Sing her song of life; she’s been dead so long. Closed in silence so long, she doesn’t know the sound of her own voice, her infinite beauty. She’s half-notes scatted without rhythm. No tune. Sing her sighs. Sing the song of her possibilities. Sing a righteous gospel, let her be horn. Let her be horn & handled warmly & this is for colored girls who have considered suicide but moved to the ends of their own rainbows.

they told me I wasn’t happy about anything anymore. I was in denial, I told him I was happy but just dealing with a lot. I was in denial about what I was really feeling

I’m tired. I’m just tired, I’m not happy. I don’t think I've been happy since I was in elementary school. I can’t even say I was happy then either. I was 19 and young and then I had pushed what happened to me in a place I thought it could never come out of. I was wrong, so wrong about that.

I've had a lot of happy moments but they don’t really last long. I have a lot of happy memories that I hold on to for dear life because it’s the only hope that I have left. Hoping that one day I’ll be happy again and feel ok.

I didn’t think I was this fucked up in the head. I never thought I was. I’d always thought I was a strong person because I’m still breathing and function in a healthy life now. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I know that I feel sad all the time. I’m happy when I’m with my daughter and best friend but then it’s like the sadness just creeps in and I get sad all over again. I feel depressed but I don’t know what’s wrong.

The other night I was thinking. I was thinking about how much I’m hurting right now but I’m scared of letting it out because I’m really not in a good place to break down. I have a lot going on right now that I’m trying to deal with.  I don’t know who will be there for me if I break down. I don’t know who I can really lean on if I fall apart. I don’t want to fall apart because I have to be strong for my daughter. If I fall apart I don’t know how long it will take me to put the pieces back together again. I’m scared that I’ll go back to cutting and not eating just to control the pain. The thought of killing myself even entered my head. I thought about if it would be better to take a bottle of pills and chase it with the strongest bottle of alcohol I can get my hands on. But I didn’t, I don’t really want to. I just want the pain to stop. I don’t know why I didn’t but the only person I thought of was my daughter. I’m trying to do everything in my power so she doesn’t turn into a fucked up person like her mother.

I didn’t do anything to make someone else rape me. There was nothing I did or had on or drank or said to give anyone the right to rape me. That’s a face. But still I feel like it’s my fault, I don’t know if I’ll be able to get that out of my head but I’m working on it.

Some days I feel like dying. I still remember after my daughter was born, she was sleeping and I was so tired after staying up all night with her I started having night terrors again. I felt like a horrible mom and all I kept thinking of was how much pain I was in. how I was hurting so bad. I wanted to open up the bedroom window and jump out; I didn’t want to live anymore. I wanted to die, the pain was too much for me to handle and I couldn’t keep dealing with it. It was like no matter what I did or what I tried the pain never went away for long. It just kept coming back and getting worse.

I wanted to call 911 and tell them I need someone to help me. I need help dealing with life. I need help dealing with the feelings that I’m having. I need help with not feeling so sad all the time. I need help with not feeling so sad all the time. I need help not trying to kill myself. I didn’t call…….I didn’t want anyone to know how I really felt. Everyone thinks I’m the strongest person in the world and I’m not. I smile every day and pretend like I’m ok and I’m not ok at all. I feel so hurt and broken and down. I just don’t know what to do anymore…..

Because it turns out the nature of rape has changed. We can now meet them in circles we frequent for companionship. We see them at the coffeehouse with someone else we know. We could even have them over for dinner and get raped in our own houses by invitation, a friend.

I don’t want to be touched by another man again. It’s just something about men that just turn me off completely. I don’t like them. I don’t really care too much for women either. But when it comes to men it’s like I’m not attracted to them at all. There’s nothing really about them that I find appealing. I don’t want any of their hands on me and just thinking about it really turns my stomach in the worst way.

It’s like every time I look at a man the first thing that pops into my head is, is he going to hurt me? How many women has he raped? How many has he had sex with while they were drink? Would I ever trust you to be around my daughter? It’s like a million questions running through my head at the same time.

I don’t want to date; I don’t really feel like talking to anyone. I’m not in the position right now to start over. I know that if I do decide to start talking or dating again eventually I will have to tell them about my past because of the panic attacks and flashbacks and the issues with sex. It’s like healing a wound and having to open it back up every time you want to get close to someone. I mean really how many times you can expect of that person to keep getting hurt over and over again. I’m tired of people not wanting to talk to me because of what happened to me. I’m tired of getting blamed for what someone else did to me.

I don’t want to have sex again. I don’t like it and it’s disgusting to me now. I felt like this after I was raped too. Like just the whole act of isn’t appealing to me because always in the back of my head is Frank on top of me raping me and I still can’t get that thought out. Being raped is what I think about when the word sex comes into my head. I think I might have pushed myself to like it just to be normal. And it’s not even the fact that I didn’t like it, it’s just that I haven’t completely separated sex from being raped so.........

