I know it’s kind of sad I’m posting this on Valentine’s Day, but I truly have nothing against the holiday. In fact, believe it or not since I’ve never been in a relationship on Valentine’s Day, I actually love Valentine’s Day. It’s just how the timing fell I suppose.

I’m trying not to victimize myself so much anymore, but it also took me almost a year to even accept the fact that I am a victim of such a heinous act.

Sexual assault has always been a pretty difficult topic for people to discuss, and I didn’t really understand why until I felt the aftermath of what happened to me.

I started dating this guy when I was a junior in high school. I had just met him the year before, and I thought he was really nice. He was two years older than me, a freshman in college, but I didn’t see that as a red flag at the time. He played the bass in his church band, he had been the drum major in the high school band I was in, the year before I got there, he claimed to be a good Christian, I thought he was perfect. I soon learned that absolutely NO ONE is actually perfect.

My parents fell in love with him the first time they met him and so did I. I was actually kind of shocked that my parents actually even let me go out on a date, because up until that point they had always been very overprotective and not really let me go out with anyone, but honestly no one or nothing could’ve possibly protected me from what was about to happen next. So, Jonah(my little brother), if you ever read this, know it was never your fault and there’s nothing you could’ve done.

Some people wander how I’m still able to keep my faith after what happened to me, but if I’m being completely transparent, it’s because I met the devil personally that day. There is no way God had any part of that. I know he knew it was going to happen and he was with me when it happened, but when it did he probably had to close his eyes.

I’ve never went into detail about what happened to me to anyone other than the cops almost a year after it happened, so I’ll refrain from going into much detail now. The only other time I did, it felt like I was being assaulted all over again. I’ve never felt pain like that in my entire life.

My little brother was in the room when it happened, but I was covered and I stayed quiet because I wanted to protect him when I couldn’t even protect myself. That’s what true love is I think. What that man did to me wasn’t love. He convinced himself it was though. He did it because he was in love with me.

I just froze for about ten or so minutes while it was going on because the three main trauma responses are fight, flight, or freeze. For whatever reason, my response method was to freeze. I don’t think I’ve ever been so quiet in my life.

He never apologized to me. He only texted me to tell me how he felt guilty because what “we” did wasn’t what God wanted. I don’t remember it being a “we” thing because I don’t remember agreeing to anything at all.

For the next ten months, I convinced myself I wasn’t a victim and what happened to me wasn’t sexual assault because my best friend at the time had told me that that’s what all couples did, even though I disclosed to her when it happened that I didn’t want it and I never said I did; and I was never even asked either.

However, I continued to keep dating this guy. I loved him, or so I thought I did. My love was pure, but he made me feel like I was crazy for asking for the bare minimum.

Don’t cheat on me, don’t argue with me for no reason other than to make me upset and make me feel bad, don’t belittle me, don’t make me a secret. Why didn’t he want people to know we were together? Was he ashamed of me or deep down was he ashamed of what he did?

I was seventeen. I was still just a kid. The last few months of my childhood were taken away and I had to grow up without a choice.

On January 17th, I went to the cops and told them about what happened. I officially ended things with him the same day because I had finally had enough, after the failed suicide attempt and him not even caring, but him expecting me to drop everything when he got sick. I was done. So done.

The first cop I talked to was really nice. All he did was take my statement and give it to the investigators. He was still really nice, though. I had to come back a few days later to talk to the investigators on the case.

They were the ones that made me feel like I shouldn’t have even told anyone about what happened to me. I had to write down everything that happened, in detail, and give to two forty-something-year old men.

Every detail. I had to remember every detail. There were some things I hadn’t even thought about before that were just flowing through my brain like a tsunami because I was having to rehash everything.

They looked me right in my face and told me they didn’t believe me. I was crying, I had tried to kill myself, and they didn’t believe me. They told me that I was just trying to ruin a good man’s life because we broke up. I’m the one who ended it. I’M the one who ended it. So, they told me they weren’t even going to investigate.

Looking back on it, I really wish I had taken my mama with me because she told me she would’ve never let them talk to me like that.

