Epiphany ***Trigger Warning***

My plan was to kind of ease into blogging. Y’know, gently. Give myself a chance to find a rhythm, give anyone who’s reading this a chance to get to know me a little before I start throwing heavy stuff around.

Yeah. Well. You know what they say about the best laid plans. Because I had a sudden, brutal epiphany earlier, and now I need to get this out, I need to brain dump and get what I’m feeling down on (figurative) paper. Because that helps. I’m hoping it will help pull me out of this state of psychological shock and allow me to start coping with it.

It makes sense for it to start out like this, I guess. My blog, I mean. This journey is not one that has been gentle. It didn’t start out that way, and every moment has been intense... sometimes rough, sometimes glorious, sometimes painful, sometimes illuminating, but always full of growth and evolution. I’m just now coming to a point where I have moments of being able to be comfortable in my life – those moments were hard earned, and I am grateful for them, and I’m fairly certain that they will begin coming more often and for longer as I continue to work hard on this journey. But I’m also grateful for the journey, harrowing as it can be some days, because it isn’t the destination that matters as much as how you get there, so don’t let that scare you away.

Because it is entirely worth it.

Incidentally... ***TRIGGER WARNING AHEAD***

I’m in a women’s empowerment, body kindness, etc. support group – it's run by actual mental health professionals, so it may actually be considered group therapy, but whatever – and today took a dark turn with some of the experiences that some of the women in the group were talking about, mostly based on things partners had done to them that they didn’t recognize as toxic or abusive at the time. The facilitator said something along the lines of how those of us who have grown up groomed to hate our bodies have allowed our bodies to be apologies for not looking the way they should, and even more, just, as women, we are conditioned to question our experiences and perceptions. “Did that actually happen to me,” turns into, “I must be overreacting. I’m mis-perceiving things. I’m just being overdramatic. I must be crazy. I’m just overemotional.”

It triggered a memory for me. Strongly. And it has fucked my entire world up.

I was on my first date with my now ex-husband over a decade ago. We were having fun walking around, and he started getting handsy. I remember telling him that he needed to calm it down, that I wasn’t sleeping with him on the first date. I remember telling him no several times. I remember he wouldn’t keep his hands off of me. I remember finally relenting and agreeing to go hang out in his bedroom. I remember telling him, “Ok, but my pants are not allowed to come off.” I remember telling him no several more times. I remember some, “I should really get going,” statements. And I remember him ignoring me every time I refused him. And I remember feeling like I didn’t have the right to stop him, I remember thinking it would be easier to just get it over with, so I didn’t fight him. It wasn’t violent. He didn’t have to use physical force, because he used the force of his personality and his right to use my body because he was male and I was fat.

I didn’t realize what that was in that moment. And afterwards, I somehow pushed away all of my ignored no’s and convinced myself that I had really wanted to have sex with him. Because the sex wasn’t bad, and he seemed like such a nice guy. So, I left afterwards, completely ignorant of the fact that I had just been raped.

Let’s pause a moment and consider that, according to Wikipedia, “Frequently, victims may not recognize what happened to them was rape. Some may remain in denial for years afterwards. Confusion over whether or not their experience constitutes rape is typical, especially for victims of psychologically coerced rape. Women may not identify their victimization as rape for many reasons such as feelings of shame, embarrassment, non-uniform legal definitions, reluctance to define the friend/partner as a rapist, or because they have internalized victim-blaming attitudes.”

Somehow, between no, no, no, which is where it should have stopped immediately, and my walk back home, I managed to convince myself that it was a positive thing. The sex was pretty good. And someone was attracted to me. I should be happy about that! Right...? I should be grateful for that attention and attraction! ...Right?!

I avoided him for the next two months. I didn’t answer his calls, I tried to avoid running into him in the parking lot of the apartment complex both we lived in. When I did run into him, I made excuses about how I was so busy with work and wasn’t able to spend time with him. Because some part of me felt incredibly uncomfortable around him. I didn’t understand why, I just knew I felt very uneasy around him. But he kept pursuing me, he kept calling and stopping by.

And then, my situation changed. I got laid off as a live-in nanny because my boss and his estranged wife reconciled and he no longer needed my services. And so, my now ex-husband offered me a job as live-in nanny for his son.  At that point, I was desperate for a job and a place to live and his offer gave me both... so I sat down with him and wrote up a contract stipulating that our relationship needed to remain platonic and that of roommates and employer-employee, and could not get sexual or romantic, because I was not willing to risk my home and my job. He agreed, and I accepted his offer and moved in.

