herarises-blog

[herarises-blog]

No Longer Afraid of the Dark

No Longer Afraid of the Dark, By Hannah Searsy

Toby Riker is no longer afraid of the dark. He doesn’t mean the dark in a physical sense, but in a spiritual one. He tells me this as we sit in a Whataburger near DFW airport. I had picked him up from the airport after he had flown back to Texas. He was fresh from a job interview in Alabama for a position teaching technical theatre at an HBCU university in Montgomery. He currently works at a university in Denton, Texas as an instructional staff technical director for their theatre program. When I asked him to describe his current job, he told me a bare bones description. “I build scenery for the theatre program. I babysit the kids from 1-5, and I teach classes as an adjunct faculty member.” Later, in a droll tone, he gave an offhand, less formal comment regarding his profession: “I am just a dumb monkey with a hammer that builds scenery for a living.”

This isn’t true. Toby is one the smartest people I know (though he’d never say that himself). He has always intimidated me with his sharp intellect. I get nervous whenever I speak around him. Anything I say when I talk to him always sounds like it’s coming out of my mouth in monosyllables. I laugh too much, uncomfortably and at inappropriate times. I bounce between becoming inarticulate and over talkative and overwrought. I generally come out of a conversation with him feeling like the more I try to impress him, the stupider I sound.

When I met Toby in the airport parking lot, he was wearing a blue plaid long sleeved shirt, a white undershirt and khaki pants. A pair of white standard issue earbuds were draped around his neck. He tossed a light brown military style backpack casually in my backseat. Toby’s short brown hair was messy. His energy seemed frantic. Toby had been the last passenger to board his flight back to Texas. He had to run through the terminal to get on his flight on time while attempting to wolf down the McDonald’s he had purchased. He had thought he had time to eat. He hadn’t. The flight left early. He was hungry. It was Texas at 11pm at night. Which meant we ended up at Whataburger, a local late-night mecca, talking about religion while bad country music blared behind us in the background. His hazel eyes shone blue under the halogen lights. He ate his burger while he talked. His hands were rough and dry looking, presumably from his carpentry work on theatre sets. I chewed on my fries, salty to taste, curious about what he had to say regarding his faith. Toby is one of the few people I’ve ever known whose views would make me reconsider returning to the Christian faith, a religion I abandoned as a teenager. He is kind. He is extraordinarily accepting of others. He has also has considered his beliefs carefully, weighing all the options.

Toby told me how he and his friends growing up used to “dick around” with the sound system when they were working audio/visual during church services. They realized that they could manipulate people’s emotional responses with sound. They started playing a game, trying to see how many people they could get to go up to the worship minister after services if they played a certain sound effect or piece of music at a right moment. I imagined a young Toby playing with the audio controls, laughing with his friends, a mischievous grin on his face. I was willing to bet that the grin had gotten wiped off his face quickly once he realized the serious questions that his actions had created for himself.

“We were actually creating a manipulated emotional response in people, which causes you then to doubt your own emotional responses. So then: Oh god, is there a god? How can tell if I am having a genuine emotional response or a manipulated emotional response? What role do emotions play in religion anyway? These are all considerations I had never had before.” His voice hardened into a determined tone. “It kind of flipped my world upside down and it was at that point that decided, I wanna know if there is a God and what I don’t want is comfort, I want truth. And if the answer is true yes or true no, I have to make sure that I’m ok with that. Which means that I can no longer be afraid of the dark.”

He met my eyes and continued, gulping down his burger. “So, what ultimately was driving my thought process here was if Christianity is just about avoiding hell, if it’s just about escaping some kind of punishment, then we can’t know if we are fully free if it unless we are no longer afraid of that punishment. If I come to terms with the fact there is no god, and I die, and I slip off into nonexistence, I have to make peace with that. I have to look into the abyss and go: ok.” He nonchalantly shrugged to illustrate his point then continued. “Versus needing there to be an afterlife because I’m afraid of the dark.”

As we continued to talk, I started to suspect that the reason Toby could not allow himself to be afraid of the dark was because he understood it intimately. “What I tend to think is that heaven and hell are where we are, what we’re doing, where we put ourselves,” he remarked. “I spent six days locked in a room with a gun to my head. I was in hell.” I nodded. This I understood well, having struggled with my own hells in my past, things mostly of my own making: my own suicide attempts, my depression, my anxiety.

