For five and half years, I was silent. Didn’t know what to say. Couldn’t find the words. Knew that, if I found the words, if I reported what happened, no consequences would occur for the perpetrator responsible. But I lived. I grew. I gained intellect and strength and finally found my beauty again. It doesn’t really end, once it’s over. (…) There are still days when the monster wakes” — but I am here. I am stronger than my past. I am greater than my present. And I am leaping boldly into my future, banishing shame, proclaiming love, and giving a voice to those who have been silenced. Rape is not a joke. This is the story of THE AFTER.
Tag: women
Emilie Morgan
“Please don’t call me a survivor. I really don’t feel like one. I still live my life as if I were raped yesterday. Essentially I was; it happens again every night in my dreams. I am not a victim either. I am a woman – and a statistic.”
…
“It was four months later that I found myself at a Take Back the Night march. I was eighteen years old and in my first semester of college. That night I found myself surrounded by women, most of whom I hardly knew. Yet we all knew each other’s story as if it were our own. It was. We were all there for the same reason. Our lives had been affected by sexual violence, and we were ready to heal. // With candles in our hands and tears in our eyes, we listened to story after story of women just like me. We held hands and closed our eyes and asked for healing to begin… // I was not alone. I was surrounded by strong women who were all surviving [and] the energy in that room could not be contained.”
Anastasia Higginbotham
“And while I, too, have seen the word ‘love’ trigger an erection, I have also seen the word ‘rape’ inspire much of the same.”
R. Walker
“Sex can look like love if you don’t know what love looks like. It gives you someone to hold on to when you can’t feel yourself. It is heat on your body when the coldness is inside of you. It is trying out trusting and being trusted. Sex can also be power because knowledge is power, and because yeah, as a girl, you can make it do different things: I can give it o you, and I can take it away. This sex is me, you can say. It is mine, take it. Take me. Please keep me.”
the musings of a miss 