Someone once told me that finding God was finding gratitude. As someone who believes first and foremost in the absolute power of unconditional love and who prays not to any particular god, but to the spirit of love moving through the universe, I seriously doubted this. I didn’t realize how inextricably connected gratitude actually was to a life full of love.
In October of my freshmen year of college, I was sexually assaulted by someone I considered a friend. We both, along with thirty or so others, had started our college experience on a five-day, retreat-like, campus ministry run program and had become fast friends. He would jokingly flirt with me, telling me he would take me to dinner if I did his laundry and such, but I had entered college with a boyfriend of almost two years and made this fact as clear as day. However, my boyfriend and I broke up a few weeks into September, and I was devastated. My self-righteous, high-strung eighteen-year-old self had planned to marry this boy, and, well, this break up was so not part of the perfect plan I had laid out for myself. My new friends could see that I was a little too anxious for my own good and gave me advice to do what most people were doing: get drunk and hook up with someone. I had been drunk once or twice, hooked up once or twice, but this was not exactly my normal method of operation. I was a conservative, hyper-religious perfectionist, but this break up had shattered my perfect, little world and I was willing to give their advice a try.
So on this particular Saturday in October, I went to a daylong drinking event and proceeded to drink myself silly, at which point, I, being the wild child I was… wanted to go home. This is when I ran into a bunch of people from the retreat and was pulled aside by that particular boy. We chatted for a while, I suppose, but then he kissed me, and although I had instructions to hook-up, a friend had just told me she was crushing on him and I couldn’t betray her trust. I told him I didn’t want to kiss him because of her, but he kept telling me he didn’t like her, he liked me and she shouldn’t stop us from becoming involved with one another. He kept kissing me so I said I was going home with my friend, but he said he would join us. He told me I was too drunk and I needed someone to make sure I got home okay; I trusted that this was his intention.
He started pulling me through the crowd and down the street, leaving my friend stuck in the throng of people. I kept pulling back at him, begging him to slow down and wait, kept calling her and telling her where we were and asking her to follow, but he had a firm grip on my wrist and before I knew it we were seated in a cab on the way back to campus. He spent the entire ride home touching my legs, but everything was spinning and I didn’t know what to do except cross them and try to escape from his grasp. Once back in his room, I realized that what was happening wasn’t at all what I wanted and tried to stop mid-hook-up and the words he spoke to me are words that have played in my head a thousand times, words I will never forget, words that never fail to make my insides tighten and my head throb. He said: you can’t stop now. My immediate reaction to these words was to fight and so he tightened his grip on my head and on my wrists and, unable to escape his grip on me, I fell into numbness; I just had to get through this, pretend that it was okay until I could get away and go home. So I did.
I went straight to a friend’s room and told her everything amidst my tears and her shocked interjections. She stayed with me all night, but word got out because you can’t be that much of a disaster (not to mention that drunk) in a freshmen dorm and not expect people to ask questions. I, being the feminist I have always been, answered them with complete honesty. It was what happened as a result that still shocks me now (although perhaps it shouldn’t), almost four years later, as I sit and write this. People didn’t know whether or not to believe me. It was a big deal. It is a big deal. Being forced to do anything against your will is and always will be a big deal.
By the next morning, our freshly made friend groups were splitting down the middle, people were looking at me differently, speaking to me differently, treating me differently. Some of my friends were enraged; others pitied me; others hid an array of thoughts and emotions behind the furtive glances they shot my way. I felt like I wanted to rewind time and start the year over. I felt like I wanted to leave. I felt like I wanted to go somewhere that no one would know anything about me and maybe I could even leave it that way. I wanted everyone to leave me alone, I didn’t want to think about it anymore or talk about it anymore, I wanted to be normal. None of these things were really possible, so I, once again, let numbness set in and knew I just had to get through each passing day, week, month and year, finding refuge in those who didn’t know and who therefore wouldn’t ask questions.