I have only ever ran out of somewhere and screamed at the top of my lungs twice in my life. This was one of those times. I thought about killing myself again that day, but I called my mom and I talked to her and she told me she didn’t want me to be at home by myself. So, I called my friend Carson and I spent a few hours with her until I calmed down. I’ll forever be grateful to her for that.

After everything that happened, I started trying to find even an ounce of happiness or dopamine or whatever I wanted to find, in things that those things weren’t in. Self harm, men that really didn’t care about me at all, and my favorite one of all: money.

None of those things made me happy, though. They actually made me feel even worse. Still, I tried dragging things out as long as I could just so I could say I tried my best.

I started starving myself again, because I convinced myself I was too busy to eat. Until one day, I got so sick that I had to be out of work for a week because I felt so weak from not eating and having lost 20 pounds that I didn’t have to lose in the first place.

I think this was the first thing that truly opened my eyes and helped me start to turn things around. Now I’m trying to be a voice for people that feel like they don’t have one, because I felt like I should be quiet for the longest time, when in reality I have every right to yell at the top of my lungs.

The world hasn’t been kind to me. The world failed me. I don’t want that to happen to anyone else, I’ve cared way too much about every single person I’ve ever come into contact with to let that happen to anyone.

So, I’m done feeling like a shouldn’t say anything because I have every right. I didn’t get to choose what happened to me, but I get to choose everything I do from this point forward and I’m choosing to scream.

02/14/23(minus 24 minutes)

When I was younger, I loved writing stories. They were never very long; I usually only made it to about 20 pages before I got bored and started to write something else. However, I always had a pure passion for writing.

Most of the stories I liked to write were based off my real life. My mom is a writer. So I blame genetics and traumatic life experiences for what I consider my main gift in life.

Anyway, I guess I’ll start from the beginning. I was born a little over nineteen years ago to my mom and my dad, my dad being a preacher and my mom once again being a writer(a journalist, to be exact). I think I lived a fairly normal life, up until I turned five.

When I was five and a half, I was diagnosed with type one diabetes. Not many people actually know the difference between type one and type two diabetes, so this is the part where I go on a long tangent about what type one diabetes actually is.

Type one diabetes is categorized as an autoimmune disease. This in the simplest terms means that my body pretty much just killed off all of the cells in my body that produced insulin and my immune system continues to deteriorate everyday as a result. I didn’t get it from eating too much sugar. I honestly can’t even wrap my head around all of the science behind it, but I know I didn’t do anything to cause my diabetes. Unfortunately, it’s incurable and there isn’t really any way to control type one either, so I pretty much am just living from day to day.

Moving on: I don’t think growing up as a preacher’s daughter ever really affected me negatively or positively. Although, I will say I always felt like some people put me on a pedestal and thought I should be the perfect human being, when I’ve never felt perfect at all. I wouldn’t say I’m an absolutely horrible person, either. I still believe in God, a lot of people see me as a light in this dark, dark world, but I would say my faith is definitely my own and it also definitely looks very differently from the rest of my family’s.

I recently deleted all of my social media apps. I did this as a way of healing from events that have happened in the past few years and trying to pretty much just slow down and reflect on all of the good non materialistic things I have in my life.

I tried to kill myself a year and a half ago. On the long list of things I was blessed with genetically, a long list of mental disorders is included in that. Not only did the genetics play a factor in my almost ending my life, but traumatic circumstances, such as my sexual assault and my (at the time) current emotionally abusive relationship, also played a factor in this time in my life. More on that at a later date.

I think the fact that I have so many things going on in my head makes me more interesting, but most people would say it makes me insane. It’s fine though, because it definitely makes for a good story.

I have a younger brother. He’s my favorite person in the world. We’ve always been really close, because we understand each other the most out of anyone else in our family.

I think I have a pretty unconventional family, even though my parents tried their hardest to get all three of their children to be pretty much the same. We all somehow are still a family even though we’re all very different people. However, we all do have some similarities to each other.

I’ve tried to cover all of the basics in my introduction. I’ve never been the best at writing the first page of anything. I tried though, so it’s the thought that counts.

02/13/23