I don't want you to fix me.
Every time I have to explain this part of my life, I begin with the assurance that I am okay and I have moved on and you shouldn’t worry.
In part, it is because I cannot bear to bring emotion into the description. Being watched with eyes full of pity is consuming and reminds me that I am the all-dreaded word; a ‘victim’.
It is also partly because I don’t want to be seen as a charity project for people to ‘fix’. There is no advice required from my situation and so there is nothing that can be said to ‘fix’ it. People naturally always want to fix it. But I don’t want to be broken and so the easiest way not to be is by refusing to be fixed.
But mostly, it is because there will always be a part of me that is worried you won’t believe me. I won’t cry when I tell you, so are you going to think it never really happened? Because surely if it happened I would be emotionally damaged, right? I might mention it simply in passing, as part of a larger less distressing story, and if I haven’t deemed it worthy of an in-depth conversation then have I even endured this trauma? I might describe every instance of the night, in excruciatingly explicit detail, is that too cold for it to be real? It wasn’t how you imagined these things to happen, it seems closer to regret, no? Surely, I should be choking on the very words, feeling too sick to express them? I might not be able to explain how it happened and, well, if I don’t provide a story, it seems like a flawed accusation?
It isn’t personal. It isn’t you. It is the world. It is the person I trusted who laughed in my face as I shared and cried and shouted. It is my own damn confusion. How can this be real? I don’t want it to be real. It cannot be my reality. I cannot be the one who was hurt in this way. Every fibre of my being is rejecting any flake of acceptance that this happened. And yet it did. And there is no changing that.
Everyone talks about what you can learn from bad situations, and sure, I learned from this. I learned how to have my power stripped away as I fought, begged, pleaded for it to return. I learned that sometimes, people can take from me, and I learned that sometimes, I cannot stop them. I learned that the people I seek sanctuary in can hurt me even when I think it isn’t possible to hurt any more than I already am. I learned how to get up every day and fake a smile and fake a laugh. I learned how to pretend that I am not hollow now. I learned how to be helpless and I learned how to stay helpless every day since. I learned to live with anger. I learned that anger made its home inside of me and I keep it there, hoping it will guard away anyone who has the capacity to hurt me, which right now feels like everyone. But I did not learn how to heal. I don’t know how to heal. All I know is anger now.
But anger isn’t pretty or polite. It doesn’t make me desirable. It makes me a problem. Maybe that’s why people keep thinking I need fixing. Maybe they don’t see a broken girl, maybe they see a problem. I have become inconvenient because of what somebody did to me, and because of what somebody said about it. But how dare you deem me a problem. How dare you dismiss the agony I endure every single moment while you sit in your untarnished dome of safety, your amnesty from this pain, while I lay in the shattered remains of my innocence, cradling the bullet hole he tore inside me when he took away my autonomy.