I was 17. I am 46 and I am still kind of fucked up, partly because it was a sexual assault, and partly because it reinforced awful misogynistic lessons my family had been trying to teach me that I had until then mostly managed to roll for disbelief on.
It is okay to be fucked up.
It is okay not to be fucked up.
It is okay to be whatever you need to be.
It is okay to be mostly over it and still triggerable and still working out the kinks it left in your thinking, not all of which are even immediately visible within the first year or two or even five, which would be where I am.
I wonder about this fear of being okay. Maybe you're afraid that being okay and admitting you're okay will mean that you're not allowed to be triggered or have relapses, and you might. Maybe you're afraid that being okay will make you careless, because it's tempting to believe that you had the power to prevent something like that and hard to accept that even if you do everything they tell you to do (and who wants to fucking live like that) the difference between a woman who gets raped and a woman who doesn't is a man who decides to rape her, period. I know that I have a real fear of giving up my lifelong paranoia about lots of things because it's kept me from having some of the really bad shit happen to me, but in the end I have to accept that it is a bad shit thing that has happened to me and not a viable alternative to taking risks and maybe getting hurt occasionally instead of hurting all the time.
And maybe it's none of those things. Whatever it is, it's okay.
no subject
It is okay to be fucked up.
It is okay not to be fucked up.
It is okay to be whatever you need to be.
It is okay to be mostly over it and still triggerable and still working out the kinks it left in your thinking, not all of which are even immediately visible within the first year or two or even five, which would be where I am.
I wonder about this fear of being okay. Maybe you're afraid that being okay and admitting you're okay will mean that you're not allowed to be triggered or have relapses, and you might. Maybe you're afraid that being okay will make you careless, because it's tempting to believe that you had the power to prevent something like that and hard to accept that even if you do everything they tell you to do (and who wants to fucking live like that) the difference between a woman who gets raped and a woman who doesn't is a man who decides to rape her, period. I know that I have a real fear of giving up my lifelong paranoia about lots of things because it's kept me from having some of the really bad shit happen to me, but in the end I have to accept that it is a bad shit thing that has happened to me and not a viable alternative to taking risks and maybe getting hurt occasionally instead of hurting all the time.
And maybe it's none of those things. Whatever it is, it's okay.