I don’t know how to talk about rape and sexual violence when it comes to my own story. It is easier to say, “things happened. They were terrible. They are in the past.”
If I must share my story, I want to do so without the attention that inevitably follows. I do not want pity or appreciation or advice. I am not brave. I am not strong. I am not special. I am one woman who has experienced something countless women have experienced. That’s what matters here, that having this kind of story is utterly common and that perhaps, by sharing these stories, we can become appropriately horrified about how much suffering is borne of violence.
I write around what happened to me because it’s easier than going back to that day, to everything leading up to that day, to what happened after. It’s easier than facing myself and the ways, despite everything I know, in which I feel culpable. I write around what happened because I don’t want to have to defend myself. I don’t want to have to deal with the horror of such exposure. I guess that makes me a coward, afraid, human. I write around what happened because I don’t want my family to have these terrible images in their head. I don’t want someone I’m romantically involved with seeing a moment from that experience when they look at me. I want to protect the people I love. I want to protect myself. My story is mine.
But. I write essays. I share parts of my story and my stories becomes part of something bigger. I make that choice.
As a culture, we don’t seem to know how to hear stories about rape and sexual violence either. We cannot face the truth, how messy and ugly it is. Rolling Stone published a lengthy article about rape on the University of Virginia campus, and the story of Jackie’s harrowing gang rape was particularly painful to absorb. In recent days, people have questioned Jackie’s story because the writer, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, did not try to interview the alleged rapists. A journalistic failure has quickly become a crack in Jackie’s story because it’s so much easier to disbelieve such a horrifying story than it is to believe what people are capable of doing to one another.
Over the weekend, Janay Rice offered her own account of what transpired between her and her husband Ray Rice. Janay Rice says she isn’t a victim. She describes her relationship with Ray Rice as loving, one that has had the ups and downs familiar to most relationships. Some people immediately disbelieved Janay Rice, in her own words, because her story didn’t fit the narrative we wanted from her. We have a very clear image of what a victim looks like and how a victim should behave. When someone doesn’t meet our expectations of victimhood, there is hell to pay.
It is be difficult to hear someone’s story, to hear their truth, when that truth conflicts with what we hold to be true.
We don’t know how to hear stories about any kind of violence, because it is hard to accept that these things are complicated, that you can love someone who hurts you, that you can stay with someone who hurts you, that you can be hurt by someone who loves you, that you can be hurt by a complete stranger, that you can be hurt.
I believe in the importance of sharing histories of violence. I am reticent to share my own history of violence.
There was a boy. I loved him. His name was Christopher. That is not really his name. You know that. I was raped by Christopher and several of his friends in an abandoned hunting cabin the woods where no one but the boys who were there could hear me scream.
Christopher pushed me down in front of his laughing friends, so many bodies larger than mine. I was so scared and embarrassed and confused. I was hurt because I loved him and thought he loved me and there I was, splayed out in front of his friends. I wasn’t a girl to them. I was a thing. When Christopher lay on top of me, he didn’t take off his clothes, a detail that stays with me. He just unzipped his jeans and pulled his cock out and knelt between my legs and shoved himself inside of me. Those boys stared down at me and I closed my eyes because I did not want to see them. I did not want to accept what was happening.
I fought but my fighting didn’t do much more than make them laugh, make Christopher tell one of his friends to hold me down. The friend held me down, his lips shiny, his beer breath in my face. I cannot stand beer breath. Christopher knelt on my wrists while he grabbed at my chest, squeezing breasts that weren’t there. I thought I would break.
I don’t know their names. Other than Christopher, I don’t remember distinct details about them. I remember their smells, the squareness of their faces, the weight of their bodies, the surprising strength in their limbs.
I begged Christopher to stop. I told him I would do anything he wanted if he would just stop but he didn’t stop. He didn’t look at me. He looked straight ahead and all I could see was the boy I loved fucking me and another boy holding me down, and more boys still watching and calling me a slut and a whore and laughing. Christopher took a long time or at least it felt like a long time because I did not want him inside me. It did not matter what I wanted.