For six months, I continued to say no, because he still would not relent in his pursuit of me. He would grab my ass as we passed in the hall, he would flirt, he would try to kiss me, and I would ask him to please stop. At one point, he started professing that he was in love with me. And there was just something incredibly uncomfortable to me about the idea of getting involved with him romantically or sexually, I just didn’t understand what that something was.

I started trying to date and was rejected several times and was feeling incredibly low. One night, I was feeling particularly vulnerable, and there he was, offering comfort and acceptance, and I thought, “Here’s a guy who seems decent and he says he loves me. I’m not gonna do any better. Why do I keep hesitating with him?” And I relented.

The rest is history. But now, I understand that it’s the history of how I married my rapist, who turned out to be a covert narcissist. One of my rapists, rather, because that was not the only time I accepted a man’s rejection of my boundaries so he could have his way with me... because it was easier than fighting, because what I wanted didn’t matter, and because I believed I owed him something. This particular violation was just the most recent. The most unpalatable part, to me, is that it took me over ten years to realize that it was a violation.

And so, I need to talk about why it happened. I’m in no way blaming myself – I said “no” and that is all I should have needed to say, so I feel no guilt about it happening. He is the one who violated me. And at that point, I had been conditioned by society, by the people around me, to allow my body to be used as an apology for being fat, for not being good enough, for not living up to society’s standards of beauty. I felt like I owed people, and would let them do what they wanted to me without argument, even though it made me feel like shit, even though it made me feel dirty and uncomfortable. I believed that I did not deserve to have wants and needs, and that I needed to take up the smallest possible amount of space.

Now that I value myself, now that I listen to my instincts and have stopped second guessing my perceptions of events, I am starting to recognize how much our entire world thrives on this kind of exchange; where we, especially women, are devalued for something, whether it’s for our weight, something about our appearance, our intelligence, our interests, the color of our skin, our hair color, the clothes we wear, anything really, it doesn’t matter, choose something, because there has to be something society can use to hold us down. Society needs for us to feel like we aren’t good enough so that we will set our sense of value for ourselves as close to zero as possible so that we are willing to allow others to treat us badly.

It’s mind-blowing to me how much I have started to pick up on the way men treat me in the last few months. I’ve become aware of gender-related microaggressions left, right, and center. I’ve noticed men try to “neg” me a lot, trying to dominate me with their personalities in telling me what they expect me to do, trying to shame me into doing things I don’t want to do. I’ve realized just how much men try to gaslight me on a daily basis because they want me to do something and are unwilling to take no for an answer. I am seeing with clear eyes that there is a ridiculous amount expected of me by the men who approach me, and these expectations are things that, unfortunately, many of us believe are totally normal and reasonable. But they aren’t. Not even a little bit.

It isn’t only men, either. Some women do it. Some women feel the need to tear down other women in order to feel better about themselves. Some women only see other women as competition, whether it’s over male attention, a boyfriend, a husband, a job, respect, admiration, recognition, whatever. It’s just as toxic, and I honestly wonder if this is another conditioned behavior to keep us under thumb. After all, if women were to start supporting each other, if we were to unify, to stand up and demand change... well that would just be unacceptable.

This is where I live now... in a paradigm where I respect and value myself, where I accept and embrace myself for who and what I am in this moment, where I love myself, flaws and all, and where I allow myself to take up as much space as I need and want, and where I allow myself to have needs and wants. Because I deserve that.

We all deserve that. We all deserve to treat ourselves with kindness and respect and love and acceptance. If we did, this world would start looking like a very different place. And that is what I dream of every day – a world where people value ourselves, where we stop feeding into the standards that society shoves down our throats, where we break those chains that tie us down. Because it would be a much kinder world, and I think it would solve a lot of the problems we face.

Through all of the pain and rage I have felt in the hours since my realization, my goal has remained steadfast: To keep creating and maintaining my own brave and safe space, because I need that space to be able to speak my truth, but also to hold the door open for others, and to allow others to come into my brave, safe space, and to let my own light help them find their light. I could choose to dwell in pain and rage, I could fixate on what he did to me, but I would rather not throw myself into that rut... I would rather use the energy of my anger to create something constructive and affirming, to add to my forward, positive momentum. I would rather build onto my determination to live my best, healthiest life.

I have found the hill that I will die on – fighting the repression of the human spirit, helping others onto this path, showing others that it’s possible to embrace yourself and that anyone can do it, helping others to find their light, which adds to the glow that can and will change the world one day. If I can inspire just one person, I am content.

"A candle loses nothing by lighting another." - James Keller