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“Was it worth it?” she asks. A pause. A bracing wind blows. Gentle rain has started to fall. “Yes. Every second of it. A life worth living is one that is free.”
There is more than one way to die. Kill spirits. Kill hope. Kill time. I’ve just died. The type of death where you’re left behind to endure being alive on the outside—no matter how dead you now feel inside. That’s what rape can do.
If you do not find justice in this life, make it. If the rules are shit, rewrite them.
“There are only two people you need to make proud in your life. Five-year-old you and eighty-year-old you.”
In America’s criminal justice system, survivors become background characters to a story that is actually about us—our lives, our bodies, our dignity. The battleground for violence against women’s bodies can’t even pass the Bechdel test. That’s just how the system works. Victims are erased from their own narratives. And now I will become, at best, a mere witness to my own rape trial.
Faustian
In movies, they never depict the logistics after the trauma. Action heroes fight, shit happens, and we jump to the next scene. We never see the bandages get changed, the car get repaired, or the laundry get done. But in real life, you don’t get to skip ahead. And at this moment, a small pile of laundry feels like Everest to me—an insurmountable mountain that somehow has to be scaled.
My body and soul hurt in places I didn’t know could hurt. I was numb on the outside, rooted to the ground—immobile, dazed, stunned. Thick paperwork still in my hand, the rape crisis counselor’s new underwear still on my body, a hospital band still wrapped around my wrist.
Survivors bear no responsibility for the violence that happens to them—but the world makes every effort to place the burden on us regardless. There is no length societies will not go to, no absurd logical leap people won’t take, to recast our simple, human act of survival as something dirty and shameful.
lacerated?
Rape is rape is rape is rape. End of story. But even for many of us who live through it, it takes time to get to that understanding and acceptance.
People think about the physical damage in a rape. The bruises, the tears. But the worst part is inside. In the cages of our mind that society has built for us.
Everything comes easy to him, but being there for a friend who was raped—not even he knows what to do. But still, he tries—he tries to be there for me, and I learn quickly that the trying itself matters. In the absence of answers, it actually is the thought that counts.
I couldn’t face the thought that a friend of mine might choose to remain friends with a rapist—my rapist. I didn’t have the heart to find out some of my friends’ true characters.
I never wanted revenge, not then, and not now. I wanted only to survive. I wanted only to make it stop hurting.
It’s one of the most painful parts of recovery: navigating your relationships with friends who know your rapist. Confronting the reality that someone we think is our friend has the capacity for this kind of violence. Even though they’re neither survivors nor perpetrators themselves, these people face a reckoning, too. They have to choose who they are: someone who continues a friendship with a rapist or someone who denounces that behavior.
“I’m a reflection, miss,” he answers. “A reflection of your rage. And I don’t see you boiling over—I don’t see you lashing out. Your rage is like so many women’s: calm on the outside, a hurricane within.”
“A man’s story is written with a pen. His destiny is an earned creation, flowing parallel with time, of his own will. “A woman’s life story begins at the end, born and bred with a pain inherent, a choice deprived, her womb an hourglass written in slipping sand falling under the gravity of society’s reproductive manifest destiny. A mandatory prescription. Forever she walks through it all, never reaching the end. A glorious illusion, never enough in the eyes of the world.
“Your anger is your pain. And your pain is your power. Anger drives us to places we can’t imagine, both good and bad.”
“We’re sorry this happened to you. We want you to know that even though you have the right to move forward and pursue action, the conviction rate for rape is one percent.” For every one hundred rapes, only one person sees justice. “More importantly,” the other woman states matter-of-factly, “it takes an average of two to three years.”
With every piece of information I read, another piece of the puzzle falls into place—but the picture it reveals is grim. I feel at once more knowledgeable, more in control, and yet more overwhelmed and enraged. The tug-of-war continues.
For every six women, one is raped. One in four college women are sexually assaulted. Most rapists are serial rapists. Every sixty-eight seconds, an American is sexually assaulted. Fifty-five percent of rapes happen at or near the victim’s home. Fewer than 20 percent of rapes are reported. For every one hundred women, ninety-nine will never see justice. Thirty-three percent of women who are raped contemplate suicide. Thirteen percent of women who are raped attempt suicide.
The worst thing that happened to me wasn’t being raped. It was being betrayed by America’s criminal justice system. Suddenly I am confronted with a ticking time bomb. A horror game that puts Saw to shame. A labyrinth to nowhere, a bureaucratic joke worthy of Kafka. And a failure rate of 99 percent—that’s the punch line.
It is as if a lady of the heavens has unfolded a splendid nightgown of a thousand glimmering stars sewn against a velvety fabric of celestial, infinite vastness.
You worry that you’re not skinny enough, not beautiful enough, but as you experience the privilege of aging, you’ll look back on yourself with kind eyes. With compassion. With disbelief, even—how could I ever think I was anything but pretty? In fact, you are beautiful. More than that, you are enough.”
“I want all survivors to know that not only can we survive and change the world, but also we do not need to give up what we love. I’ve started training part-time in astronautics research as a route to finding a way back home to the stars.”
away because they are too painful to remember. It’s difficult to think that the people who hurt us aren’t only monsters, that they are humans. How is it possible to reconcile their violence while also loving them?