After Christopher came, he switched places with the boy who was holding my arms down. I was already so sore. Christopher refused to look at me. He just held my wrists, spit on my face. He laughed. All those boys fucked me. Sometimes one fucked my mouth while another fucked me. They tried to see how far they could go. I was a toy, used recklessly. One shoved his fist into my mouth, his knuckles scraping the soft gum of the roof. One shoved his fist inside me, creating a gasping wound of pain that made my heart stop. That’s what broke me. I stopped screaming, I stopped moving, I stopped fighting. I stopped praying and believing God would save me. I did not stop hurting. The pain was constant. They took a break. I huddled into myself and shook. I could not believe what was happening. I literally had no capacity for understanding my story as it was being written. I couldn’t move.
They did things I’ve never been able to talk about, and will never be able to talk about. I don’t know how. I don’t want to find those words. Later, they told everyone at school what happened. They told a version of the story, one that made my name slut for the rest of the school year.
I wish I could tell you I never spoke to Christopher again, but I did. That may be what shames me most, that after everything he did to me, I went back, and allowed him to continue using me, because I didn’t know what else to do. The aftermath is just as common but it is also part of my story, mine. I cannot carry a pregnancy to term. I can’t handle receiving oral sex. It is only recently I’ve been able to be touched without flinching. My dating history is littered with a very specific kind of asshole. The list goes on. But. I am better. I am as healed as I am ever going to be. I know joy.
This is my story, what I can tell of it. I am sharing it because perhaps we do need to hear more and more of our stories. Perhaps we need to hear so many of these stories we finally learn what to do with them and how to take care of the people who have to carry these stories. In an even more ideal world, perhaps by sharing our stories, we will raise a generation who will have no such stories to tell.
Tags: Janay Rice, our stories, sexual violence, UVA
thank you for sharing <3 so glad to hear that you’re healing… although I wish you didn’t have these experiences that need healing.
I’m listening. My heart is breaking, but I will keep listening to you, and anyone else with stories to share.
Thank you.
Very recently, I realized I was raped several years ago. At the time of the action, I didn’t call out to the girl who was asleep in the room with us because she liked him and I didn’t want to upset her that I was getting laid. I was afraid I’d lose her friendship by going behind her back and stealing the guy despite the fact I just woke up with him in and on me. She then drove us home to our respective apartments. When she dropped him off first, she detailed all the ways he flirted with her the night before. I stopped returning her calls.
I have been trying to deal with it, but last weekend I was drunk at the bar with friends and, for some reason, told two of the guys there. One was dead sober and said, “I’m sorry that happened.” I felt such guilt for being such a drag and telling an un-fun story at a friend’s party. Right now, I feel embarrassed for having told them and worry that it taints their perception of me.
<3
When people know this about you, they don’t judge or make assumptions about you. They do that about the person that attacked you. They were in the wrong, not you.
Thank you for sharing this. I somehow wish that I had something very profound to say, but I don’t. I just know that reading your share and others too is helpful to me and thank you for that.
Oh, Roxane. I’m sorry. I’m sorry this happened to you. I’m sorry it’s such a familiar story. I’m sorry that I read it and absorbed the private tragedy of it, and I’m sorry that I couldn’t read all of it. I’m sorry.
I write around what happened because I don’t want to have to defend myself.
I notice that I talk about my own rape almost exclusively in punchlines. I can acknowledge with apparent conversational casualness that I was raped — and I do that pretty often, because there’s no shame in it for me, only for my rapist. I am not the wrong-doer in this biographical fact.
But if I ever mention any details, it’s with a raised eyebrow and a brash, crooked smile, certainly as a defensive mechanism, but also because it cuts through both the sympathy and the denial that listeners sometimes spout. (And I understand their sympathy, because not to feel and offer it feels brutal.)
But mostly, I think, it’s because I will not allow anyone else to decide how this story gets told. This is my story, this is part of my history, and I get to decide how to tell it.
That is even more horrible than what I gathered from the essay in “Bad Feminist,” Roxane. I am so sorry you were brutalized. Infertility as a result of rape? So inhumane. Your resilience inspires, but it really stinks that you have had to overcome such a dreadful trauma. Supportive tears flowing here.
This is why you don’t write about such things–the pain is in the details. I know it took a lot for R. to write this after resisting for so long. I’m hurting for you today and so proud of the power you bring to telling truth.
I hear you. I’m so sorry this happened to you.
Roxane, you have all my support always. I remain angry at the reviewer who felt entitled to the details of YOUR story, the details of this hateful violation, but you have responded with thoughtfulness and grace (as I see you do with nearly everything).
