horror for me. But it's a chicken-or-egg scenario, because I discovered my intense fear of ghosts/demons the same year this all happened (via my first occurrence of sleep paralysis), so I don't know if that fear contributed to my emotional reaction to that evening because it already existed, or if it became a new fear because of that evening.) But at the same time, having a definite face to remember might have just turned into a face to haunt my nightmares. In my recent nightmare, the man waiting in my home to rape me didn't have any face, he was just a dark shape. Would it be better to have a specific person to be afraid of, or to just be afraid of any danger? Maybe if I'd been more afraid back then, this wouldn't have even happened.
Now, I realize I disobeyed SO MANY of the cardinal rules of college parties: Don't take an open drink from someone you don't know. Don't take a drink that someone else poured. Don't take a drink labeled with your name. Trust me, everyone I've told this story to in real life has reminded me of these rules. Included my mother, who drilled these rules into me with a kind of religious fervor (a fervor which I internalized and thus drilled these rules into my freshman and sophomore roommates' skulls as well-this happened my junior year of college). I really knew these rules. I have no explanation for why they seemed to have completely escaped my brain that night. The only thing I can think of is that the ONLY people I'd been drinking around for the last couple of years were all very, very good friends and I'd grown so comfortable that I was no longer living in constant fear of someone slipping something into my drink, and this implicit trust carried over to a group of unfamiliar people who I felt comfortable around.
For whatever reason, I let my guard down, and I've beaten myself up over it for the last several years. It wasn't until very recently that I realized this. Even though I've never been ashamed of what happened to me and I've never felt like I asked for it or anything like that, I did blame myself for being stupid and careless. Like I mentioned, whenever I've told my story to other people I've usually gotten the "But didn't you know not to do A, B, and C?" lecture, and I've always said, "God, yes, I was SO STUPID, I can't believe I did that, I don't know what I was thinking!" And it's taken me a very long time to realize I've been internally shouldering some of the blame for what happened to me. It's a fine line between realizing how depressingly necessary these "rules" are, and then blaming myself for being a "stupid idiot" when none of the actual blame for getting drugged should fall on me. I'm still not sure how successfully I've walked that line, sometimes.
I don't remember how many drinks I had, but I don't think it was more than one or two. Very shortly after I started drinking I don't remember much of anything. I know at some point I started feeling sick, and my friend took me into a separate room to lay down. I then either blacked out or went to sleep. Several times I remember her coming in to check on me and make sure I was okay. But then I don't remember her checking on me any more, and I don't remember if I eventually just stayed asleep, or if she went to bed and stopped checking on me, or if I eventually came out of it enough that she felt okay about leaving me alone. I don't remember if I slept in that room that night, or if I moved somewhere else. I don't remember if I ever locked the door. What I do remember is that the whole night it never even occurred to me that anything was wrong, that I'd been drugged. I like to think that my friend figured out what was going on, or at least suspected, and that's why she kept checking on me, because it would be harder to rape me if there was someone keeping an eye on me. There's no doubt in my mind that if she hadn't taken care of me, something awful would have happened that night. I would have been raped by at least one guy, probably more. Whether she suspected or not, she saved me from a hell of a lot of trauma, and I'll always be thankful for that.
But even though I'm relatively sure that nothing happened that night, I'll admit to having my moments of doubt. Because most of the night is a complete blank. I remember at least some of the times my friend came to check on me, so I like to think if someone came in and did something to me while I was out of it that I would have woken up enough to remember it happening, but what if it happened before the drug started to wear off, and I was so out of it that I never woke up or just couldn't remember? I'd like to think that if something had happened to me that my friend would have at least noticed when she came to check on me, but what if they did something (like groping or touching) that didn't involve much (or any) removal of clothing? I'd been rolling around in a blacked-out stupor before she came to check on me, so would she really have thought much of some rumpled clothing? I'd like to think that with my friend checking in on me every so often, that there wasn't ever any opportunity for some guy to sneak off and do something to me, but what if she just thought I was drunk, not drugged, and some "nice guy" at the party offered to come check on me for her and he used the opportunity to do something to me then? Even now, it's really hard for me to look at these questions too closely, partly because I don't want to consider the possibility, and partly because I'll never be able to know what (if anything) happened that night.
