By Angel Lemke
The week after she was sexually assaulted, my best friend tried to hand me a pamphlet for friends and family of survivors.
“Do you want this?”
“Why?”
I’m really not that big of an asshole. But she knew I’d been through survivor advocacy training a couple years before that, and we’d just been discussing friends and family who were seemingly less prepared than me. I meant, “Why? You should give it to so-and-so who doesn’t have a notebook full of sexual violence information at home” or “Why? I already know we’re both about to go through hell.” I meant, “Why? I already know what secondary trauma is.”
Sure I did. That’s why I was so busy sinking into my I-can-handle-everything act that I didn’t hear how that “Why?” must have sounded to her.
“Why? This is your problem.”
I call her my best friend, but that was the public face of it…I was in love with her…or sometimes I thought I was…my other friends all thought I was, certainly…my ex-girlfriend…I was “love addicted” to her, to use an awful if too-accurate phrase from therapy. We were certainly deeply co-dependent in ways that had already strained our connection to the almost-breaking point before the rape. I’ve blogged a lot about her over the years, and I’m still not sure how best to describe it. We were intensely connected intellectually and emotionally in ways that for a time were good for us both and at times were totally fucked up.
Would accepting that pamphlet graciously have kept us from the spiral of miscommunication and hurt feelings that erased us from each other’s present day lives within months of that moment?
Probably not.
Would reading it have kept me from a full-scale breakdown, complete with lost jobs and failing to leave the house in daylight for weeks?
Maybe, but not by much, and at the cost of much-needed clarity. I was headed that direction before she was raped. In fact, I’d had a little mini-breakdown the week before the assault, shut off my phone and hid from everyone for three days. Was it secondary trauma, after all? Maybe my failure to treat my own chronic depression and anxiety just hit the fan at an incredibly inconvenient moment in my loved one’s life.
Either way, I wasn’t ready to deal responsibly with any of it; I didn’t end up in therapy for another year and a half after that, and let’s just say it’s been slow-going.
Still, the four-year anniversary of that pamphlet moment is this month, and I can’t help wondering how differently things might have gone. The four-year anniversary of that pamphlet moment is this month, and I see so much of the last four years as a twisted path back toward the things that were right in my life in 2007.
We used to say, “It takes thirty seconds to change your whole life,” as a way of motivating each other to get moving on a task. Thirty seconds to change direction, change your mind, change your behavior. Thirty seconds to say yes instead of no. Thirty seconds to say, “You know what? Maybe I should take a look at that, after all.”
What we didn’t realize is that once those thirty seconds are gone, it takes a whole lot longer to change back.
Angel Lemke has contributed previously to POTB. She is a friend of Andrea Scarpino which is all the recommendation you will ever need.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 