You have given the world so much of your talent; you owe them nothing. Yet you continue to give and to share your learning and growth and healing and I am so glad to be a beneficiary of your writing. Thank you.
Seconded, all of the above, with all my heart.
I hope someday I could write and act with even half as much grace as I see here and everywhere in Roxane’s writing.
Thank you for expressing my thoughts exactly. No-one should experience such horror, my heart breaks for you, Roxanne.
Roxane. I’m so sorry this happened to you. You’re a wonderful soul. Thank you for sharing. It means a lot.
Nothing else to say but thank you.
Christ almighty. Because I work in sexual violence prevention and education, I’ve have had occasion to observe how many (many many) people bray for the gory details and are confident they’ll fully understand the scope of the problem, if only we’ll serve them up a victim to talk to them *in person* about what it’s like. And then when they get the details (not first-hand, because fuck you if you think your learning experience > a real human person’s pain), the ones who were the most vocal/bloodthirsty about wanting to hear from a victim or survivor, they’re either so horrified they shut down, or they immediately start to pick the story apart. They can’t handle it. They can’t see it or hear it, like you said.
But. (In my limited, anecdotal experience) that’s not the majority. For most people, hearing a story like yours really, truly changes them. It shouldn’t have to be that way, but I do think sharing stories like this and forcing people to see and hear and feel the truth changes hearts and minds. I have hope for the future, as insignificant as that is compared to the scope of the pain and hurt in our world now.
Thank you.
My heart breaks for this, and for you, and for every other woman who has been victimized in this way. It is your story, but we are your people. We are here to listen and to cry and to stand with you.
thank you for sharing your story. i’m sorry you had to go through that.
Thank you for your story and for linking to Janay Rice’s. Both important.
It’s strange that people suspect women of conspiring to falsely accuse men of rape. If we’re going to conspire against men, I’d be more inclined toward murder than false accusations.
I don’t say that I was raped, because I don’t think he succeeded in penetrating my vagina, but I don’t know that for sure because I was blackout drunk, having prepared and consumed a Nalgene of Sex on the Beach, of my own volition. I drank it in a lacrosse player’s dorm room, in the basement of my freshman dorm, which was commonly referred to as “the Dungeon.” It was my first month at college, and I had a crush on a boy, and he had a crush on me, and we were both very drunk when his friend decided to turn what would have been a consensual hookup into a nonconsensual threesome. I remember him asking if they could “Eiffel Tower” me, and I remember laughing and saying, “I don’t know what that means, but no!” I don’t remember much after that, except a vague impression of myself flopping into a ball on a dirty futon while they both tried to maneuver me into position. I woke up the next morning in my own bed, sensing that something bad had happened, but not sure exactly what. Almost immediately, I started hearing gossip about myself. “Some drunk freshman had a threesome with two lacrosse players in the Dungeon.” I had to Google “Eiffel Tower” and confront the first boy, the one I’d had a crush on, to piece together what had happened to me. And it was confusing because he was sorry, and he still liked me, and I didn’t know how much to blame him. Looking back, I see him more as a victim than a perpetrator. I went to my Commons Dean to try to get the other boy moved to a different dorm, but after the dean accidentally left a detailed message on the dorm phone of a different Caitlin who lived on my hall, I was too embarrassed to follow up any further. Lucky for me, he got himself expelled later that year, for cheating or plagiarism, I think.
I don’t harbor any murderous impulses toward that boy, but having read this, I really do feel like killing “Christopher.”
That is horrible. I’m sorry it happened to you.
after the dean accidentally left a detailed message on the dorm phone of a different Caitlin who lived on my hall
WHOA WHAT
I hope there’s someone here who knows enough about university privacy policies to tell you whether that is actionable in some way. It should be — not, of course, because there’s anything you should have to be embarrassed about, but because (as I said above about my own rape, as Roxane says so eloquently in her article) because this is your history and you should be the one in charge of deciding whether, when, and how to disclose it.
I’m sorry this happened to you. It’s bad enough that it happened, then to have it so appallingly mishandled…
That institutional failure isn’t accidental. It doesn’t have to be intentional on the part of the bureaucrats to be having the desired effect of reducing women’s confidence in seeking redress for sexual assault and safety from their attackers. A system that blithely accommodates well-intentioned bumblers is enough to make it clear that we aren’t safe reporting our experiences. And it’s awful.
