Content Warning: This essay contains depictions of and discusses the following sensitive topics: sexual assault.

Everything has two handles, one by which you can carry it, the other by which you cannot

              – Epictetus, The Discourses of Epictetus including the Enchiridion

Midsummer 2000—when many of us still believed in the year’s apocalyptic potential—one night between midnight and daylight, a man raped me. 

I want to rearrange that sentence, smooth it to the conventional passive: was raped. 

There are so many things I want to rearrange.

***

Christmas, 2010: Outside, snow-lacquered sidewalks. Inside, cozy pub hubbub and Glenfiddich eighteen-year, neat. It wasn’t the evening’s first drink, nor first pub, which is how I came to tell the story to the man opposite me. We’d been friends, and intermittently lovers, for a decade. When I stopped talking, he wrapped his hands around mine: “Don’t you think you should let it go?”

Between us, the heavy, varnished wooden table became a void. 

***

That summer day in 2000, my housemate Reggie suggested we go to Heaven (the one beneath Charing Cross Station). I was in a funk, had been since the end of the academic term. London was home; my friends were family; my impending return to the States for senior year was a sentence, not a privilege. Reg wanted to cheer me up. Wanting to be cheered, I went. 

It was a school night—Thursday, probably. Although a Heaven regular, this wasn’t my usual music or crowd. Nor was I equipped with the usual stimulants, so I drank pint after pint of cider and black. Near closing time, we were upstairs, to the right of the bar. A tall, skinny guy started chatting. He introduced himself; he happened to share a name with my crush. This coincidence stabbed my sodden heart like a cocktail stick. 

Can I get you a drink? 

Vodka cranberry.

More half-heard exchanges and irrhythmic shuffling. We kissed. Can I come home with you? I asked—the man gestured to Reg—he says it’s cool. 

Odd, I thought. But I shrugged. 

On the night bus, I held Reg’s hand; the skinny guy swayed in an adjacent seat. 

***

One boyfriend I told said, “That’s terrible.” And we never spoke of it again.

Another frowned: “I’ve never done anything like that.”

***

My friend Lucy said the four-letter word first. Go to the police. (She was fearless, brash, funny. We got tattoos together in Camden: a seahorse and an infinity symbol.) 

I don’t know.

When I told Reg, he offered to hunt the man down and batter him.

I don’t know.

I sat on a sagging stair next to our beige corded phone, yellow pages on my lap, traced the local police number with my finger, thought about what I might say, what they might ask. After a while, I closed the phone book. 

***

In 2018, Swedish artist Jenny Wilson talked to me about her album, Exorcism. It is, in music journalism parlance, a concept album. Only, its theme is not a concept; it’s a report.

“I didn’t choose the subject; the subject chose me,” Wilson told me. “I was 40-plus, with two kids, a career… I considered myself a ‘smart’ and ‘strong’ woman, [but] it happened to me. The rape.”  

For as long as I’ve loved music, I’ve listened to songs conflate sex and violence. From Eminem’s murderous fantasies to the Beatles’ declaration of what they’ll do if they see their girl with another man, there’s never been a shortage of voices talking about sexualized violence. 

Except women’s voices. 

Exorcism was the first time I heard rape sung about from a woman’s point of view, the first time the perennial object was the subject, the first time force was identified as crime, not conquest. 

Exorcism unnerved me in a way men’s songs did not. Wilson’s explicitness about her experience of dissociation, the post-rape physical exam, the vertigo and self-doubt, felt indecent. I admired her but could hardly bear to listen. 

***

Me: What hope do you see for changing… attitudes towards sexual violence? 

Wilson: “We have to talk. Silence is a dangerous weapon.”

***

For most of my twenties, I had sleep paralysis. Always the same sensation: someone in my room, moving closer; I couldn’t stir, couldn’t take a breath to scream. The man I lived with got used to me bursting awake, limbs thrashing. Near thirty, when I had sex sober for the first time in years, the dissociation amounted to an out-of-body experience. 

***

Me: Why did you make an album about such a painful subject? 

Wilson: “I HAD to write about it. Not that I WANTED to… This disturbing, horrifying thing had to go through my entire system. Otherwise, it would’ve blocked me. Maybe shut me up… forever?”