The next morning, I remember I still didn't think anything was wrong. I was tired but, from what I can remember, nothing was amiss. I'd been black out drunk before (once, after a LOT of alcohol) so while I thought it was strange that I'd done it again, it honestly never occurred to me to even consider the possibility that I'd been drugged. It wasn't until we were already on our way home (and had been on the road for maybe an hour or so) that we started having the typical "Oh man, I was so wasted last night!" recap that I realized I couldn't actually remember how many drinks I'd had that night, that I remembered getting my first beer and then INSTANT BLACK OUT. I kept trying to turn that over in my head, and slowly, the idea that I'd been drugged began to hit me. But as we were discussing the rest of the night, I didn't even want to bring it up, because what if my friend took it personally? What if she thought I was attacking her boyfriend by association, saying he hung out with rapists? Eventually, though, I did broach the topic, and she was surprisingly receptive. (Another reason I think she might have suspected it herself the night before.) I tried to be dismissive about it, to kind of make a joke about it, because I wanted to tread lightly and not upset her. I said things like, "Well, nothing happened, so it doesn't matter anyway. And maybe it's all in my head, maybe I just had a bad night. The only way to tell for sure is to go to a hospital and get tested." And then (this is how amazing my friend is) she said if I wanted to go to a hospital and get tested we could do that. I honestly wanted to know, and I was tempted to do it, but I eventually decided against it, because 1) we still had a 10 hour drive ahead of us and class the next day, and 2) I had heard that one of the reasons roofies are used so often is because they metabolize so fast they can't be detected the morning after. (I've since realized that this is false, but at the time I thought that delaying our trip for a drug test that would most likely be negative even if I had been drugged was pretty pointless, so we drove on.)
After that, I mostly forgot about the whole thing. I considered it a very close call that had taught me a valuable lesson about not ever letting my guard down EVER, and honestly sometimes I'd completely forgotten it happened, like I'd hear a story on the news or see a similar situation in some Lifetime movie and it would take me a minute to realize: Oh, hey, that happened to me too, I forgot! And it wasn't just me, I had to remind the people around me too, like my mother, who I told about the whole thing the day after it happened. Looking back, I think I was, at least partially, distancing myself from what happened to me. Like I would see some girl get drugged in some Lifetime movie, and it would take me a moment to be able to identify with the girl on screen. I had to overcome the "me" and "rape victim" disassociation, because nothing ever happened so I wasn't a "victim," and I'd never thought of myself that way (even though now some part of me acknowledges I was, at least in the most superficial sense). It just wasn't something that I carried with me, I never considered it something that affected me or shaped who I was. It wasn't part of my identity, it was just something that happened to me one night. When I talked about it with people, it was always along the lines of: "Yeah, that one time I got roofied, LOL. Hide yo kids hide yo wife. It can happen to you!" I think, maybe, that was my way of dealing with it from a sideways angle, acknowledging that it had happened without ever having to look to closely at it and face the harsh realities of what may or may not have happened that night. Even now, I feel like what happened to me is this foggy grey area that I can't really put a word to. Because on some level, I was victimized, but I feel like to call myself a "victim" of sexual assault is not only a technical fallacy, but it also diminishes the events of "real" victims who've suffered far worse than anything I have.
And that's basically how I've been dealing with it consciously for the last ten years or so. Subconsciously though, and through my involvement with the amazing fangirls found the online community, I feel like I've internalized a lot of feminist ideals (strong women/abortion politics (women having control of their own bodies)/living in a "rape society") so strongly because they've struck a chord with me in a subconscious way, again connecting me to my narrowly-avoided assault without having to deal with it head on. An indirect result of having all you wonderful ladies and gentlemen on my flist is that I feel like I gained a community of support that's allowed me to build up to the point where I am now, where I feel like it's time to deal with it in a more direct way.
So now, speaking of more recent events, there's been a lot of seemingly insignificant things that have snowballed, mostly dealing with people being blind to the way women are treated in society, which for some reason unknown even to me, I've started to associate with the emotions I still feel about that night.
