Lucky

There is a perplexing thing I do. The victim’s advocate four years ago said I was doing it, and the moderator for a support group I attend says I still do it. I minimize the crime committed against me.

You may say, right, uhuh, you have a blog totally devoted to trauma, you write about it ad nauseum, and you think you minimize it?

This is how I (along with so many trauma victims) do it:

I feel lucky that the rapist didn't cut me with the knife. He didn't use physical force except to originally subdue me -- he didn't seem to use violence gratuitously.

I feel lucky my daughter wasn't there to witness the attack.

I feel lucky I got a condom on him so I didn't have as much fear of AIDS or pregnancy afterwards, which is fortunate because I was allergic to the HIV prophylactic drugs.

I feel lucky that the cops caught him in my bed after I'd escaped to the neighbor's.

I feel lucky to be one of 2% of rape cases that are successfully prosecuted.

I read about women in the Congo gang-raped by soldiers at the wells, their genitals so severely mutilated that if they don’t die, they live with constant pain, incontinence, and an inability to farm for their families -- and then on top of everything, they are ostracized from their communities as though they are now worthless and, basically, left to die.

I feel lucky I wasn't them.

Although I'm very open about talking about the rape, and almost militant in my activism in some ways -- I still minimize what happened to me, because there are people who have had it so much worse.

I'm trying to figure out exactly why I minimize. I know intellectually it must make it easier for my mind to embrace what has happened, a sort of denial that facilitates recovery in some ways, a self-protection. I think it also is an attempt to temper what feels -- and I fear looks like to others -- like self-absorption in victimhood. It's furthermore probably a manifestation of low self-esteem that comes from having someone so completely disregard one's own will and wishes, which is what rape is -- a very clear message from the rapist that your voice means nothing.

I know this in my head. But it still doesn't FEEL right to completely embrace the full horror of my experience, without qualification. Sometimes I manage it, like in what I write at times in this blog. But then I feel simultaneously satisfied and yucky afterward, like I've done something not quite accepted. All the gender programming mixed in there reminds me the not-at-all demure female is threatening, not least to my own self-image.

The support group moderator said I minimize the crime committed against me. She said, "every person's story has it's own particular kind of damage and repercussions". I keep looking at those words, trying to soak them up through my skin, digest them, make them a part of how I feel, and not just what I know to be true. But I don’t feel it yet.

I still feel lucky.