I don’t want to have sex again but I want to beheld and feel like I’m loved. I deserved to be loved and be held. It feels really nice and it would make me feel happy and wanted. It’s like every man wants sex and I just don’t want it at all. So I’m deciding to stay away because I don’t think it’s fair to me or the other person to be in a relationship with someone if you can’t be intimate with them. After I’m healed I just want to be healed without worrying about having sex. I just don’t want to do it.

 Like I want to be alone but I don’t want to live my life alone, or die alone. That’s been my fear since I was in elementary school. When Justin molested me I started having nightmares. I remember it because in middle school I had a crush on my neighbor but he didn’t like me but I loved him and in the nightmare someone was trying to kill him and I saved him and he still wanted nothing to do with me. I had my own house a really big house with no kids and I was just living there with cats and that’s how I died, alone. It’s my biggest fear is going through this world alone.

 I’m just so worried about hurting other people again that I put myself second and I need to stop doing that. It’s just that when I do actually start to lean on people when I need help they walk away and I’m alone…. again…

I cried tears of blood last night And no one cared why I screamed at the top of my Lungs last night and no one Heard my cries.

So I think I’m going to start writing in my blog every day now because I started posting my poetry in my new blog every day.

I feel free but alone at the same time. I feel free but scared to say how I’m really feeling and I’m scared that other people won’t want to be around me if they really knew how I really felt…

I’m fighting a war inside my head right now. It’s a war going on between my head and my body and my body is losing really badly. I didn’t realize how fucked up I am mentally until yesterday. I’m not sure if fucked up is the right word to use but it’s just how I feel. Everything that I went through has hurt me in some kind of way for the longest time I was ignoring it, hoping that if I pushed it back far enough I would be normal again. Then I realized that I won’t ever be that woman again.

My mentality is so messed up right now it’s not even funny. My ex-husband triggers me now. I've known him for almost 10 years, he’s never scared me, threaten or even hurt me but he triggers me now. All men trigger me. Yes I look confident on the outside and you can never tell by my interaction with other people but inside it feels like a million bombs going off at the same time. I jump every time he moves, it’s like my whole body just rest itself over again and I have to restart everything again.

Certain things that didn’t trigger me before trigger me now and I don’t really know how to handle it but to keep talking about it. It’s the only thing that helps me. It’s like I’m becoming obsessed with what happened to me and what I went through. It feels like I just want to know the answers to everything so that I can fix it. So that no one else has to go through these things again.

I didn’t sleep too well last night. I kept having flashbacks of Frank and how everything was fine the first year we were together. It just makes me sick to my stomach. That whole year he raped me whenever he had the chance and I didn’t do anything about it. I was 17 and the whole year it hurt every time he did it. A lot of the time I would leave my body and watch from above other times I stared at the ceiling waiting for him to hurry up and finish. The worst was when he would make me look at him while he raped me…..that may be the reason why I could never look at my husband when we were being intimate without having a pic attack, how embarrassing is that.

It’s just so sickening…..I can still taste what his penis taste like and every morning I can taste his semen in my mouth. I never wanted to say that out loud…my stomach hurts again:(

It feels like I’m going crazy. You’ll never understand unless it has happened to you. I can’t stand the skin I’m in some days. It hurts. The scars the way it feels period. There are some things I can never get back and I’ll just have to live with that. The panic attacks, the nightmares, my hair falling out, the stress, not being able to be close to anyone. It hurts so bad I want to be that "normal" female. But it will never happen.

I feel so disgusting. I feel like there’s a pound of dirt on my skin and there’s nothing I can do to get it off. I feel like no matter how many times I scrub my skin it will never be clean again. I fight this feeling every day, all day long.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m single now and I’m free. Like I feel everything they did to me. Last night while I was sleeping I could feel Banky inside of me. I felt him inside my vagina. It felt like I was on fire…

I need to write more. I feel really hurt right now. This bath isn’t really helping either. It feels like I’m swimming in a tub of their semen and I can’t get out without cleaning myself first. It just feels like my skin is on fire all the time and I can’t stop the burning. Last night I had night terrors. I could taste his semen in my mouth, I tasted him and I still can taste him and it just makes my stomach hurt and upset and I wish I could just throw it all up so I can get it out of my body. Every place on my body that they touched me is burning right now. It’s like their fingerprints have been burned into my body and I’m trying to cut them off just to get my skin back.

