Random memory.

Mild trigger warning for non-graphic mention of rape and survival

I came out as a rape survivor the summer before my third year of college. It was June, and I'd been home for a few weeks, and somehow it all crashed into my head and...I had to know. So I told Magus, who I'd been dating for about a year and a half. In email, because no way was I able to say that face to face, not when I froze for a solid five minutes with my hand hovering over the send button.

He was the first person I ever told, and Tho was the second, and then Brenton and jere7my. Slow, and over the course of several months. I think in the first year after I started being out, I only told maybe ten people.

(It got easier. Two and a half years after I told Marc, I told everyone.)

But man, in that first year, it was the scariest, sharpest, hardest secret I had. I wanted to tell people! Because it hurt, so much, and I was desperate for someone that would hear my pain and know how to make it go away. But if I told people...they'd know I was raped. They'd think less of me, or doubt me, or...

...stop being able to think of me as anything other than "the girl who was raped". I wouldn't be myself anymore. And that was(is) fucking terrifying.¹

But one of the nice things about being _weird_ is that my fear has always been tempered by the need to play with it. Why do I act this way, how can I push at this button? And so when one of my professors that fall, a bare four months after I even realized this happened to me, asked for an open ended personal essay, I tossed that in the middle, well padded by frivolous bullshit.

I completely dropped all contact with him, simply because we couldn't have a civil relationship of any sort. Starting last spring, I've begun to come to terms with the fact that I was a victim of sexual assault, just how badly that messed me up, and how I can fix it. I'm still very much in the process of coming out, as it were, that he did such things to me so, I mean, if you're going to keep any part of this private, I'd like it to be this one.

Because what the hell, right? He seems nice enough, and if it turns out he's an ass, I never have to speak to him again after this semester (he was focused on teaching teachers of English, it was the last gen-ed class I had).

And so he collected the essays and then a few classes later, stopped by my desk just before class and gave me a smile and told me that he'd read my essay and thought it was cool that I was into science fiction and that he read lots of it himself. A reference from later in the essay, from a different aspect of myself.

It was exactly what I was looking for. Because to him I wasn't "Kat who was raped" I was "Kat who is diverse but we have this in common".

I don't think I ever told him how much it meant to me, that despite me laying out bare that I was fractured and a freak, queer in so many senses of the world, that he responded to me by treating me like I was normal, usual, just another person in his class. I got no special treatment from this man who knew my deepest secret, when I could count the other people aware on one hand.

So yeah. I should email him and tell him about this. It's the sort of good teacher story that makes me feel hopelessly guilty that I didn't do better in his class.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: I am so much more than my trauma. I am movement and words and creation and passion and service.