Thank you for your words and your story. I keep wanting to type more, to say more, but I’m at a loss.
So thank you.
Also, you are one hell of a deft writer. Gracious.
I don’t know what to say, Roxane. I want to say thank you for sharing or that I’m listening but I feel like you shouldn’t have to share and that I would listen to you not sharing anyway…I will always be on your side to listen to whatever you choose to tell us or not to tell us. You write that you aren’t strong but from the comment section, I can’t think of another or better word to describe you.
*crying*
I’m so sorry. Thank you so much for sharing this with us. I don’t even know what to say except that I have so much love for you.
This is such an awful story and I am so sad but I am also so thankful that you shared it and that you are in a place of healing. I do think it’s important for people to share these stories, and for other people to share their absolute horror, for many people to come out and say “THIS IS NOT RIGHT, it was never right, and now we are going to tell you it is not right [not that you need to be told] rather than hiding in shame about it.”
I really used to think sexual assault didn’t happen that often. Now I realize that I am incredibly lucky to have never been raped.
Oouf. Thank you for giving voice to your experience. I’m having a difficult time coming up with a thoughtful comment other than “thank you for saying what I wish I could voice myself.” Too many elements of your story resonate with me. I found myself back there, unable to breathe while reading. I believe and agree fiercely that by sharing our stories we expand the narrative of abuse and violence (which is ultimately a good thing) AND YET, sharing my own story is so difficult.
Thank you for voicing you story.
I am listening, trying to find a new way to hear these stories, holding my own story that I do not want to confront, to shape, to share.
Our stories and truths may be ugly and messy; but oh. Oh, our truthtellers are beautful and courageous and raging and prophetic, calling us out, calling us forward onto a path together.
So much power in both this essay and in this testimony. The desire to protect others from the secondary trauma of hearing about what happened to us comes from such a beautiful impulse to protect, and to let the violence end in our bodies, and no one talks about this. As a society we do so desperately need to learn how to bear witness, how to truly hear, and how to increase our capacity to hold and respond to stories of violence so that all of the costs of being heard, understood and cared for is worth it.
Sometimes, I just want the world to end.
There are a lot of terrible things I can imagine doing. I understand a lot of terrible people and their crimes. That’s my job; I’m a journalist. I try to imagine my way into people’s heads.
But I can’t imagine doing what they did to you to anyone. I just can’t. I can’t understand it; I will never understand it. I want to. I think it would make it less terrifying. But I don’t.
I wish, very much, that this had never happened to you.
I love you. Thank you for helping all of us.
“If I must share my story, I want to do so without the attention that inevitably follows. I do not want pity or appreciation or advice. I am not brave. I am not strong. I am not special.”
“It is difficult to hear someone’s story, to hear their truth, when that truth conflicts with what we hold to be true.”
Thank you for writing this. I’m a survivor of CSA / incest and I wrestle with what to share and how to talk about it all the time. Even with other survivors in my own family.
My grandfather molested 2 generations of girls, including me and my mother. And I almost never tell anyone all of that – I talk about having PTSD, I may talk about being a survivor of CSA, but I don’t get into the nitty gritty of how many victims and who’s in denial and who’s in therapy and who doesn’t even know what happened. Even one of my therapists was kind of incredulous that no one ever told my grandmother. And I certainly don’t mention that I invited my abuser to my wedding – or all of the emotional calculus that went into that decision, and all the people I put on duty to make sure he was never left unattended. Because it’s ugly and it’s messy and it doesn’t even meet my expectations about how the world should be.
This piece is a punch through the heart. I am so sorry that this happened.
i am so so sorry you went through this. i wish this never happened to you. you are an amazing writer and person.
So much of this resonates so deeply for me, especially this- “I do not want pity or appreciation or advice.” – I shared my story on the tenth anniversary of having been raped, and my reaction to people telling me I was brave could be an entire piece in itself.
But when I read this- “I am as healed as I am ever going to be.” — You get to write your own story. And if you do not *want* to heal more, I respect that. But oh goodness do I hope, for you, for me, for all of us, that this isn’t true. I hope we all heal more that we ever expected to.
