***Trigger Warning: This portion contains potentially distressing material pertaining to sexual assault.
The Doctor’s Office
At the doctor’s office, I recall feeling less a part of the world. I was less and less myself. I had become more of a bystander to the events that were happening around me. I could feel nothing but everything at the same time. I even thought that I could think nothing but I was discerning the atmosphere. I felt like a fly on the wall that no one could see. I just observed, but I do remember the concerned look on my aunt’s face.
My aunt had a mixture of facial expressions, and I remember trying to read them. I remember wondering if she thought differently about me. I remember wanting to desperately ask her if she thought I was different, but I felt so much internal shame that it was unbearable for me to speak. I wanted her affection, but she was caught up in her own fears about the situation. I took note, that although she was my favorite aunt, she was so similar to my mother (her sister) in the way she behaved and handled her emotions. She was almost stoic, but I could tell that she tried desperately to handle me with care.
When we were called into the doctor’s area, everything became blurry, and all I remember are a haze of voices and a lengthy conversation of exchanged words between my aunt and the doctor. I remember also vaguely wanting to leave and somewhat checking out in my mind. The moment I realized the doctor wanted to examine me was the moment those traces of my memory of the attack were lost forever. My mind just shut off. I do not remember an examination by the doctor at all. I vaguely remember the visit to the hospital itself except for the wrap-around curtain that was supposed to protect me from being seen by others and an examination table.
I just know that from overhearing a conversation between my aunt and a friend of hers that things did not go well with the doctor, and there was expressed concern that I would be affected for years to come. By this point, the elements of the attack had been filed away somewhere inside of a locked vault within my mind. I could not have remembered those dreadful events in that moment if I was paid to do so. My mind made me forget, and although my body ached from bruises, my mind was no longer allowing me to make the connection that I had experienced something so horrific.
Thinking back upon this, there is no telling what the doctor may have meant since I have no recall of the conversation he had with my aunt. Strangely, I only gathered bits and pieces of broken parts of conversations my aunt had with others to know that something was wrong, but I was so dissociated and out of it, that I have never been able to reconnect the missing pieces. Believe me, over the years when I began to remember that I had even been attacked, I have earnestly tried to remember things, but I just have not been able to remember. It has been a slow process of recall and realizations that have mainly occurred through triggered flashbacks and nightmares that I have had no control over.
Trauma Takes Hold And Changes Me
Nevertheless, once my aunt took me back to her apartment, the beginning of the root cause of the anger that permeated my life began to take hold of me. I think that if I had been handled differently, maybe the anger would not have been so dominating within my life, but I sincerely do not know this for sure. I had not known that I suffered a lot of post traumatic stress. I had not shared this attack with anyone.
In my family and community at the time, sexual assault and rape was kept silent. The survivor of such atrocities was never spoken of and mainly brought up as fodder for gossip. The crime upon the survivor seemingly brought shame upon the family and cast a dark shadow upon the survivor as if the crime committed against the survivor was the survivor’s fault.
My aunt may have not responded to me in the way that I had hoped because she was living according to the stigma of the violence that had been perpetrated against me. I would learn later that she was not happy with the woman who had rescued me because the police was called and a report was filed on my behalf. It was not that my aunt had even wanted to file a report, it was what the report meant to her in the community.
Somehow, my aunt believed she would become an object of scorn, and all eyes would turn upon her long after I returned home to my family. Based on the things that she insinuated and even said to me and around me to others, she would be the one to suffer because everyone would know that it was her niece who suffered a violation and because of the report filed, she would be seen as the troublemaker in the neighborhood for telling on the attackers.
Once the attack itself implanted a root of trauma within me, my mind shelved it all, and I moved on haphazardly through my life wielding the aftermath of the attack in anger upon unsuspecting people who had no idea why I was such a troubled girl and young woman. Frankly, I had no idea why I was so troubled either. I was lost, angry, and deeply saddened. I grieved a death that I did not completely understand, and I grieved a loss I had yet to grow myself into before it was suddenly gone.
My innocence was taken from me, and for a very long time, the very essence of who I believe that I was had vanished without a trace. I felt remarkedly different even if not visibly so, and although my mind almost completely erased everything from my memory, my body kept track of things and screamed to anyone who would listen. My heart longed for someone to understand me, but because I could not find anyone to understand what I was going through, my heart grew sick. I fell into a deep and dark depression.
This would explain why at the age of nine only months after the attack, I deeply wanted to die, but I made no correlation with the depression I felt and the trauma I experienced because I had dissociated myself from it. My mind had split off and shut the door on the trauma. So I battled depression all while missing the link to the reason for it. My mind had compartmentalized the trauma and filed it away.
Fortunately, I had not developed feelings towards the attackers. I had dislodged myself from feeling anything for them at all. I did not feel hatred. I did not feel anything. My anger was never even directed at them. The attackers had seemingly become irrelevant as soon as the attack was over. I had literally detached and separated myself from them. In my mind, they did not exist. I cannot even recall what they looked like or even what they sounded like. The fact that the woman who rescued me screamed their names, but I could not remember, was very telling that my brain had cut every ounce of them out of my thoughts.
The attackers were strangers to me prior to the attack, and they were strangers to me after the attack. I could have passed them by on the street later in my life and would have never known it. The only thing that stood out to me was the pervasive evil that permeated through them – particularly the one in charge … an evil so dark that it engulfed me. I sincerely thought I was going to die at their hands. I could only wonder what I had done to them to make them so vicious against me.
I saw the eyes of hatred that lacked any shred of humanity, empathy, or compassion, and I knew “it” wanted me to die. Whatever “it” was that sprung upon me had come to destroy me, but God had other plans for my life … at least that is what I look back upon and believe. I never did understand how two young people could be so evil to someone they did not even know. I could only imagine that they were being controlled by evil entities because how does evil breed within such young people? At least this was my thinking as a child back then, but I had a lot to learn.
Stay tuned for the next post.
My Voice Unchained 