***

I scoured news accounts of rape for victim-blaming cops, indifferent judges, the harsh jury of public opinion.

***

INTERVIEW 

Q: How did the man get to your house?

Me: He asked if he could come home with us.

Q: What happened when you got home?

Me: My housemate asked if I wanted to have a threesome. He fancied the guy. 

Q: What did you say?

Me: I agreed.

Q: You wanted to have sex with this man?

Me: Not really.

Q: Did you want to have sex with your housemate?

Me: I don’t know. I was tired, and drunk. 

Q: What happened then?

Me: We were in my room, on my bed. 

Q: Were you dressed? Undressed?

Me: Undressed. We all were.

Q: What happened?

Me: Reg was trying to kiss him. He was trying to kiss me. It was weird. I got up, wrapped myself in a towel, and went to Reg’s room.

Q: And then?

Me: Reg came to check on me. I wanted to sleep. I asked him to get the guy out of my room; I was definite about that. I didn’t want to see him. Reg left, and when he came back, he said he was downstairs on the sofa. So I went back to my room. As I was closing the door, I thought, lock the door—but I’d never locked the door. It seemed silly. 

Q: The door had a lock, but you left it open?

Me: Locking it seemed paranoid.

Q: Were you afraid of something?

Me: Not afraid, exactly. I just didn’t want the guy in my room. It was a strong feeling.

Q: Then what happened?

Me: I was asleep, or falling asleep, when he came into my room. He was only wearing boxer shorts and said it was cold downstairs. He asked if he could share my bed.

Q: What did you say?

Me: I wanted to sleep, so I was like, fine, whatever. I just wanted to be left in peace.

Q: You said he could sleep with you? 

Me: That he could sleep in my bed.

Q: Were you still undressed?

Me: Yeah. 

Q: You kissed him at the club, let him come home with you, started having a threesome, told him he could sleep with you while you were naked. Is that correct?

Me: Yes, but…

Q: What happened next?

Me: I fell asleep. I was dreaming that someone else was in the room. I thought maybe Reg had come in. Gradually, I sort of came to. As I woke up, I realized my legs were bent and shoved up, and he was kneeling between them. 

Q: The man from the club?

Me: Yes.

Q: Was anyone else in the room?

Me: No.

Q: Was he penetrating you?

Me: No, but I could feel semen trickling out of me. I knew he’d had sex with me. I burst into tears.

Q: What was his reaction?

Me: He asked what was wrong.

Q: What did you say?

Me: Get out. Get out. Just get out.

Q: What did he do?

Me: He tried to talk to me but finally got up and left.

Q: What did he say?

Me: He said he didn’t usually do this. He wrote a phone number on a scrap of paper and said to call him.

Q: He left you his phone number?

Me: A number. I don’t know if it was his number.

Q: Did you call it? 

Me: No.

Q: Why not?

Me: I didn’t want to. I was scared.

Q: Of what?

Me: I don’t know—that he would deny it? Or that he wouldn’t? That it was a fake number? As long as I didn’t call, I had the option of calling; I could still decide to do something. 

Q: You didn’t want to identify him?

Me: I guess.

Q: But you’ve changed your mind?

Me: I want the police to have the number.

Q: Let’s go through what you’ve told us…  

***

Every time I ran that script, it made me cold. It hurt to watch someone get every damn thing wrong. The drink. The kiss. The passivity. The inexplicable suppression of the gut warning: lock the door. Worse still, the waking and stumbling into work reeking and reeling with hangover, determined to pretend everything was fine. 

Who would believe that girl?

The script only exists in my head. There was no interview. I never called the police.

***

I kept the scrap paper with the phone number in my wallet for a long time. When the wallet got stolen, I felt guilty relief: the only means of finding or identifying the rapist was gone. Silence became a fact instead of a choice. 

In the silence, I practiced exorcisms.

For a while, I had sex with anyone—really, anyone—on the basis that if I say ‘yes’ then I’m in charge. Then, depleted and disappointed, I veered into celibacy.  

The men with whom I reentered the world of sex were good people, and good to me. Some became partners, others lovers, some daydreams. 

For all their care and affection, at whatever point I told them about that night, they infuriated me. 

Discussing Gran Torino with a filmmaker I was dating, I lamented its use of rape as a plot point to justify male violence. 