Toby spoke more about his struggles with his mental health later in the conversation when I asked him if he still played guitar, something he had always done in the past. He told me he did not. “I’m actually in a phase in life right now where I’m doing a really good job of managing really bad depression and so I don’t really-“ He paused, looking pensive. “I want to enjoy playing guitar, but it doesn’t give me the same kind of fulfillment it used to. Nothing really does.”

Toby Riker and I first came across each other in our community college days in Fort Worth, TX. I met him around 2008. Neither of us could exactly hash out how we first met when we talked about it. We both knew his childhood best friend Ben, who also had attended the same college. We guessed that we had likely met through him.

My only real impression of Toby in our college days was that he was a cool dude. Back then, he had a reserved, aloof demeanor that at the time I had thought was mysterious. He rode a motorcycle, played guitar and did audio work for punk music shows in Fort Worth. He was handsome. Toby was the kind of artsy guy that everyone knows in college, the one that nearly every girl you associated with likely had a crush on. (Including myself at the time. In those days, I often referred to Toby as “your friend, the punk rock god” when I talked about him to Ben.) He had the prerequisite emo kid hair of the era, his sandy brown hair longer in the front than in the back. He wore square black-framed glasses and had a lip ring. (Ben wanted them to get lip piercings together. Toby didn’t think Ben would go through with it, so he had agreed. Ben surprised him, and went ahead with it, so Toby wore a lip ring for several years, though he no longer sports one.) He also wore a green military style hat that seemed perpetually glued to his head. “What was up with that hat you used to wear all the time?” I asked Toby suddenly, as it was something I had always been curious about.

“I’ve always had a hat that I wore and I wear them til they fall off my head.” He showed me his current hat, which he had with him. It is a ratty baseball cap that was originally black. Toby wore it in the unrelenting Texas heat through three summers of building sets at the Texas Shakespeare Festival in Kilgore (the work he did there he considers one of his greatest professional accomplishments). This abuse had faded the outside of the cap to a dull brown. Its edges are threadbare and worn.

Toby and I didn’t have any significant interactions until after he had transferred to a four-year university in Wichita Falls. He would visit town from time to time and Ben would often invite him to join us at the bar. Toby had once made an unexpected guest appearance at my little brother’s 21st birthday thanks to Ben’s invitation. He made my little brother’s eyes grow wide at his stories about living in a bad neighborhood, where Toby had to regularly scare gangbangers off his porch with a shotgun. He also made fun of me for bringing an eight-hundred-page biography about Che Guevara to a bar. (Deservingly. I never finished the book. I don’t think I even made it past the first ten pages.) At another bar gathering later that year, he asked me if the American Spirits I carried with me were a status symbol. (Likely. Toby has always seemed surprised whenever I have had cigarettes in front of him, like he doubts I have legitimate smoking habit. This is fair, as I have always doubted it myself.)

We got a bit closer when he messaged me unexpectedly around the end of 2013. He had written to tell me I was an “exemplary person, always very kind and inviting and excited for one thing or another. The world needs people like that. You’re just a good soul and I appreciate that and wish that we’d gotten to know each other a little better back in the old days.”  I was extraordinarily depressed at the time I got his message. I had gotten sexually assaulted the year before at an arts festival by a virtual stranger and couldn’t begin to comprehend it. I was lonely, having isolated myself from most of my friends because I couldn’t handle the social contact. I had just lost a moderate amount of my possessions because of a roommate with a hoarding problem and bedbugs. I had recently moved into a shitty small apartment in Arlington with a friend, for lack of better places to go. I had dropped out of college after the assault, and was working as a corporate bill collector, a job I hated. My time not working was spent alternating between drinking myself into a stupor and sticking my head into the gas stove in my apartment for as long as I could stand it, just to try death on for size. I was learning then that darkness could be so much more than just the absence of a god. The dark was everything that went with that absence. It was all the things as humans that make us broken: our depression, our trauma, our anger, our poor coping mechanisms, our pain. It was terrifying. The thought that one person considered me in any way decent, let alone a model to be held up, had helped me cope with my own fear of the dark.

