By Anonymous

Dear Teenager,

I’m about to tell you something that I didn’t know until it happened to me.

A few years ago, I was raped by someone I thought was my friend. Actually, I thought we might date eventually. At the time, I told him I was still nursing a broken heart and wasn’t ready to be with him. Because he supposedly cared about me, I thought this would make him leave me alone. It did not. He thought he could make overpowering me physically into a romantic entanglement. I remember getting a text message from him a couple weeks later asking for my address. He wanted to come pick me up and take me out for a fancy dinner, nice dress for me and suit for him. I had a panic attack under my comforter before being able to tell him no. It took me nearly a year to come to terms with the fact that I’d been raped. I wanted so badly for it to have been a misunderstanding.

I couldn’t remember the details of what happened. I could remember some moments very clearly. But I couldn’t remember saying no, and I couldn’t remember fighting back. I lived with so much guilt because of this. I’m strong and opinionated. I state my wishes clearly. I had had friends who had been victims of violence before, so it’s not like I was unfamiliar with the concept.

But what nobody told me was that our bodies react in different ways to violence. When we feel we are in danger, our instincts take over. Our conscious thoughts fall by the wayside. We may not run away or fight back physically if our bodies decide that freezing is what will be most effective in preserving our physical and mental health. If you’ve ever heard of “playing possum,” that’s when an opossum pretends to be dead so that other animals will leave it alone. Humans do this, too. I remember falling asleep in hopes that he would leave me alone. It worked for a while, so my body made a good call.

If you are violated and you don’t remember why you took certain actions or did certain things, please don’t berate yourself. You were not complicit in your attack. From the moment your attacker made it clear that your wishes about your own body were secondary to his/her wishes, your body was in emergency mode. What it did, it did to protect you. You, your body, were always trying to take care of you and make sure you were alive the next day.

And just because you don’t remember something doesn’t mean you didn’t say or do it. As I started to recover from the attack, I recovered some of my memories. I did fight back—not with my fists, but with my wits. I’d used creative ruses to try to get out of the room, I’d said many different shades of no. When that didn’t stop him, my mind even tried to minimize damage by trying to turn the encounter consensual. I tried to care about him; I tried to want him. I felt so guilty about this after the fact, because I felt like I’d betrayed myself in the moment. But I was just trying to survive until tomorrow. I was trying to stay sane.

If you’re having a hard time putting words to what happened, if you’re afraid to call it by its name, if your reactions were confusing and don’t fit the narrative of what our culture identifies as rape, that doesn’t mean anything. Each attack is different, perpetrated by a different person under different circumstances, and each survivor is different, too. If you don’t hear other people with your story, it probably means that they’ve just been too scared to put words to it yet. I’ve been there.

And I believe you. It’s not your fault.

- Anonymous