“Huh,” said the cinephile. “I hadn’t noticed.”

After watching 300 with a different boyfriend, I was too upset by its depictions of sexual violence to sleep. He hadn’t noticed.

I seethed at their insensitivity, their lack of imagination, their lack of understanding. 

Don’t you think you should let it go? 

Don’t you think I’ve tried? I wanted to shriek. Don’t you think I’ve fucking TRIED?

***

Things I tried: Counseling. Meditation. Yoga. Running. Writing—so much writing: letters, journal entries, essays, rants. I walked myself through that night again and again in imagination, remembered the coarse bedroom carpet, his light-blue boxer shorts, the wallpaper texture, the bunched-up duvet; I conjured the acrid sweetness of cider-and-black and the bus stop chill; I cradled the phone book in memory and pressed my palm against the beige receiver; I marched myself back to the sexual health clinic and rewound conversations with the counselors who urged me to contact the police, replayed my tearful refusals. 

I wrote a short story that moved the event to a small mountain town; in another, I shifted the POV to watch myself through the rapist’s eyes.

No matter how I shuffled the puzzle pieces, they refused to form a new image. 

Mostly, the memories hibernated; when they growled awake, hungry, I’d suck the marrow from a welter of dry bones—but carefully, so they didn’t rattle. What remained unnervingly fresh was the anger: I replayed my ex-boyfriends’ inadequate responses, strangers’ incidental insensitivities, my friend’s obtuse comment. The anger was juicy, bitter, alive, while any tangible emotion regarding the rape itself was dead.

***

Reading my first draft of this piece, the force and direction of my anger stunned me.

Anyone reading this would think you’re more mad at your friends than at the rapist. 

That wasn’t true. 

Was it? 

I didn’t want it to be true. 

What are you really angry about? The question drummed in my brain while I ran, did laundry, fed the cats. What are you really angry about?

Jenny Wilson’s voice: disrespect is universal.

Universal

Universal

Universal 

Means

Everyone

Everyone 

includes 

me.

Once, driving north along the Oregon coast on Highway 101, I crossed a bridge in wet-wool fog; at the far end, as if a curtain had lifted, piercing, peerless blue. This realization was as abrupt and crystalline: the silence, the slights, the skepticism that angered me the most was my own. A half-buried Cormac McCarthy line came back: it was always himself the coward abandoned first. After that, all other betrayals came easily. 

Within my miasma of hurt lodged a lead slug that burned at the self-imposed injustice. 

The man who raped me committed a crime; he violated a fundamental human trust and basic moral principle. The silencing, the shaming, the ‘bad victim’ narrative? That was me.

The validation I craved? The comprehension? The compassion? Unavailable because I couldn’t validate, couldn’t comprehend, couldn’t extend compassion to myself.  

Finally, as if in a mirror, I saw the shadow face beneath my skin.

***

Don’t you think you should let it go? 

What I thought needed letting go was long gone, overshadowed by the self-recrimination to which I clung. Blame was a way to write a story with agency; I refused to report the crime because I couldn’t control how my story would be heard. And I loathed that cowardice, hated my complicity, hated being afraid.

For decades I’ve asked myself: was I wrong to not report it?

And answered with all kinds of justifications: the rape conviction rate, the horror police stories, the cruel headlines. 

There will never be a correct answer to my question because it’s not a matter of right or wrong. I did what felt necessary at the time—what might have been necessary—to hold myself upright. In another time or place, perhaps I’d have been able to meet my own high standards. Maybe, if I had, I’d have been pleasantly surprised at the official reaction, or unsurprised but not crushed. But it was that time, that potentially apocalyptic year, and I was who and where I was. However much I wish to have been different—bolder, louder, stronger—it’s time to let it go. Time to rearrange some fixed ideas.

Believe me, I cried inside. Believe me. More than anything, I wanted to hear it wasn’t my fault but failed to see the kernel of self-accusation that sowed a harvest of hurt. 

It is time to stop blaming myself, and blaming myself for blaming myself; time to stop suffering uselessly, as Adrienne Rich put it. Time to believe that a bewildered, shaken twenty-year-old did her best in troubling circumstances. Time to believe that the loves that sustain me are deeper than old wounds. Time to believe that with every kindness, every desired touch, every moment of grace, disrespect ceases to be universal.