After he messaged me, Toby and I struck up a friendship. We would meet up from time to time for coffee or more often, a drink (and we both loved to drink). Sometimes I would text him for a listening ear when I felt like my life was falling apart, one he always provided without complaint. We commiserated with each other periodically about our shitty jobs and our mental health problems. (He had struggled with depression even then, though I did not know the full extent of it). Both of us seemed to be going through the kind of existential crisis that seems to restrict itself to those solely in their mid-twenties. “What am I doing with my life, where am I going, have I wasted my time, have I ruined my life, when will I move forward?” were sentiments I recalled us both voicing.

Toby was in a comparable situation to me at the time, as far as work went. Unlike me, he had graduated with his BFA in theatre design from Midwestern State University. Theatre hadn’t been his first choice. “I tried at every opportunity to do something else. I changed my major like four times in college. Maybe close to seven, I don’t know. It was just-I hit a point where I need to finish my degree, I’m going to get whatever I can, the fastest and easiest thing. So then I went to college for theatre because it’s what I knew and what I was comfortable with.”

He had trouble finding work in his field after graduation. He lived with his parents and was employed as a hotel desk clerk (“MOTHERFUCK THAT HOTEL!!!!” he once texted me when I brought it up), then worked in marketing for a time. “I got out of school, I couldn’t get a job, I couldn’t feed myself, I didn’t have the professional development. My resume looked like trash. So I bounced around from crappy job to slightly less crappy job. Worked in marketing. So it kind of was what it was,” he said when I asked him about this time in his life, and how he ended up teaching college theatre classes. He shrugged as he continued. “I was feeding myself, not well. It was a rough time.”

I eventually quit my shitty job, went back to college, got some therapy, left Arlington, and slowly learned to be a bit less self-destructive. Toby wound up moving to Alabama for graduate school. He had filed a letter of interest with the Fort Worth Police Academy ten months before that, for lack of options. They sent him his acceptance letter to the acadamy six days after Toby signed his contract for a TA position at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. (As he says, “No plan survives enemy contact.”) He earned his MFA in theatre design and technical production there in 2017. Graduate school was not enjoyable for him. “I hated grad school. I almost dropped out of graduate school.” I had suspected this from some of the things I had heard from him during the time. I remembered him texting me stories about his various weird roommates, his seasonal depression struggles, how he had often slept in his TA office at the university and how that office had been as cold as hell. He stayed in graduate school only because he met his eventual wife, a lovely sounding woman named Molly, who I have never met. She works in fashion design, textile and apparel management. Toby and his wife had only recently moved back to Texas so he could start the technical director position in Denton this past fall.  The conversation in Whataburger was the first time I’d seen him in person in nearly three years.

Toby and I continued to talk. His own struggles with darkness came up again when I asked him if ever wanted kids. “Growing up, I knew that I really really wanted to be a dad. But at the same time, I look around whenever somebody passes away young and everybody goes, oh my gosh it was the worst thing in the world and they were just so in love with life, and there’s just never been a phase in my life that I felt like I was just in love with life.  That’s not a qualification that I bear. I’m horrified at the idea of passing that on to someone else. For somebody to be as broken in the ways that I am broken…..” He trails off, lowering his head. “Cause I am, I’m just a self-destructive mess most of the time. And I didn’t ask to be this way.”

He told me how he had finally gotten health insurance through his work this past year. He’d gone to see a psychiatrist, and he said he was basically given a handshake and shown the door because they weren’t in his network. They said that they would call him back with a list of doctors who were on his insurance, but they never did. I pictured him sitting in one of those puke green chairs they inevitably have in every psychiatrist’s office and nodded. “Health insurance is a bitch”, he said. I agreed.

I asked him if his depression had affected his work. He sighed and put his burger down, fiddling with his wedding ring and avoiding my eyes. “I get by. That’s about it. It doesn’t really affect my work. My work is just a good distraction machine for it. It’s not particularly good for my friendships, my marriage.” He looked away from my gaze and said quietly, “I’m really good at shutting people out.”