Thank you for writing this. It’s so helpful to have people acknowledging the things they do after rape that just don’t make sense to others. What did I do the day after I was orally raped in my second semester of college? I went out on a second date with my rapist. Not even a real date. Just sex on the bathroom floor in the building where he taught. The morning after the rape, I told my best friend, a fairly religious guy. He reacted as if it was consensual, tried to joke about it, and asked if I’d at least had the respect to get him to reciprocate. (No, asshole, that’s not how rape works.) But it gave me the “great” idea that getting the guy to perform oral sex on me would somehow erase the rape. It didn’t. Being so terrified in a sexual position I put myself in made it impossible to enjoy sex for a decade after that.
“We don’t know how to hear stories about any kind of violence, because it is hard to accept that these things are complicated, that you can love someone who hurts you …”
This. A thousand times this.
I am sorry that you felt pressured to tell details, that we must always *prove* that violence was indeed violence is exhausting. I am more sorry, sorry to heartsickness, that this happened at all to your girl-self, to the girl-selves of so many many women I know, to the boy-selves of my friends molested by priests, that our history is one of violence upon violence.
Perhaps naming it is helping? Perhaps progress is being made? I can only hope. And thank you for telling, and for continuing to tell …
I believe it’s a form of self-preservation, of trying to negate what happened, writing over the bad experience with one you can tell yourself you are controlling, orchestrating. Leaving him leaves him with all the power to have harmed. Staying is a choice she made and had the power to unmake. That was her emotional reality, and she did unmake it, but his emotional reality never agreed with hers. In his, the power was always his, and if it took rape and broken bones to keep it that way, so be it.
(The she in this case I won’t name; her story is not mine.)
Thank you so much for writing this Roxane, it was real as hell. I’ve been raped and sexual assaulted and the memories completely overwhelm me somedays. I was not a perfect victim (in so many ways), and knowing this makes me miserable. Your story came as a salve for me. Its contents are disgusting, but good lord your writing is beautiful. I don’t think I’ll ever heal from my own past but your writing has brought me some peace. Thank you for telling, it’s helped.
I know that sharing stories eases shame, lessens stigma, builds connection. Sharing stories creates a space where people can become powerful and real change begins. Thank you for your work, Roxane.
thank you for sharing. (I actually want to quote you and say “I have no words”). thank you for writing. and for fighting. and for working towards a world that’s right.
I love you, Roxane Gay. You have opened my eyes to so much… I remember the first piece of yours that I read. It was linked on the Toast and it, along with various writings of Mallory’s, has done more for my mental health and my heart than a lot of therapy has done. You and Mallory have shown me what true feminism looks like, at least my understanding of it.
And then this piece…I spend a lot of time mentally avoiding the things that humans are capable of doing to one another. I left the Holocaust museum a quarter way through the exhibit because it was so painful. Any time a show mentions or depicts rape or brutality against women, I turn it off. I avoid it because it breaks my heart too much. Thank you for not letting me look away. I carry you and any victims of cruelty in my heart.
I am so glad you wrote this powerful piece, and so sorry that you felt you had to, and that that person demanded that you tell, and sorrier still that it happened to you to write about.
Oh god. Oh god. I’m so sorry, Roxane. I’m so sorry this happened to you. Reading it is painful and brutal and horrific but then what they did to you was painful and brutal and horrific too.
I’m sorry this happened to you. Thank you for writing about it. You’re an amazing writer.
Roxanne, been following your writing a long time, I also love you. This helps.
Your writing often astounds me, Roxane (in the best way possible), but this has reduced me to tears. Such a raw, honest and powerful read. Thank you for telling your story. Although, I wish we lived in a world where you didn’t have to.
Your comments about Janay Rice make it all a little too easy. If she says she loves the guy, of course I don’t disbelieve her. Plenty of people love their abusers. But to accept that being knocked unconscious is part of the “ups and downs familiar to most relationships” is a little astonishing. It just pushes us back into that traditional paradigm in which whatever happens between a man and a woman is their business, and theirs alone, wrapped up in the dynamics of their *lurrrv*..the paradigm according to which there is nothing linking all the many incidences of rape and abuse, one to another to another, because each one is private and separate, and whatever men and women work out between them must be a-ok. Maybe that’s not the paradigm you wish for us, but…it’s one you are tacitly endorsing with your comments on Ms. Rice.
