Trigger warning: sexual violence

I sat in the corner of our school elevator. It was rarely used, requiring a special key to unlock. We were alone. I was isolated — away from the majority of the student population, in the room with him.

He wanted to have sex. I cried in my corner. He didn’t care.

He grabbed me and pulled my pants down, not bothering to take them all the way off my ankles because it constrained my movement. It made it easier to control and subdue my panicked motions.

He pulled me down and lay on top of me, putting his full force on top of my body. His weight immobilized my body. I had been told that it would hurt but that the pain was “natural.” It wouldn’t fit, so he pushed. Tears fell, but he ignored them, continuing his pathetic humping while I struggled to catch my breath. The tears carved the memory into my cheeks. This was the first, but it wouldn’t be the last.

The bell rang. My persistent anxiety of being late for class made me struggle more.

“I can’t be late — I can’t get into trouble. My mom will kill me.” This statement applied more to the entire situation than I had realized in that moment. Having to explain to my mother that someone did this to me — at me — seemed harder than the actual rape.

I finally convinced him to move his body off mine, pulled up my too-tight pants and scurried through the hallways like the nervous little high school freshman I was. I got to class, and my friend read the confusion on my face.

“What’s up?” she asked. I paused, unsure of what had just happened. How do words define that act of violence, that destabilization of my humanity?

“I … I had sex.”

My friend responded with a shrewd smile, excited to discuss an event that was supposed to establish my womanhood. But to me, this was the beginning of something else — of comprehending what had happened, of blaming myself, of figuring out how to recover. This was sex after rape.

When someone is raped, greater society erases the survivor’s sexuality. The perpetrator gains it in some way, like a collector’s card of basic human rights. Society reduces people who have experienced sexual assault to barren creatures who have lost their sexuality, categorizing them as either the helpless victim or the strong survivor. But categorizations do not account for the fluidity of healing, or for people who have experienced sexual assault but exist outside of this binary.

Before the elevator, I had never seen a penis. In fact, I didn’t even see his penis during the rape because I was too scared to look. All of my prior knowledge and understanding of sex came from sex education, “Lizzie McGuire” and my beloved book “The Care and Keeping of You.”

With the perspective of a curious adolescent who just months before had experimented with French kissing for the first time, I was clueless when it came to sex. I had been dating this 17-year-old boy for the past month, and while I was aware of his expectation of sex, I didn’t think it would happen so soon. So to me, these rapes, these acts of sexual violence, were sex. I had no other idea of what sex could be or that this violence was not a required reality.

Sex with him became a job, and sex itself a burden. It was my obligation to keep him happy. I would eventually reclaim sex for myself, but that would take a long time. Misunderstandings became rumors, and the elevator incident became my reputation. I was judged for an act I didn’t even consent to, and I was too ashamed to stand up for myself. I was seen as a slut, which troubled me immensely because of my inability to prove otherwise.

After hours upon hours of considering how to rectify the situation, I had an epiphany: I didn’t care what they thought. Their viewpoint was formed from limited knowledge and no context for who I was as a person. They didn’t know who I was, and frankly, I didn’t care.

In the past, I’ve been afraid to tell my partners I was raped — not because it is traumatic and I don’t want to relive the experience, but because their view of me changes. I become fragile and my agency is lost because they think I can’t assess what I need in order to take care of myself. When I’ve mentioned my assault(s) to partner, I’ve incorporated the information in a casual way, often making them do a double take at me.

“Did you just casually tell me that you were raped?”

Yeah, I fucking did. At this point in my life, it is something that has happened, and I don’t have to treat every sharing experience like a personal crisis. I do not need to break down in tears with the mention of my attacker. I do not need to prove my victimization by being emotional. The reason I tell my partners this is so they have information about my health in order to know how to navigate experiences in the future.

I am not my assault, but my assault is mine. It was an act of violence against me, but now I get to reclaim it as the reality of the situation. It is mine to own, to experience and to understand. I exist as I want to — we all exist as we want to.

Taylor Romine writes the Tuesday column on sex. Contact her at [email protected].