A week after I talked to Toby at Whataburger, I went to his house in Denton to speak to him again. My writing had become my own distraction machine. A few weeks earlier, I had finally reported the man who sexually assaulted me at the arts festival all those years ago. I wasn’t sure of my motivations for doing this. There was the requisite sense of responsibility and guilt, the fear of “what if he does it to someone else?” It had taken a greater emotional toll on me than I had anticipated. Since then, I was struggling with my own depression. I hadn’t been able to sleep. I was barely eating. I’d been avoiding my friends, shutting out my boyfriend, not sure what to say to them. I was trying to avoid drinking, my old standby. Writing gave me a constructive reason to avoid looking into my own abyss. I wasn’t sure that I was strong enough to be able to give a nonchalant “ok” in the absence of light.

I parked in front of Toby’s duplex, which was in a nice-looking neighborhood close to a park. A large black truck sat in his driveway. I was getting the beer and salsa I had brought to thank him for letting me interview him out of my car, when he suddenly appeared from out of nowhere across from me. He was wearing a worn, slightly stained white V-neck t-shirt, paired with an unremarkable pair of baggy black pants and sneakers. Toby had on his usual hat, the faded black baseball cap from before. His fingernails had black dirt under them, presumably from whatever carpentry work he had been doing that day. There was a black analogue watch on his left wrist and a thick silver ring on the fourth finger of that same hand, as well as his wedding ring on his right. Thick black rimmed glasses were perched on his face, an echo back to how he had looked when I had first met him years ago. He was nursing straight, dark colored rum in a small clear tumbler, which he gripped tightly in his right hand. It was Friday the 13th, and Toby had just gotten off from a long day of work. He had to run tech rehearsal for a show the next day. He looked tired and had bags under his eyes. They were tinged with red. I felt immediately bad for having asked him to speak to me again. (I made a mental note to thank him with something better than salsa and beer the next time I saw him.) He ushered into his house. Toby and I commiserated with each other as we walked into his house over the shit-show that working in academia can be at times. (I also work for a college and had just gotten off work myself.)

We walked through the living room, which held a worn brown couch. Behind it on the wall hung a large photo of him and his wife on their wedding day. Molly looked ethereal in an old-fashioned style white dress, a crown of flowers perfectly placed in her light brown hair. Toby was dressed in a simple black suit jacket paired with a pastel yellow tie. His outfit complimented the rustic look of her dress well. They were pressing their foreheads together, noses touching, holding each other close, smiles on their faces. Toby had always seemed to me like he was weighed down by forces I couldn’t quite see, but not in that picture. It was the happiest I’d ever seen him look.

He led me to a brown rectangular table cluttered with plants, a few tobacco snuff tins, mail and empty Keystone beer cans. The beer cans littered his entire duplex. They were all over the kitchen counter, in the sink, on his coffee table. Toby had mentioned that Molly was out of town and that he was in “bachelor mode”. I suspected that the cans would disappear before she returned.

Toby pulled out a chair for me, and we sat down across from each other. He took off his hat and put it on the table to his side. His chubby collie Rory and his orange Maine coon cat Harvey sat below us on the wood floor, listening in.

I glanced over to his kitchen on our right. A black and white cutesy sign hung above the sink which read “I love Biscuits and Gravy.” I pointed it out and Toby laughed. He told me his mother-in-law had said it reminded her of him, so she had bought it for his house. He thought this was funny because around the same time, his father in law had seen a graphic t-shirt made to look like it was spattered with blood and had told him the same thing. He enjoyed the thought that his in-laws had two seemingly totally different perceptions of him.

I pulled out my notebook and we started to talk. He mentioned his childhood friends, whose influence it was clear Toby valued greatly, even as an adult. Our mutual Ben came up immediately, which was not surprising to me. He also had various friends from church, theatre and his high school that came together through Toby to form one large group of friends, which Toby took great pride in. The core of his group of friends were several young men who Toby described as the “Dead Poet’s Society”. Toby and these friends had many losses in their young lives, which had ultimately affected their intellectual growth and emotional development.

“We were thinkers. I mean, it sounds silly but it was almost like our little core of friends was the Dead Poet’s society you know? Where we shared this common bond. Everyone in the group, man.” He shook his head. I listened intently, scribbling in my notepad. The dynamics of male friendships had always fascinated me. Toby smiled sadly and paused, fiddling with his watch before he continued.