The final approval email is a message that is just four simple words. “Request done and accepted.” Three simple emails. It’s surreal to look at those words in their cold simplicity—such a nonchalant exchange, papering over the impossible weight of what it truly means. There’s that tug-of-war again. On the one hand, I’m relieved that my kit has been saved, at least for now. On the other, I’m enraged that every part of this process is like pulling teeth, every step a hassle, every rule another absurd artificial barrier to my peace of mind.
The truth is that I don’t see myself as an activist. I’m not like Charlize. She’s bold and daring and doesn’t care what people think. But I do—I care very much. I care what the CIA thinks about me.
I am begging to be heard. Pleading for the bare minimum from a country that promised me I would be treated with dignity if I was a good survivor. If I went to the hospital; if I went to the police. There is no such thing as a good survivor, I now know, only an inconvenient one who must be beaten into submission by a system that simply doesn’t care.
What keeps me afloat, if only barely, is the knowledge that my death would let them win—not only my rapist, but the system that permits him to go on breathing freely while survivors like me gasp for air.
Rape inherently disempowers. In a twist of irony, survivors have the most powerful voice to contribute to this movement. I wish I could talk to every survivor and tell them that your bravery and your struggles are heard. I am here to hear them. I know your anguish. I share it. And that’s why it is ever so important at this moment to rally together and push for a better future. This system is accountable to us. We have the power to make a difference.
“Your saddest memories aren’t of pain,” she explains. “They’re of grief, the potential of happiness that cannot be.”
“If you find me, you’re on the right track. Not numb from denial, not blind from anger, not bargaining out of delusion. Sadness is an integral part of the human condition. All of us must experience it. For without it, life is meaningless. Sadness is a lighthouse that guides you in the storm to tell you about the love you have for what and who truly matter to you. Every cup tastes different based on the person drinking it.”
A countless toll of women, mostly suffering in silence, trapped somewhere in this cycle alongside me.
But when you present them with hope, you find that hope is contagious. People rally to it. They fuel it. And hope spreads like fire.
sexual assault survivor’s Bill of Rights: a comprehensive declaration to fundamentally reinvent the way the system works—the right to not have our rape kits destroyed before the statute of limitations, the right to have access to our own patient medical records, the right to our own police report, the right to not have to pay for lifesaving medical services or our own evidence collection. Our goal is to ensure that no one has to go through what I went through ever again.
just because we are working to break the cycle doesn’t mean that the cycle has released me from its grip. I am still juggling, still trying to live, still trying to escape.
If the East Coast doesn’t offer me enough distance from the world I am escaping, perhaps outer space will do. I still harbor dreams of becoming an astronaut, so I apply to the White House in hopes of landing a political appointment at NASA.
I am exhausted. Long gone are the friends, hobbies, and activities I once enjoyed. I cannot talk to anyone about the CIA job—and I avoid talking to people as a rule, so as to avoid talking about my rape. I am spreading myself too thin and juggling far too much. Something was bound to drop;
They did not say it outright that I would be demerited for the assault. But it feels like they did. My exhaustion is mixed with anger. Anger at the CIA for asking the question. Anger at the criminal justice system for destroying rape kits. Anger at society for victim blaming survivors. Why should I be demerited for the violence that happened to me? In how many ways can survivors be judged, branded, and stigmatized for the rest of our lives?
I am crashing and burning juggling my nine-to-five job at the immigration nonprofit, writing two laws, saving my kit, and going through the onboarding process at the CIA. I have been struggling ever since my rape to not have to choose between justice and my career.
Leland Melvin was drafted by the Detroit Lions in the 1986 NFL Draft before he became a NASA astronaut.
The Hubble Space Telescope’s breathtaking photos remind me of the orbital perspective, also known as the “overview effect,” a term that’s been documented in psychiatric literature as what astronauts who go to space experience. They have described it as being fully in awe of Earth—both terrified by its amazingness but also humbled by humanity’s togetherness. It’s essentially an existential crisis.
Space and civil rights have always gone hand in hand,” he says with a smile. “Space is going to be there. It’s going to be there long after you’re gone. So go fight for your civil rights, for our civil rights. And when you’re ready, I’ll be here to welcome you back to space.”
Vietnamese legend says the moon is a woman in love.
At the Malaysian refugee camp, Lan found an aid worker and asked to relay a message home that she, Bach, Khai, and Khoa had made it.
One staffer seems preoccupied with checking their email. Another stifles a yawn. These legislative aides could not be more uninterested. With their body language and tone, they act as if they are Olympian gods giving us the grace of their time. We hand over the briefing folders.
I hate this feeling, hate that I have to put myself out there, beg for my rights and share my trauma in order to get people to even pay attention. I know that as soon as I say the “R word,” that’s all I’ll be seen as. The word is so weighted in taboo it erases the rest of my identity.
The senator stares at me. In the most saccharine, pedantic voice, almost as if he were talking to a child, he says, “Wow. That was so brave of you to share.
