I am an 18 year old female and I am the survivor of two incidences of
acquaintance rape, the last occuring about 4 years ago. I am also the
survivor of years of childhood physical and sexual abuse.
The details of the rapes are not important. In both cases I was with people
whom I trusted, people who I had known for some time, and people who I never
though would hurt me. To this day, one of my attackers in particular haunts
me. He is active in the local hc community which I am also a part of and we
have many mutual friends. I have never been able to tell them *WHO*did this
to me, I guess I'm afraid they'll take his side and I really can't deal with
anymore crap from this, I have all I can handle. It is damn hard to listen
to them tell me how nice he is and how good-looking he is and have to keep
this all inside of me. It isolates me further and further and somedays I
don't think I have much further to go.
The rapes have completely changed who I am. After the second time I became
extremely bulimic and anorexic. All said and done, when I landed in the
hospital, I had lost 50 pounds and weighed 75 less than I should have. I
can't tell you why I am alive today, but I am grateful that I am, in ways
that could never be expressed with words. In the past year and a half I
have come full-circle in many ways. My weight is "normal" for my age and
heighth and I have not binged and purged in 15 months now. Realizing that
binging and purging was symbolic to the rapes for me helped me to begin to
put both of them behind me. For me, all of the food that I stuffed down was
representing my feelings and the secrets that I had kept hidden for so long
and by purging I was ridding myself of them, and my pain. My eating
disorder, especially when I would starve for weeks at a time, was my way of
punishing myself for what I though was my fault as well as an attenpt to
regain control of my body, the control I had lost when I was raped.
Another important breakthrough was the birth of my daughter, who is now,
amazingly, almost two and a half years old. I was about 35 pounds
underweight when I conceived her, but a lot healtheir than I had been in
ages. I did binge and purge during my pregnancy and she was born premature
and with some minor health problems. I can't even begin to tell you the
amount of guilt I feel because of that, there are no words for it and I am
sure I will always feel that way. I was also basically unable to take care
of her for her first year, all of the responsibility fell on her father and
our friends, but the day of her first birthday I broke, and all of the
sudden I saw that she was this little *person* and it was like my life felt
whole again, something that I hadn't felt since I was very young. Now I am
proud to say that I am healthy, I made it back to school, I have a good job,
and I have the most wonderful daughter a person could ever ask for. She is
a constant source of strength for me, but I have also learned to be a source
of stregth for myself and hopefully for others, and I finally do feel like a
survivor!