A few months ago, when I was in DC for training, I went to a bar with a bunch of my friends/workmates. While I was there, I got grabbed THREE separate times: once on the dancefloor (by my elbow) and twice just walking through the bar (by my wrist). Each time I was grabbed and pulled. Each time I was instantly filled with panic and my fight-or-flight response kicked in. I never looked at whoever grabbed me. I just wrenched my arm free and moved away as fast as I fucking could. Afterwards, I was riding home with some of my friends and discussing how creepy I found it, and the girl I was riding with thought I was being ridiculous, that "It's a bar, you're gonna get grabbed" and "how else are people gonna get your attention in a bar?" and joked that I was just being a prude. I told her it wasn't acceptable for a guy to think he has a right to my body simply because I'm female and present in the same room! But nothing I said would make her understand how I felt, and I didn't want it to turn into an argument, so I stopped trying.
And then, more recently, there's been a confluence of events that are all sort of inter-related. I've started dating a guy from work, my first relationship in several years. And I've never had a "serious" relationship ever since before that night in college (though I'm not sure if there's a correlation there, because I also broke up with the guy I thought I was going to marry right before I went to that party in Wisconsin, and that relationship took a pretty serious emotional toll on me as well). Anyway, he's been very patient and so far seems willing to go at my pace, and we haven't even gone on an official "date" yet (he just finally asked me on a real date this week) so he wins points for that, and he's got a heart of gold and has been there for me when I had a family crisis a few weeks ago and seriously he gets like 100 billion points for that, but he's also made a few distressing mistakes. Short version: he joked that his work ID wouldn't get stolen because it's got a "rape whistle" and then brought over a movie with TWO male-victim rape scenes that are played for laughs. The good thing is he at least seems receptive when I talk about why things like that bother me, even if I haven't yet mentioned my personal experiences. (I've had more than one chance to bring it up in conversation, but I never have, which isn't like me. Like I mentioned earlier, I've never had trouble talking about it, until recently.) However, he's also a big fan of Game of Thrones, which is pretty pervasive in its misogyny.
Speaking of GoT, we come to the next event that's been bringing all these emotions up for me: namely, the on-screen implied rape of a woman sold into marriage (aka sexual slavery), which pretty much EVERY ONE of my work mates who watches the show (half the department are all fans) dismisses as "part of the story" and "historically accurate" and which made me nearly burst into tears when I watched it. Even my mother, who was watching the episode with me, thought I was being too sensitive. Meanwhile, I cried for about three days, every time I thought of that scene. Even thinking of it now, it's hard for me to keep it together. (Basically, it's like a night-and-day difference from ten years ago, when I had to struggle to identify with a roofied girl in a tv movie.)
So the ramifications of the systemic victimization of women by media and society, and the way people are desensitized to it, has been weighing heavily on my mind lately. And the fact that I seem to be the only person who notices this victimization makes me feel isolated, while at the same time bringing up the emotions associated with what happened to me. And yet I also still feel like a big whiner because nothing traumatic actually happened, and combined with everyone around me (friends, coworkers, my own mother) acting like I'm a big whiner, that just compounds the problem. I think that's the root of what I've been feeling, but I still don't know why it's hitting me so hard, other than maybe just being at a point in my life where I'm mentally and emotionally ready to deal with it. Except that while I feel like I need to deal with it, all the above has made me feel like there's no one in my real life that I can talk to about it, and that no one would understand anyway if I did want to talk about it. Even in my own head, I still feel like I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill, because bottom line: nothing happened.
So, if you've gotten this far: Wow, thank you. This was mostly written for me, as a way of working out my own feelings, but as you can see, there's still a lot I'm struggling to understand about the whole thing. If you'd like to talk to me about this, or share your own experiences, I would welcome that. If what I went through can serve to open a dialogue or even just make people think, then I'll feel like some good has come out of it. And like I said, I'm still working through a lot of this, and talking to people helps me do that. Also, just FYI, anonymous commenting is enabled, so if you're more comfortable commenting without your name attached then feel free. :)
For right now, I'm going to leave this as a public post, because I feel like everyone should have a chance to join in any discussion this may cause. But I will be locking this post down at some point in the future, because I'm planning to print out at least some portions of what I've written here and give them to people in my life who need to hear these things, and I'd rather they not be able to use it to find my journal (or, okay, more realistically: that it would be more difficult for them to use it to find my journal).
Thanks to all of you for listening. I really do feel like my flist and the amazing friends I've found online have been instrumental in helping me through some of my hardest times and given me one of the greatest support networks out there. Even if we're all coming together through tv shows and porn, we've all stayed together because we're all awesome and we recognize that about each other. Rock on, flist! I love you all! ♥
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