“Matt lost his dad on Christmas Day when he was thirteen, Kaleb lost his mom to cancer when we were fifteen or sixteen, Andrew lost his dad to prison and his mom to liver failure when we were twenty. All of us, as very young men, had to deal with some incredible loss and had to deal with these really lofty ideals, and it’s kind of what drew us together. I never really thought about it, but that’s one thing that I guess kind of makes me sad about that group of friends. Now we’re all married, a few of us have kids, we’re not just going to mobilize one Friday and go camping and deal with the lofty ideas in life. But at least I can say at one point I had a group of friends, we were all consumed with this like…..”

He grimaced, searching for words as he ran his finger along the rim of his glass. “Not existential crisis, because crisis isn’t really the right word, but this existential metathought of: I am, we are, I am because I think we are because we think and talk communally.”

Another group of friends he talked about were the ones he has made through the years in his career in theatre. He told me that he had “blood brothers” throughout the industry, from California to New York. He said that the entertainment industry, while containing some of the worst people you will ever meet, also contained some of the best.

I asked if he wanted to talk about his siblings, curious if he also had close relationships with them. “I’ve got a brother who is twelve years older than me and a sister that is two years older than me.” I watched his face as he continued talking. He held my gaze intently. “I was never really close to my brother growing up-in fact my brother was going through a divorce about, shit five years ago, having a real rough time, he was in and out of the hospital for alcoholism.”

He gestured his hands back and forth to illustrate this. I looked around at all the beer cans surrounding him, raised my eyebrow a bit, and nodded as he continued. “And he’d dry out and fall back into the bottle and dry out and fall back into the bottle and you know, we don’t have the same Mom. So, any time we heard anything about one or the other it was through my dad and it was like, he was kind of whitewashing what was going on in our lives, so you only ever got the good parts. So as far as my brother knew I was doing great, but that was the same year that I woke up behind a dumpster behind a bowling alley, you know? Again, I’ve never had one rock bottom, I’ve had like four or five, maybe five or six now.”

I looked down at my notepad. I tried to take notes but the only thing that came out of my pen, written in bold ink and circled twice was: “I relate to this far too much.”

He kept on talking. I leaned in, trying to focus. “But that was one of the rock bottoms so I called him out of the blue and was like, hey man, I understand things suck. Things suck on my end too. So, my brother and I have actually developed a relationship in our adulthood, if nothing else to just reach out, hold somebody’s hand and say like, yeah this sucks.”

He sighed. I shifted in my chair, his words hitting close. I knew that having someone to hold hands with in the darkness who understands can make all the difference. Toby took a large sip of his rum, then put his glass down on the wooden table with a heavy “clunk”.

“That’s my brother. My sister, we could have never been more opposite.” He shakes his head, slight smile on his face. “I’m a late-night person, she’s an early morning person. I’m gloom and doom, she’s sunshine and daises. My life did not go according to plan, not at all.” His voice turned slightly sardonic as he continued to speak. “If I had to create a metaphor for my life, it’s that I was standing in a second story window when I tumbled out of it and went tumbling down a hill and that’s how I got where I am. I had no control over the process, life has happened to me. By contrast, my sister married her high school sweetheart, is a stay at home mom with three kids, and they just live their lives.”

I asked if any of his struggles with his “rock bottoms” had affected his personal relationships. I was curious if he had cut people out because he just couldn’t deal with them, like I had done at times. He nodded and referenced his undergraduate years. “Yeah, yeah. I cut everyone out. I cut EVERYONE out. I made myself entirely, completely an island. There was a point where I wasn’t talking to anybody about anything, I burned all of my friendships.” He paused again, fiddling with the now empty glass of rum.

The strength of his community came through for Toby in that moment of darkness. He had some friends who not allow him to be totally lost there. Toby looked at me dead in my eyes, his gaze like a bullet hitting the target. “The only one who wouldn’t let me kick him out was Ben. Ben never let me kick him out. Right on down to the darkest of hours, man.”

I changed the topic as I sensed our conversation was winding down. I asked Toby who the greatest influence in his life had been. This is a question I love to ask people, if only for the sheer variety of answers that I get. He laughed and exclaimed, “Oh shit, that’s hard! Um, Chuck Klosterman.” His face turned thoughtful. “My grandfather was my first-my first real friend. My first advocate.”

Toby paused, his eyes hazily gazing through me, as if he was looking into his past at someone I couldn’t see. He blinked suddenly, realized what he was doing, and then shifted gears. “He’s not a terrible influence but Andrés Segovia. He was arguably the first real guitarist. He became the first recognized guitarist because he was rearranging Bach for guitar. He said, stop playing the part of the guitar and start loving the part out of the guitar. Which is this really absurd abstraction, but it makes so much sense.”

