Personal Narrative: Sexual Assault

“Sexual assault” was a phrase I had never heard of as a 7 year old. Sure I had heard of rape and the big S-word, but never had my ears been exposed to the word until the summer of 2005. My mother and father have never been “together” in my lifetime. I remember my mom being angry every time my father would come to pick me up. Her brows were always knitted closely together and her lips were forever pursed when talking to him, at the time I never understood why. He married and had another child within two years of my birth. I remember going over to his house, their house,almost every summer. I remember when my brother was born and how small he had been, but one summer I remember something I wish I could forget.

The summer of 2005 was all around

“What if I was born a boy not a girl?” “What if I had refused to lay down with him on the couch?” What if? But then i realize that it does not matter. That what happened happened and I cannot change the past. If it had not happen to me then it would happened to someone else, and I would rather no one else have to go through what I did. I had to keep going I had no other choice. We may not always be able to choose what happens to us but we can always choose where we can go from there and I choose not to wallow in the negativity. I choose to forge ahead, but there was a time in my life where I got stuck.

Middle school had not been easy for me or anyone really. I had no support from anyone, no one I could lean on, not my friends or even my mother. My male classmates would hurl insults at me on a daily, hourly basis. Those vultures were always circling above me, waiting for my guard to lower so they could attack with vile words and disdain.

I would retaliate, however, never one to go down without a fight and I would retaliate when they would call me a “man,”a “dyke”. Eventually ,no matter how hard one tries, one wears down. One day your claws are not as sharp, your movements not as fast, and everyday these vultures would take a piece of me with

At the time, getting just a handful of hours of sleep was normal and I never thought anything of it. I never thought it strange that I would go home and just sleep. I never thought it strange that I never seemed to have energy. Or how I never seemed to be genuinely happy or excited about anything. That period of my life was stricken with haze and gloom. It took me educating myself about mental illnesses, and dragging myself from the deep end, to realize what had been staring me in the face all along: I had been depressed, I had insomnia, I had been fatigued.

Yet, somehow I managed to rise above it. I adapted. My skin got thicker, my tongue got sharper and I grew up. I stopped caring what people thought of me. I decided somewhere along my journey that what happens happens. I cannot control the future or change the past. The only thing I have any command over is the present so I have to make the best of it.

With everything that has happened to me in my I have learned a few things: to persevere in the face of adversity, to take things one day at a time, and live while I