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…

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.

We are calling it theft. As if he could pluck open your ribs like cello strings, Pocket your breasts, steal what makes your heart flutter and tack its wings to his wall. Some days you will feel dirty! Some weeks you’ll remember how hard it is to breathe in public, like your heart beat is climbing to the attic of your throat only to suicide itself on the pavement. But know this: the person who did this to you is broken, not you

I just feel really shaken up right now. I feel lonely and I feel like breaking down and crying again. Last night was horrible and I don’t really have a lot of days like that in a while. I had seen someone walk past my house last night and I had a panic attacks, so I hurried up to close my blinds and it hit me in the head and knocked a statue over. So I was on the floor crying trying to glue back the pieces and I had this horrible flashback of Banky raping me and I had broken down. At first I was angry and then I was sad. I got up and sat that the computer and cried. I cried so hard that after a while I got tired of crying because it hurt too much so I had to stop. I had another flashback but this one was about Frank and it felt like the 2 years that we were together had been crammed together and I had felt every single time he touched me and it was in such detail like I was watching a movie but I couldn’t stop the movie from playing. After I had caught my breath and stopped having the flashbacks it felt like my body was here but my head wasn’t. My body didn’t feel like it was mine. And all I wanted to do was get the pictures of them out of my head. The flashbacks became nightmares the whole night and I got no sleep.

I just feel so hurt right now. I woke up this morning and I feel like I have to throw up and my stomach is so upset right now. Like for the first time in months I’m actually scared to be in the house alone. Like I feel like I’m becoming paranoid again. Like I can feel them watching me. So when I woke up this morning I didn’t want to get out of bed because my vagina hurt so much. Like it felt like I was burning and I can still feel it. I’ve tried everything to get that feeling out of me but nothings worked so far. It felt like that after Banky had performed oral sex on me and before he raped me. It’s like that feeling just won’t go away and it just makes me sick to my stomach because I can smell him on me and no matter how hard I scrub I just can’t get it off of me.

 Someone to tell me it’s going to be ok, someone to hold me and just be there for me, I need to hear that it’s not my fault and that I’m still normal and beautiful and that I’m not damaged. I can’t do this part alone. I’ve tried so hard and I can’t so I’m reaching out to my support system. I’ve tried doing it alone and it doesn’t work, I only hurt myself and everyone else around me when I do it alone. I’m trying to convince myself that it’s ok to lean on other people when I need help. That I’m not weaker because I need help, that I deserve to be happy just like everyone else.

 I’m trying so hard not to cry because my daughter is here and I don’t like crying in front of her because she picks up on emotions so easily.  My daughter has changed everything for me recently. I was so selfish the past couple of years, especially after I had her; I was selfish to my ex- husband and everyone else. But just being around her more and actually spending quality time with her and opening up has changed my life.  I want to be there for her when she’s 100 lol I know that it’s not going to happen but I want to make sure that I’m around for her. She’s my heart and if it wasn’t for her, I would still be drinking and trying to kill myself. I don’t want my daughter to grow up without a mother like I did. That is the 2nd worst thing that could happen to her and I would never want that for her. Every day I look at her and she gives me a hug or says I love you mama I think about why I’m fighting so hard. Why I keep fighting to survive, I’ve been raped and hit and abused (sexually and emotionally) enough times so that maybe one day she will never have to go through what I went through.

Each day is hard; it’s the hardest thing I will ever have to do. Some days I don’t want to get out of bed, some days I just want to fall asleep and never wake up again because on my bad days I feel like I would be so much better if he would have killed me and then I have days where breathing hurts so much that I’d rather hold my breath until I die. But then there are days where I have really bad panic attacks and I have control over them, and that makes me feel really good because I know that everything I’m doing is finally working. The emotions that I go through every day I can’t explain it. There are a lot of highs but so many lows to go along with it. It’s a draining and exhausting process that I’m scared that I’m going to have to live with for the rest of my life. I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to get better, to be normal again; I guess I just want to be a normal woman. Someone who has no problems with her sexuality. A woman who doesn’t have the flashbacks, panic attacks, triggers or the jumpiness when she’s touched by her partner. I want to feel like my body belongs to me again, that someone never touched me in the most intimate place every. I can’t get that back, none of it I can get back and I don’t want to say its ok because it’s not but I’m determined to heal from it.