This comment made me so MAD. Like, I am sitting here and I am just so angry and I don’t know where to put it, because I am sitting in a cubicle at work. You’re entitled to your own feelings and I want to give you that space–but that’s the thing. You’re entitled to your own feelings. Why doesn’t Janay Rice get to have hers? You want Roxane to condemn her actions, her feelings? Yeah, that helps. Is she a victim of the patriarchy? Is she a dupe? Is she too dumb to understand the cycle of abuse? Please, tell me who she is, according to you. Jesus Christ, did you see what she went through? In *public*? It wasn’t enough to be hurt and shamed by the person she loved. Instead, she had to do it with all of us watching. And then football (sorry, I mean, God) told her how to feel and what to do. And then the public did. And now you’re going to?
It’s about love and it isn’t. It’s about living with yourself and your life and what you’d have to give up if you did it all “right.” It’s not about some Barbie Dreamhouse conception of love. I had a bad childhood. Like, it f$#ked up my whole life. Still. And I don’t talk to the person responsible, but he’s family. And now he’s having a baby (and, yeah, I’m horrified, but that’s a whole other issue). I’ll never have a baby. I’ll probably never get married. *I WANT THIS BABY*. I haven’t spoken to this man in 10 years, but it doesn’t matter. That’s over; I have to bargain. I want this baby in my life. It is my only opportunity to have this special relationship with a baby and watch it grow up. When I die, it will probably take what’s left. I’m not going to stand on my high horse about how hurt I was as a kid, so that Feminism can say I did good, that I stood up for all women, all survivors. Janay Rice doesn’t owe you anything and neither does Roxane and neither do I.
I didn’t say anyone owed me anything. I’m saying I don’t accept that being knocked unconscious should be considered part of the normal ups and downs of a relationship. My own childhood abuse was so extensive and profound that there is no reason on earth I should be standing–so please don’t go down that road of “you must not understand survival.” Survival is about doing whatever you can. You don’t condemn survivors…I don’t condemn Janay Rice. I’m just saying, we don’t have to condone the idea that physical abuse is a normal part of the ups and downs of love.
Just one other quick thing. It sounds to me like that baby will be lucky to have you in his or her life to add love, support, sanity. What a tough decision on your part, but I think it makes that baby lucky.
But if you stood up in public and said, “this guy’s abuse is just part of the normal ups and downs of how caretakers act toward children,” then I would understand where your response was coming from, I would feel for you enormously, but yeah–I would also say that is not a message i want to see validated.
Thank You, Roz. I come from that “traditional paradigm” family, where women were expected to value their marriages above their own lives and safety – and the lives and safety of their children. I must confess that I have been very mean and judgmental in my comments about Janay Rice because of my experiences as the daughter of a woman who offered up her babies as human sacrifices to the violent man she worshipped (my “Dad”). It kills me that there is virtually no mention of Rayven Rice in most of the stories about Ray and Janay.It’s as if Rayven has no value at all – as if she were mere property. It also bugs the crap out of me when there is no differentiation made between the abuse of women and the abuse of children. I have been an abused child, and I have been an abused woman: trust me, there is a HUGE difference. As a child I genuinely had no choice. As a woman, I genuinely did and do. But we are never really talking about Janay Rice when we talk about Janay Rice. We are really just talking about ourselves. Roxanne might see herself in Janay because she was so deeply wounded by Christopher that she held on to her need for his love. That is heartbreakingly human and understandable. But it has nothing to do with Janay Rice. I see myself in Rayven because my mother clung to an abusive man and I paid a severe price for it. But that has nothing to do with Rayven Rice. I pray to God Rayven’s situation is nothing like mine. I hope everything Janay said in her interview was true and that Ray never had and never will punch her in the face again (does she not see how lovely she is? Does she not know how unthinkable it is for a man to put his fist through that soft beautiful face?). Anyway, thank you for helping me feel less alone. There is zero place for violence of any kind in “love”. And a violent home is no place for any child to live.
Dear Roxane, Thank you for sharing this, as another commenter wrote, thank you for making it impossible for me to look away.
Just coming back to say, I keep thinking about this piece. I made my husband read it. I just thought of it again now, as I read this quote from Telling Your Public Story, by Marshall Ganz:
“Stories not only teach us how to act – they inspire us to act. Stories communicate our values through the language of the heart, our emotions. And it is what we feel – our hopes, our cares, our obligations – not simply what we know that can inspire us with the courage to act.
