It's been about 12 years since I sat down and wrote about my first sexual assault. It's laughable to think back on. It was more or less a two page, overly-abstract essay about an affair between a high school freshman girl and her then English teacher. In hindsight, of course that's the story I wrote when I was 19. I think that was about as much of the experience as I had processed at that time.
I was making the bed this morning, and for some reason going over the story in my head. I don't know what triggered it today, it comes and goes when it wants. But normally I would outline the story of what happened, maybe to keep working through it - going painfully point by point in my head to remember and re-remember for myself what actually happened. For whatever reason I have developed this new method of processing the event, I found myself starting to choke on it. They've welled up into a knot and the words are just holding themselves tightly in my chest.
So here we are. I know exactly what I am going to say, but I am terrified to say it. I would say still terrified, but I don't think I have ever come this close to sharing this story publicly. I genuinely worry about the ramifications of my words personally and professionally. It's a silly little blog and I have no intention of naming names. And I have shared this story with many people over many years. But something about putting it in words requires owning it. And I think my hand is being forced to own it now. By my heart.
Last year when the #MeToo movement started to pick up steam, my depression came at me strong and hard. It wasn't any particular victim or person being accused that triggered me. It was the whole weight of it. Everyone had an opinion. People were debating openly on social media what qualified as sexual assault. And even worse, what didn't qualify as sexual assault. And I think it was that idea that brought to life the reality of what had happened to me when I was 13. Because for years I had written it off as not being a molestation or rape or anything forced per say. So it just wasn't that bad.
My psychiatrist and I have covered the fact that many victims will blame themselves for being active participants in their own abuse. Because we didn't say no, or we feel as though we invited or encouraged the behavior. An understanding of this, in addition to the constant conversations about it around me, starting bringing to surface details of this experience I must have repressed. Details that made me finally feel as though I wasn't a willing participant, I was a child who couldn't have or shouldn't have been forced to make the distinction between affection and abuse from someone that should have known the difference.
When I was 13 years old, a then 29 year old teacher started an emotional and physical relationship with me. We were around each other all the time. During school where he taught classes to my peers, and after school where we would spend more one-on-one time in drama class, show choir, and speech team. He was always around, not only myself, but all of the under age school children just trying to be involved in the arts. Left with him after 3pm when the other teachers have gone home, the school empties out, and you can trust your children are in the safety of their after school programs.
At the time I had a really big crush on him. How could a 13 year old girl getting attention from an older man NOT have a crush? I grew up on 90210 and Dawson's Creek. This was the teenage drama story-line of my dreams. We would sneak phone calls late at night on my home landline and he would come pick me up at the end of our cul de sac so know one would see it was him. We went out swing dancing once, a few towns over where we most likely wouldn't run into anyone we'd know. He made me mix CDs, and I still even have a poem he wrote me when I turned 14 about how we were closer to finally being together publicly.
These are the things I remembered for so long. Because I did participate in them. I could own that happening because it wasn't a bad thing I let happen, it was inappropriate - yes. But I was there too. It was consent as much as consent can be given at the age of 14.
But there are big parts of the picture I had cut out and kept from myself for years to not see the situation for what it was. He lived with head of security for the whole high school at the time, a cop, the irony not lost on me. Through this he had access to her office in the school and learned where all the security cameras were. He learned the corner angles of certain hallways he could touch me in without being detected. The doors he could pull me behind in the middle of practices, rehearsals, classes, when he wanted, to touch my child body.
I remember the smell of the gymnastics mat he brought up to the dusty choir robe closet that he laid on the floor for us to "fool around on". I had only had my first kiss a few months prior to this, and so fooling around for me was making out. But now I can remember him pushing my hands down his pants, or forcing his mouth up my shirt - to my resistance. And worse, all the times I didn't resist, but I now vividly remember the feeling in my stomach that I didn't want it to be happening. But I was afraid he wouldn't like me if I made him stop.
The reason it stopped wasn't because he was caught, or he worried what he was doing was wrong. The reason it stopped was because after a few months of trying to push my hand down his pants, and me resisting doing anything more than letting him touch me while I lie there, he got bored and didn't want to try any more. I remember the words verbatim, "Whats the point?"
I think of the calculated 30 year old man, looking for dark corners to hide in, trying to make a physically uncomfortable 14 year old girl do things she told him, trusted in him, that she wasn't ready to do. Then the mix CDs and poems don't seem like something I signed up for. They seem more like tools that were used to keep me on the line for him to sexually abuse a student, a child. I was a child.
It's been 17 years since this happened. And I honestly feel like I am just now starting to process it in any real way. It's required acknowledging that my body has held onto physical trauma from that situation. That I was emotionally manipulated in a way that directly impacted (impacts) relationships I have had with every male in my life to this day. Not just males, but any person in a position of authority or mentor-ship. He reshaped my entire life of academia and involvement with the arts, negatively. But finally after 17 years I don't see that teacher that broke my heart when I was 14; I see my sexual abuser.
I knew sooner than this it was a fucked up situation. And I have carried a lot of guilt with me even since 16 or so that I didn't speak up or tell anyone. The first excuse was that I didn't want to cause my family the embarrassment. I would see stories on the news of the girls that brought down teachers, I knew the teachers were obviously in the wrong, but it always kind of felt like they vilified the girls that "brought them down". And I didn't want to be that.
I finally wrote a letter to the then superintendent of the school when I was 25 years old or so. Being apart of my school's drama club alumni page on Facebook I saw that he was teaching at the school again. And I felt strongly enough at that point that they had a right to know what he had done. I wasn't looking to press charges or do anything about it - I just didn't feel right knowing he was in those hallways with more classes of children who shouldn't have to write these blogs in their 30s. I never got a reply.
So here I am, years later, telling the story as it was then and as it is now. I am secretly glad 20 somethings Katie was able to protect herself from some of this. She was already going through so god damn much. I feel way more equipped to handle processing these memories now than I could have then.
But even now I am taken aback by how profoundly the need to write this down came over me today. Maybe I am tired of processing it alone. Maybe I am tired of people defining what sexual assault looks like and doesn't look like. Maybe I just need another version of this story to exist so someone else who has been here with a line-cook when they were 16, or any older boy or girl (17 is still old enough to assault someone Mr. Kavanaugh) can know they didn't participate. That they didn't ask for it. And that they shouldn't have had to be the one to stop a sexual assault.
