/High-PitchedHumming...

...is the sound my anxiety makes.

And it has been the perpetual soundtrack to the last two weeks.

One would think that I would learn; semester after semester, I overload myself with far too many responsibilities. Some are out of necessity, some are voluntary. This semester is no different. I actually think this semester is a bit worse than usual. I've started online counseling through RAINN and it really just takes it out of me. I understand that they're just trying to help, but reliving that crap bit by bit is just inimical. How is this supposed to help me? Most nights it ends in minor to moderate panic attacks, which means no sleep the rest of the night. This doesn't bode well for a 5:30 am wake-up time to drive to CD East and be an alert, responsible, pre-student teacher.

On top of that joy, I've been attempting to stay afloat in my five classes, pre-student teaching, and work. My chem professor is frustrating the crap out of me, methods is challenging, math is not my subject, Faulkner is....well....Faulkner, and I have stupid classmates in conservation.Pre-student teaching is really fun; this is definitely the profession that I want to be in, but the constant driving back and forth is really killing me...and my bank account. Stupid gas.

There are many times that I wish I could have the lives of some of my classmates...have my parents pay for all of my college, bills, housing, hell even gas (forrrrreals...this is the status of a friend of mine who claims he is "too stressed" and/or "too tired" to do things like attend class/meetings. This is the shit that makes my anxiety go, "ahhhhhhhhhhhhh"). But, I know that if my life were like that, I wouldn't be me. I think that my situation has made me more independent and self-sufficient than what I could have been. And while I didn't/don't care for the crappier parts of my life, I still appreciate that they are what they are.

I think it's just the overwhelming combination of all of this. Throw in the TFA interview, prepping for Las Vegas, trying to pay off my surgery, and life in general (normal bills, boyfriend, social life?) and you have the perfect recipe for a mental catastrophe. I see that it's now 10:30....I should really get started on these papers I need to grade for Monday.

Public Safety Announcement: Remember to BREATHE

The Past.

We each have our own personal hells. I share mine with 1 in 6 women and approximately 92,000 men a year in the US alone. It's been a long time coming, but I've finally come clean with my past to the people I care about. It's been suggested that I write about it in an attempt to let some of it go. I feel comfortable doing it in this medium as it's likely to be found by either people I do not know, or people I want to have the opportunity to read it. So here we go and bear with me....some of this will be explicit and triggering for many people:

Almost everyday after school, I would get off the bus and walk straight to the library in my town. I'd stay until around 5pm and then begin walking back so that I would be home before my mother and father should they decide to come straight home instead of heading to the bar. On this day, I had just passed the gated retention pond and was about half way home when I heard voices off to my side. I didn't see them coming, but the next thing I knew, one of them was grabbing me by the hair and covering my mouth with his other hand while dragging me into a garage. Once inside, the taller man who was holding me shoved me to the ground and starting taking my clothes off while the shorter man kneeled down on my neck and gagged me with what looked like an old washcloth. When I tried to yell, one of slapped me across the face and it was at this point that I realized it was pretty much fruitless to try and struggle; I was outnumbered and a third of the size of these me. I eventually just laid there praying to God that they wouldn't kill me and wishing the concrete ground would just swallow me whole.

Unfortunately, it didn't. The taller man went first. I watched long enough to see him strip his pants and put on a condom. He looked me in the eyes and said, "let's do this". I closed my eyes and braced myself for the worst. Forgetting about the gag, I attempted to shriek at the pain I felt when he started; it hurt far more than I possibly could have imagined. It felt as if he had torn through every organ in my lower abdomen, and then it happened over and over again. Finally, what seemed like hours later, he seemed to finish with me and stood up and pulled up his pants. At this point I had completely given up on God and the concrete floor swallowing me up. Little did I know, they were not nearly done with me. The smaller man strode over from where he had been standing a few feet away and started undoing his belt. He got down on his knees and smirked as he pulled my arms above my head. Holding my wrists down with what seemed to be all of his weight, he started on me too. Over and over and over again. It seemed to stretch on into eternity. He pulled out and I thought they were finally done. I was wondering what they were going to do with me when the man on me sat back on his heels and looked over at the taller man who had been just standing over us, watching, and said, "toss that over here, let's have some fun". The taller man tossed him what looked like an old wooden bat from off a shelf. He caught it and pressed it into my neck saying, "if you breathe a word of this to anyone we will find you and do this again. We know where you live and that your friend lives in the house behind yours. Tell anyone and we'll do it to her too." He pulled the bat off and replaced it with his hand, choking me while he shoved the bat's handle into me over and over. It must have been an old one, as it felt like it was splintering inside of me. Eventually, the blistering pain subsided and he stood up. Tossing the bat to the side, he pulled me off the floor and held my face to him with both hands. He said, "tell anyone and we will find you, understand?" I nodded, shaking. he released me and instructed me to get dressed and get out. In disbelief, I pulled my shirt down, jammed my legs into my jeans, and fled. Sprinting down the alley, I heard a truck start up somewhere behind me. I ran even faster, the adrenaline flowing through my body. I didn't stop until I was in my bathroom behind several locked doors. Fortunately for me, no one was home yet, so it didn't look suspicious. At first I sat in the corner and just shook. Then I showered. And showered. And showered some more....I never really felt entirely clean. While I showered, I contemplated going to the police or telling my mother and father. But fear outweighed logic; fear outweighed logic for over a decade. It was around then that I realized I had left my newly-borrowed library books and sweatshirt on the concrete floor of that garage. Clearly, I had no intentions of going back for them.