By telling our personal stories of challenges we have faced, choices we have made, and what we learned from the outcomes we inspire others and share our own wisdom. Because stories allow us to express our values not as abstract principles, but as lived experience, they have the power to move others.”
Thank you again for sharing your story, Roxane.
Just coming back to say, I keep thinking about this piece. I made my husband read it. I just thought of it again now, as I read this quote from Telling Your Public Story, by Marshall Ganz:
"Stories not only teach us how to act – they inspire us to act. Stories communicate our values through the language of the heart, our emotions. And it is what we feel – our hopes, our cares, our obligations – not simply what we know that can inspire us with the courage to act.
By telling our personal stories of challenges we have faced, choices we have made, and what we learned from the outcomes we inspire others and share our own wisdom. Because stories allow us to express our values not as abstract principles, but as lived experience, they have the power to move others."
Thank you again for sharing your story, Roxane.
Oh, Roxane. I’m in awe of your bravery and generosity. I simply cannot imagine what it took to publish this, but it’s so so important and will make so many women less alone with the unspeakable things that were done to them. I love you.
I have so much love and admiration for you. The world has never seen the likes of the magnificent life you have ahead of you. Bless.
I had to take a few days before I thought I could read this. I don’t know if anyone can ever read this and feel the same about the world. You didn’t owe anyone this story, and here it is, living, with you alive and healing and that is so valuable to anyone who doesn’t know if they’ll ever heal. My thanks for writing this are wholly inadequate and don’t really feel right either. I hope, like you, that perhaps one day there won’t be more stories to tell.
Roxanne. Thank you. Thank you for telling “our stories.” Now we are all a bit more visible. It needs to stop.
As a fellow survivor, I am in awe of your courage. Thank you. I am sending you healing energy.
Wow – I admire you even more now than I did before. I know that’s not why you shared this, but you’re just going to have to accept the fact that your ability to survive (and I would say prevail – don’t argue, you HAVE prevailed) is astonishing, admirable, heroic. Yes, I said heroic. Deal with it. “Christopher” sounds like my father (he can’t be – I’m probably older than Christopher). But he sounds like the kind of person my father was (he died of an accidental drug overdose at age 45 – good riddance to him). My father raped me throughout my childhood. I have survived and prevailed. Feel free to call me brave and strong, because I am. Like you – like so many survivors- I also deal with the whole “bad victim” thing. In my case, it’s because I was elated when I got the news that my father had died. I wanted him dead so badly I sometimes wonder if the force of my hate is what killed him. Good for me if it did (see – bad, unforgiving woman). If he’d lived, I might have ended up killing him myself. I had often fantasized about it (Bad bad girl. Not nice. Not sweet). I will never visit his grave except to urinate on it. I’m not one of those “feel good” victims who forgives her abuser and heals her relationship with her family. I am a MOTHER BEAR: to myself and to my daughter. I am also a powerful partner to the man I love and adore. I am kind, but I’m not nice. People don’t like that. Angry women are scary. But the gifts of anger are Power and Energy. And after spending the first 35 years of my life trying to be a a “good” forgiving victim, I gave birth to a daughter. She could not afford my “goodness” (just like poor little Rayven Rice cannot afford her mother’s “love” for her father). I was finally able to feel anger on both her behalf and my own (Oh – and my eating disorder withered away – go figure). If I can’t roar, I can’t laugh. Today, I laugh and love so much. When I come home, I come home to kindness. Yes, I am bragging. I totally rock. And so do you. You’re out there roaring every day, on your own and other’s behalf, (while those rapists are rotting away from the inside out in a hell of their own creation. Good!). After reading your story, I can come to no other conclusion than that you are a hero. There is no other conclusion to come to. I hope you choose to take that in. Sending HUGE hugs!
Amazing. Horrifying. I'm angered and saddened. I don't want to believe this…But I know it's true, I know this exists, and I know that it's common. Thank you for sharing, and reviewers for sharing too…may this sharing contribute to the process of healing.
Thank you for writing your story. There is power in your words. I am sorry those boys violated you in the worst ways possible, and not just physically. That you are healing gives me hope that I too can heal, and that I too can face my pain and come out, if not unscathed, at least whole.