The good thing about us separating is I can stop pretending. I can stop pretending that it doesn’t hurt when it’s really killing me inside. No one will really understand how it feels unless they've been through it before. I can sit here and explain until I’m blue in the face what the flash back feels like. I can try to tell you what it feels like to have the same nightmare about being raped over and over again. And as many times as you may tell me it’s just a bad dream, it’s not. It really happened. It’s a reality that keeps replaying its self over and over again. Yes I know and understand that it may not happen again but the fact that it has happened already hurt. Living that same nightmare over and over again hurts. Being raped over and over again in that dream (that really happened) hurts. It’s not just a mental thing it’s physical also. What they did to me was not right. It hurt me in so many ways I didn’t realize until now.

They took a part of me I can’t get back and that’s what hurts. I was a child when I was molested the first time. For 2 years I didn’t say anything because I was scared I would get in trouble by my mom. She knew and didn’t do anything. She knew and made me play with him anyway. She still fuckin knows and still lets him come to the house like its nothing. Frank hurt me. I don’t want to talk about that right now because its making me sick thinking about it. I pressed charges against Banky and somehow or another they still made it my fault. Why did I left him touch me? Why did he drive me home? Why did I let him give me oral sex? Why? Why? Why? Who fuckin cares???? My dad told me not to tell anyone about what happened, my mom said something about therapy 5 years after it happened. You stupid ignorant bitch, that would have helped me 5 God damn years ago. The damn damage is done now.

Like how do you explain to someone new you’re dating that you have flashbacks and panic attacks. Every single time you have to start over with a new person. You have to re-teach your body to get used to that persons touch and what they look like and constantly remind yourself that they aren’t going to hurt you. Like it’s just an awkward conversation to have with that person. And then when they leave because they can handle you. Like what do you do in that situation? You can’t be mad at them because they can’t handle it but it’s more like putting the blame on you. You’re the one who’s feeling guilty even though you know it’s not your fault but you feel like it because you’re the one who’s suffering. It’s your partner who can’t handle what happened to you because of what someone else did to you. People don’t fuckin understand that no matter how people react to you it always comes back to what happened to you and it makes you feel like it’s your fault. You feel bad when partners leave you ,you feel bad when you jump at him touching you even though you know that he’s not going to hurt you, you feel bad when you want to kiss that person but can’t because you’re having flashbacks of your rapist holding you down, you feel bad. That bad feeling doesn’t go away overnight. 

Damage….such a funny but hurtful word. So many times I've been referred to as damaged good. As if I’m some kind of damn broken package instead of a person with fuckin feelings. I am not what happened to me. I am not rape, I am a rape survivor. Do not fuckin define me by my past.

Things Not to Say to a Survivor of a Sexual Crime Please don't...Don't say something like, "Well, it's been six months (a year, 5 years etc.) and ask if we're "over it" yet. Chances are that we may not be ready to go back to life as it was. We may never be ready and may have to create a new life for ourselves as we learn to be safe again.

 What I don’t deserve is to be punished for it. It’s like everyone expects me to be happy all the time and I’m not. I cry and its ok, I don’t need anyone else’s permission to fucking cry because I’m hurt. I was molested, I was raped more times than I can count and that hurt me. What happened to me hurt me in ways that most people can every understand it hurt me in ways that I can’t even begin to understand. So I talk about it, that’s my right to do so. I get sad about it, I have that right and personally I’m starting to feel like if me being unhappy because I’m having flashbacks or panic attacks makes you uncomfortable then that’s your fuckin problem not mind. I did not ask to be raped, I did not ask to be molested, I didn’t ask for other people to use and hurt me. I didn’t ask for my family to hurt me or be the way that they are towards me. I cry because I've earn that right to cry whenever the fuck I want to. I've earned the right to be sad whenever the fuck I want to. Over the past 20 years I've earn the right to have a couple of bad fucking days and you or no one else can take that away from me. I have the right to have my emotions and feelings change whenever they do.

 My healing has no damn time limit. I don’t care anymore that I've been dealing with this for 10 years because I realized something; it’s going to take more than 10 years to even begin to fix it. In fact it can’t be fixed; it can only be incorporated in to my life. However long it may take for me to do this it is ok. If anyone ever tells you that you’re taking too long to heal look them dead in their eyes and tell them to go fuck themselves. Tell them that they can tell you how long to take to heal when they’ve been raped, tell them when they can live your life then they can tell you what to do, look them straight in the eyes and tell them to either be by your side or get the fuck out of your life. I wish I would have said that to my ex-husband when he told him how long it’s taking me to heal. Like if that’s not the biggest bullshit I've heard in my life after my dad telling I disappointed him after I was raped. I don’t think people understand how much words really do hurt. And you sit there and repeat those words in your head and try to justify it, you try to make sense of the words but you’re just wasting your time thinking about it because what that person said to you will never make any logical sense. If I could hurry this process along and get better faster don’t you think I would have done it already? Like seriously think about it, who in their right minds want to feel their rapist inside of them every day? Do you really think I want to live the rest of my life this way? Because if you do then you’re sicker than I thought you were.