I had not yet menstruated, not yet become a woman, but I was an adult. And there was no question in my mind that it should be reported. The responding police officer accused me of making it up. He made jokes. He implied that me wearing a pair of shorts inside my own house had seduced the rapist. When I forgot that I’d met the man once, briefly, then remembered, the officer used that to imply that I was lying. The officer had to be kicked out of the examination room during the rape kit because he made jokes about my lack of pubic hair. When I picked the rapist out of a photo lineup, he sabotaged the photo lineup. When I found out that this man had raped two other girls my age from the neighborhood, I understood why they did not report to the police.

In those days, it was standard for any rape victim to be blamed for the crime, no matter what the circumstances. The prank calls and slurs I would endure from neighbors and other kids and their parents were a defense mechanism, a way for them to convince themselves that their children won’t be raped as long as they aren’t slutty (which I must have been) or had the right parents (which I must not have had) or attended church regularly (which I did not). Victim-blaming is easier for most people than thinking that it could happen to them.

I was an adult when I realized that the only sense of justice I could trust in this world was my own. I vowed that I would use my voice to make up for those other two girls whose families told them to keep quiet.

In my high school, girls were date-raped often, but they could convince themselves it wasn’t really rape because they were wearing the wrong clothes or drank a beer or didn’t get their own ride. I remember three of the popular girls discussing how they didn’t want to go to a party that weekend because they were still healing from their last unwilling encounter, but they were resigned to the inevitably that sex was not their choice to make. Surely they’d learned as much from their parents’ reactions to my “scandal.” These girls could (and did) spit on me during the day, and then lean on my shoulder after school because I was the only one who was publicly identifiable as a survivor. I was different in a bad way as far as they were concerned, but having to rely on my own sense of fairness and compassion because I found almost none in my town made me stronger than those who fit in. By listening to and empathizing with my bullies in those secret sessions, I hoped to lend some of that strength to them.

In college I took academic work related to sexual assault, particularly the prosecution of rape as a war crime. Not that I was ever a leader in that fight, but it takes a lot of people to form a movement. I spoke at Take Back The Night. I’ve done a lot of other things professionally; sexual assault hasn’t taken over my life. I do struggle with PTSD (mostly from something else, not from the rape). So mine is not a neat linear tale of recovery, but a story of how strength comes from a lot of different places. I am unapologetically and publicly a survivor of a rape, and since the moment I felt his hands grab me, I knew I would neither capitulate nor retreat. Not inside, and not to a rapist, not to a badge, and not to a slew of cowardly victim-blaming phone calls.

I was raped on July 20th, 1987.

I was married on July 20th, 2002.

We could have chosen any date, any year. I’ve planted a flag on that date and redefined it. I took July 20th from my rapist and gave it to someone far more deserving. I have a fantastic husband who loves me for all my faults, just as I love him for his. We had happily been living in sin since high school. He had to grow up too fast as well, and maybe we wouldn’t have found each other if not for that.

I’m not fully an adult, and I’ll be damned if I ever consent to becoming one. But standing on my own two legs during a time when everyone seemed to judge what once happened between them was the major formative event in my life. For all its ups and downs, I like my life. I am secure in it. If I want to look like a fool crawling on my belly chasing after a bug with my camera, I will. If I want to be overjoyed at simple pleasures, I will. If I want to follow my bliss professionally, I’m blissful. Call me childish, because I’ve been called worse in the course of that one adult moment. The ways in which I am an adult enable all the ways in which I refuse to fully become one.