I ended the interview there as Toby had plans to call his wife. We exchanged some pleasantries and hugged. I walked out of his house, not sure when I would see him again. I got into my car and started the drive back to my home in Fort Worth. I thought of his statement from earlier that he could no longer be afraid of the dark. I admired that. For me, the dark was everything that I was afraid of facing: my assault, my pain, my own depression. Like Toby, I didn’t want comfort. I wanted truth. I considered all we had talked about: his depression, his family, his friends, The Dead Poet’s society. I had loved hearing about the richness of all his relationships. I realized all that I could learn from Toby about what he called “the ethos of community” and how it can help us cope with our fears of the darkness.

I pictured me and Toby standing side by side on the edge of an abyss. I look down below into the dark, wondering if there is any kind of help, if there is hope. Our eyes meet, and he nods at me with acknowledgement. He looks down into the abyss as well, staring at something I can’t quite see yet. He shrugs his shoulders, looks back at me and says calmly, his voice steady, “Ok.”

I thought back to what he had told me earlier, in that loud Whataburger when I had asked him if he believed in an afterlife. “I don’t believe in an afterlife, not like the traditional idea, this dichotomy of heaven or hell. Christ doesn’t come to say, the kingdom of God, the kingdom of God, those who come into the kingdom of God-he’s talking about now. He’s talking about what we can do to improve our lives now.”

In my mind’s eye, Toby and I turn to face each other, and say, our voices in tandem: “Now, it’s time to stop being afraid of the dark.” “

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” John 1:5

[herarises-blog]

#metoo

Every year, it is the altar call, the awakening, the urge, the anniversary and like clockwork, I find myself pulling my rapist's Facebook page. His name is the only three words that linger on my tongue as I pull it up, fighting the urge to press the back button, close the browser, abort the mission. I'm unsure of what compulsion, ritual, this strange form of digital Stockholm syndrome, drives me to visit his page, but I do, and he's still there as always, computer screen depictions nearly as unnerving to me as if I ran into the real thing. Every facial curve, smile and word I know about this man has been unpackaged in many therapy sessions over the years, until it seems distant, a blip in the landscape, an odd aberrance in the order of my life.

His Facebook page looks a good deal like mine, with pictures of fun times and friends, the milestones of relationships and graduations lined up in a neat timeline, packaged for an easy biography. His name is Will, or Zach, Jake or some other cute stereotypical guy name that evokes someone with nice arms, facial scruff, and a decent smelling cologne. His memes make me laugh and he almost seems mild and non-threatening posing in his kayak next to his group of friends, ready for the next adventure. He is relatable, interesting. He likes pizza and air hockey. He lives in a cool city near me and likes drum jams, he goes to the same parties as I do, he listens to trap music and he voted for Bernie. He is just like me, which eases my mind at times, even though I am conflicted by the fact of what he did to me. He’s just a regular guy. He's not monster, a statement I know others would object to.

I don't hate him, which is surprising, sometimes even to me. I often think I should thank him for the wisdom and insight the slow aftermath of the event inevitably brought into my life. People tell me he broke you, why would you say that? I tell people I was broken before. He just stepped on the cracks in just the right spots for me to be cut clean through enough to be put back together again.

He raped me at an arts festival when I was twenty-two. I was young, and extremely emotionally stunted due to a holy trinity of mental illness, immaturity, and being homeschooled by evangelical Christian parents. I shouldn’t have been there, wasn’t adult to be there, and yet I was there. He followed me around, talking to me about this or that, and I was too unnerved to say no right up until the second it mattered. I had opportunities to ask for help, I didn’t. I could have walked away right up until the last second, I could have told him to fuck off, but I didn’t. I don’t blame myself for what happened, thought I struggle to stop questioning what I could have done differently, which is not an uncommon occurrence from what I understand. He got me in his tent, and I finally said no, but by then, it was too late. I often question my actions afterward: I pretended to be on certain illicit substances in front of my friends, mostly for attention and because I wanted to feel like everyone else, having a good time. I was a compulsive liar, often telling stories for attention and often because I was so used to lying to my parents about little things, it eventually just became habit. After the festival, he messaged me on facebook, and I messaged him back for a time (thought eventually I blocked him). He never acknowledged what happened. Nor did I. We talked about Occupy Wallstreet, we talked about drugs, we talked about man things, and I tried to pretend he’d never hurt me. I spent two years in fact trying to deny what had happened, and spent two years trying to pretend I was many things I wasn’t.