Sometimes I think about if there’s actually healing from this. Is it something that you can actually be cured of or will it kill you slowly in the end? Do we actually heal from the flashbacks or do they eventually go away for a while and come back again when you’re not expecting it? When it does come back do you have to start all over again with therapy and healing? I wonder how many hours of my life I’ve lost to being raped and fighting this battle. Who would have ever thought that it would cause so many problems and so much heartbreak that a lot of people just don’t understand. I just want to know if I can actually get better from this or am I just holding on to false hope…..

"The last thing I want to be known as is 'The Girl Who Got Raped'. The big turn around you make in your head is from victim to survivor."

He’s crying out my tears for
The past 9 years…..


Every time it pours it rains
And every time it rains it
Floods.


I’m always that one person at
The top of the highest land mark
Waiting for everyone to
Go by.


Always waiting to not be saved……
©Golden Rays

She's got eyes of innocence, the face of an angel, a personality of a dreamer, and a smile that hides more pain than you can imagine.

        So the past couple of days I’ve been sleeping ok. I haven’t really had any restless nights but I have had nightmares. It was nothing serious though, just petty irrelevant nightmares that really didn’t bother me they were just stupid. Last night I was just kind of irritated, we had the window open to get some fresh air but that didn’t really help me because I was still having hot flashes and I was restless and couldn’t get comfortable so I didn’t fall asleep until about 5:30am.

        When I woke up this morning I felt like total crap. I fed the little one, went to the bathroom then came back and say down on the bed to see if I could relax but I couldn’t. So I jumped in the shower. Like I had felt so dirty, like my vagina was dirty because of the rapes, my vagina started to hurt like the feeling I had after I had been raped so I got in the shower. I did feel a little better but not really. So I put on lotion thinking maybe that would make my body feel better but it didn’t. My skin felt sticky and I had still felt dirty, like there was nothing I could do to get that sticky dirty irritating feeling from off my skin. I had felt so disgusting with my body but I knew what was going on.

        I’m trying to pay more attention to my body and how it reacts to certain situations that way I can pinpoint what’s going on with me and how I can make myself more comfortable and relaxed. I can start to feel when I’m about to have a panic attack or a flashback and usually it helps me to really calm down and handle them without hyperventilating which is good. It is very annoying and embarrassing when my body feels like that sometimes. It feels like my body is betraying me but I know its not. I know that its apart of the healing process which sucks ass but im dealing with it. I’m trying to try out different ways of coping with what’s going on. When my body feels sticky and dirty I usually jump in the shower put lotion on and then baby powder. I know it sounds crazy but the powder does relax me and it does take that sticky feeling away.


      For me personally sometimes I do feel like I’ve been damaged, like there have been parts of me that were taken away that I cant get back and that hurts. Someone took a part of me that no one was suppose to see until I was ready to show them. It feels like I’m not “pure” anymore is the best way to put it. I use to have a really big problem with feeling like “damaged” goods and I’m still working on it.

Something we all must read to really understand the hurt rape causes....

♥Black women are particularly likely to have sustained numerous assaults on their overall well being, leaving us vulnerable to PSTD when we were assaulted.

♥If friends, family, police, counselors, or hospital workers treat you negatively, their secondary victimization, also called second assault, can further damage your emotional state and cause your healing to take even longer.

♥The rape of enslaved black women reached perhaps it most pathological extremes when slavers decided to "breed" more slaves.

♥Black women were used sexually in a number of ways. Sometimes the masters let their sons sleep with Black women for their first sexual experience.

♥The point is they had no sexual autonomy. And that is the injustice, that Black women did not own their body. Period.

♥This legacy of violence and sexual victimization affects every member of society, but Black women continue to bear more than their share of the fall out.

♥It is not something that families want people to know that their daughters have experienced.

♥"There is this idea that Black women's rapes are not as important as White women's rapes."

♥The racial biases are institutionalized to this day. "Black women's rapes are taken less seriously in the criminal justice system." Recent studies have shown that judges generally impose harsher sentences for rape when the victim is white than when the victim is black.

♥We still buy into several myths. [As] strong Black women, we just can take whatever and move on. And the other one is that we have to take good care of out men. If we take care of our men, then we're not going to report men who are violent