Almost two full years later, I spent the summer, working at a camp in Princeton, New Jersey. I lived with twelve other people for eleven weeks, starting and ending my summer with a retreat. It was at this first retreat that I was told about gratitude. It was also here that I found out each of the thirteen of us was required to “tell our stories” to the entire group. We needed to do this, so we were told, for two reasons; the first was that bits of our stories would be used as witness talks during camp and the second was that we needed to get to know each other and understand each other more fully. I had absolutely no desire to tell any stories because at twenty-years-old, I had undergone some intense pain and I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want anyone to know, I wanted them to know me as I was right then, not as a product of my past. In reality, I wanted to exist separately from my past, I didn’t want it to define me because I didn’t want it to be true. I freaked out and said I was afraid people would judge me, cried, refused to write “my story” down and found all sorts of ways to act like a child, but I still had to talk.
I started with stories of my brother’s abuse, continued with disordered eating and molestation by a friend, and when ending with the sexual assault, I started laughing. I just realized how ridiculous it all sounded. How could all this shit really happen to one person within the span of twenty years? I was so fucking angry that all of this had been dumped on my perfectly planned out, cheerful, little life that I refused to believe it. It was so ridiculous it was funny, a disgusting kind of funny that only comes from utter denial and detachment—from numbness. After I finished my story, someone asked me if I had ever gone to counseling to deal with the abuses; I said no. I had been to counseling when some boy I was dating started cutting himself and threatening to commit suicide because I couldn’t handle the pressure of being with someone who I was afraid, if I wasn’t perfect all the time, if I didn’t cheer him up every time he dealt with a episode of depression, that he would kill himself and that it would be completely my fault. Never had I gone because of my own pain because in my mind, I didn’t have any. The things that had happened to me were completely separate from me and all that I was. I was me, I was happy and I loved everyone. I definitely did not feel sadness.
My goal for this particular summer was to pick a cause that would be my own; I felt so overwhelmed by all the pain and injustice in the world and I knew I needed to pick something to focus on so that I wouldn’t fall into inaction due to my being overwhelmed. I was tossing around a few ideas when it hit me in the middle of the first week of camp. On Wednesday evening, a presentation was given to the high school students about social justice issues. It was quite a mentally and emotionally exhausting night because to be hit with the facts, with the staggering statistics and with the pictures of innocent yet pained faces is just too much to handle. It was my first time seeing the presentation, so I was basically holding back tears the entire time. Close to the end of the presentation, the man giving it, showed some information about organizations working to relieve in unjust situations to try to end on a more positive note. In this segment, he showed a video called “The Girl Effect.” (Go watch it.) It displayed statistics about girls living in poverty, but then followed the possible “effect” of taking just one girl out of poverty, of giving her education, of giving her a chance for a better life. It showed how much she could help her community; it showed that helping one girl could realistically help the world. It showed how much one person really can do, and it showed how much women matter. The tears finally broke through. I sat on the floor crying my eyes out, and I knew that I had found my cause, women.
I proceeded within the following weeks, knowing what I wanted to devote the rest of my life to, to find and purchase some books about the abuses women face from birth to death (as untimely as that death may be), and I learned how often sexual abuse occurs, in how many forms it occurs, how often it is blamed on the women, how often those women are then punished, the forms of punishments they received, and the cultural mind-sets that inspired gendered abuse. I felt like I was on fire. I mean, really, what the fuck? I was so mad, but I was also so motivated. I wanted to change the way human beings saw each other. I wanted to change the world. I wanted women to not only break free from the restrictions of poverty but from the restrictions of societies everywhere and from the restrictions of sexual politics. I found my passion, my calling, my reason for every breath I take. I found myself and I loved everything that I found.
One morning following my realization, I was taking a run down by the grotto at the seminary I was living at, my mind whirring with everything I was learning and all that I wanted to do with this newfound knowledge, when I had a thought. As sick as this sounds, my realization made me feel that I was (almost) glad I had been assaulted. I was grateful. I had found a way to twist the darkness of my life into utter light and in doing so I had learned to absolutely love and adore myself. In finding gratitude, I was able to see the light of that spirit of love I pray to inside of myself. I had found peace with all that had happened to me by means of utter gratitude.