Flashforward to my 24th year, notable events: Robin Williams had offed himself, Ferguson, Missouri was on fire, and I was cray-cray in the bay nay nay. My emotional problems had caught up with me, and I wasn’t coping well. When I wasn’t drunk, I was terrorizing my roommate by screaming curses at him for no reason, calling his girlfriend a whore, and staring straight through him while I cut my wrists in the living room. I was fine. Everything was fine. No, I don’t fucking have a problem. I didn’t acknowledge my own emotional immaturity and my own trauma, until I found myself sitting in my room, having torn half my books to shreds, convinced my friends at burning man could hear my thoughts, jazz music playing constantly in the back of my mind, suicidally depressed, and facing the fact that if I didn’t get help, I’d probably lose myself and everyone I loved. I was a difficult person, a dishonest person, until I sat in my friend’s house, in her spare room after she came to get me because my roommate (understandably) couldn’t take it anymore. There, I watched a documentary about happiness, an emotion I wasn’t entirely sure I’d ever fully felt in my life. The people in the documentary talked about how happiness is a choice, how happiness is work, and how happiness doesn’t just happen. It was a novel concept to me, having being raised to believe happiness was something bestowed upon you and if you felt anything otherwise, you were deviant. I decided to seek therapy, because at the current moment, the alternative of where I was headed was much worse. I never would have hit that breaking point, as terrible as that moment was, if what had transpired two years prior hadn’t happened.  

I am angry at my rapist. He was wrong for what he did to me. But I refuse to hate him. I refuse to see him as less than person for what he did to me. I refuse to let his actions control my life. My justice won’t come from naming names, from yelling from the rooftops what happened to me. At this point, it’s my word vs someone else’s, which is never a place from where justice comes. Justice comes from seeking a dialogue to help create a culture where what happened to me won’t happen to anyone else.

I spent the past four months sitting on this essay, I didn’t have an ending, so I set it aside. Then something happened. A variety of sexual assault allegations started coming out of Hollywood. Harvey Weinstein it seemed, had groped his way into provoking a national conversation regarding these issues. I hoped it would lead to a productive conversation. In some ways it has, with many women and men feeling comfortable to come forward and share their stories for the first time through #metoo. My hope slowly faded however, as I observed what I hoped was to be a conversation develop into a witch-hunt lead by ideologues screaming platitudes about trigger warnings, how men should stay out of this conversation, and how this is primarily a female problem. Mob justice is rarely objective. I understand how many feels this is the only way they can get justice, as many are often dissuaded from reporting their assaults to the police for fear no one will listen, for fear they will be mistreated by the very people they seek protection from. These are the topics we should be talking. Men and women rape, men and women violate consent, men and women both stigmatize the other by saying they wanted it, or that it shouldn’t matter. Consent, police ignorance and sometimes apathy, societal stigma against both male and female assault survivors, these are all topics we need to discuss as people, not as two genders polarized against each other in war. Then there’s the grey areas, the “well I had sex, but I really didn’t want to, and they were being really pushy”, or “well we were drinking, and then we had sex, but I wasn’t really sure how intoxicated they were”, which I don’t view so much assault as a ignorance in our culture of what constitutes consent. I’ve heard these stories from both men and women, and been the protagonist and the antagonist on both ends. The problem isn’t one gender or another. The problem isn’t feminism or the patriarchy, or whatever ideology you subscribe to. The problem is that in America, we don’t teach consent culture, we don’t teach our children about sex until it’s too late, and when we do it’s often inadequate and colored by our own positive or negative experiences. I hear a lot of, “we need to teach our boys”, but the truth is girls need to be taught to. We need to openly face these things as a united group. Some of these conversations will be painful, some of these conversations will force us to face things we don’t want to see and question the things we do. We can’t get anywhere until we realize that these things won’t be resolved until we as people decide to have a dialogue without finger pointing, stone throwing or witch hunts.