For the next week or two I spent as little time as possible at my house. I didn't want them to come looking for me or my family/friends. I did a lot of research on rape survivors and their stories and how they coped. I fell into a lame pattern of stealing my parents' alcohol [not difficult to do for those of you who do not know me] and quickly figured out that it wasn't for me. I could only do it at night and at home, so I found something I could conceal and do pretty much anywhere and anytime I needed to escape. I started cutting, and it has been my vice for the last decade. I've been clean of that for the last couple of months...so I suppose that's something. I guess sometimes, when you're just not given the proper tools to love and respect yourself, when you feel more alone than you could have possibly imagined, you do desperate things. Things you cannot change, but things that make you who you are nonetheless. And I guess this is who I am. Fortunately, I've finally found people that I trust enough to tell this story to and from them I've started to accept that this is a thing that happened to me and is over. Now if only the night terrors would cease and desist.

So yeah. Here we are. That's all I have for y'all. If you just read all of this, I apologize for making your day that much suckier.

Faulkner

"She had looked a little alive, but now she looked like she had collapsed, like she had been made out of a lot of little thin dry light sticks notched together and braced with cord, and now the cord had broken and all the little sticks had collapsed in a quiet heap on the floor, and somebody had spread a clean and faded calico dress over them." 

C. Bukowski

Find what you love and let it kill you.

J. Austen

I am half agony, half hope.

Is college worth it?

"You will also have spent a lot of time writing papers and attending classes and going to supposedly epic frat parties that are never actually very fun because even as you're dancing and drinking and talking to vaguely attractive strangers there's this omnipresent gnawing feeling in your gut that nothing means anything and you feel this endless existential isolation...or was that just me?"

-John Green

Dear Todd Akin,

I am writing to you tonight about rape. It is 2 AM and I am unable to sleep here in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I am in Bukavu at the City of Joy to serve and support and work with hundreds, thousands of women who have been raped and violated and tortured from this ceaseless war for minerals fought on their bodies.

I am in Congo but I could be writing this from anywhere in the United States, South Africa, Britain, Egypt, India, Philippines, most college campuses in America. I could be writing from any city or town or village where over half a billion women on the planet are raped in their lifetime.

Mr. Akin, your words have kept me awake.

As a rape survivor, I am reeling from your recent statement where you said you misspoke when you said that women do not get pregnant from legitimate rape, and that you were speaking "off the cuff."

Clarification. You didn't make some glib throw away remark. You made a very specific ignorant statement clearly indicating you have no awareness of what it means to be raped. And not a casual statement, but one made with the intention of legislating the experience of women who have been raped. Perhaps more terrifying: it was a window into the psyche of the GOP.

You used the expression "legitimate" rape as if to imply there were such a thing as "illegitimate" rape. Let me try to explain to you what that does to the minds, hearts and souls of the millions of women on this planet who experience rape. It is a form of re-rape. The underlying assumption of your statement is that women and their experiences are not to be trusted. That their understanding of rape must be qualified by some higher, wiser authority. It delegitimizes and undermines and belittles the horror, invasion, desecration they experienced. It makes them feel as alone and powerless as they did at the moment of rape.

When you, Paul Ryan and 225 of your fellow co-sponsors play with words around rape suggesting only "forcible" rape be treated seriously as if all rapes weren't forcible, it brings back a flood of memories of the way the rapists played with us in the act of being raped -- intimidating us, threatening us,muting us. Your playing with words like "forcible" and "legitimate" is playing with our souls which have been shattered by unwanted penises shoving into us, ripping our flesh, our vaginas, our consciousness, our confidence, our pride, our futures.

Now you want to say that you misspoke when you said that a legitimate rape couldn't get us pregnant. Did you honestly believe that rape sperm is different than love sperm, that some mysterious religious process occurs and rape sperm self-destructs due to its evilcontent? Or, were you implying that women and their bodies are somehow responsible for rejecting legitimate rape sperm, once again putting the onus on us? It would seem you were saying that getting pregnant after a rape would indicate it was not a "legitimate" rape.

Here's what I want you to do. I want you to close your eyes and imagine that you are on your bed or up against a wall or locked in a small suffocating space. Imagine being tied up there and imagine some aggressive, indifferent, insane stranger friend or relative ripping off your clothes and entering your body -- the most personal, sacred, private part of your body -- and violently, hatefully forcing themself into you so that you are ripped apart. Then imagine that stranger's sperm shooting into you and filling you and you can't get it out. It is growing something in you. Imagine you have no idea what that life will even consist of, spiritually made in hate, not knowing the mental or health background of the rapist.

Then imagine a person comes along, a person who has never had that experience of rape, and that person tells you, you have no choice but to keep that product of rape growing in you against your will and when it is born it has the face of your rapist, the face of the person who has essentially destroyed your being and you will have to look at the face every day of your life and you will be judged harshly if you cannot love that face.

I don't know if you can imagine any of this (leadership actually requires this kind of compassion), but if you are willing to go to the depth of this darkness, you will quickly understand that there is NO ONE WHO CAN MAKE THAT CHOICE to have or not have the baby, but the person carrying that baby herself.

I have spent much time with mothers who have given birth to children who are the product of rape. I have watched how tortured they are wrestling with their hate and anger, trying not to project that onto their child.

I am asking you and the GOP to get out of my body, out of my vagina, my womb, to get out of all of our bodies. These are not your decisions to make. These are not your words to define.

Why don't you spend your time ending rape rather than redefining it? Spend your energy going after those perpetrators who so easily destroy women rather than parsing out manipulative language that minimizes their destruction.

And by the way you've just given millions of women a very good reason to make sure you never get elected again, and an insanely good reason to rise.

#ReasonToRise

Eve Ensler
Bukavu, Congo