I�m tired of hauling out statistics and facts about rape in our culture to try to convince people it�s a pressing issue. I�m tired of having to prove that to the whole world. Because it is. Womyn are raped in war AND in peace.
I want rape to stop everywhere, but most of all I want the rape inside me to stop. Cause there might not be anything physically happening to me at this moment, but somewhere deep inside me it goes on constantly. Somewhere in the caverns of my mind, there is a space in time that never moved on, and just keeps playing over and over again.
And when I say its deep inside me, it is part of me. Its my blood, my skin, my bones and my cells. I don�t know where it ends and I begin, and I have no idea what I would be like if I�d never been raped.
A lot of times I couldn�t talk when I was a kid. And sometimes I couldn�t move. People felt so sorry for me that they were condescendingly nice and believed that they were doing their charity for the day. And they were also scared of me, because I was a �freak.� It made people so uncomfortable just to look at me, and when they talked to me I wouldn�t always be able to respond. I did a lot of random staring, even though inwardly, I was desperately trying to get my body to cooperate and to stop my brain from going haywire. I was literally frozen with fear a lot. And this has been a big secret for me for a long time.
I was terrified that if anyone in my life now knew, that I would be catapulted back into sub-human status. Because now I can hide it a lot of the time. Sometimes I just seem a little awkward. I�d like to smile, and laugh and chat. I would like to be touched by another human being without my skin crawling. So often I would love to just relax and talk and move around and connect with people. But somewhere deep inside I�m being raped. And do you usually hold casual conversations when you�re being raped?
At this point in my life I have come a long way in the healing process. In some ways I�m surprised that I�m still alive, but I�m glad that I am. Because no one owns and controls me now. There are reasons for the things I�ve been dealing with for my whole life, and the reason isn�t that I am defective. I have a right to tell the truth about my own life and I refuse to be robbed of that. I finally feel like a human being.