How I Found My Way Through the Darkness: Surviving Sexual Assault
I use to wake up screaming from nightmares of a gun to my neck. I never stepped outside the house alone for a year after my attack. I could not find a point of living. I did not know why I wanted to live. Why did I fight? Why did I drag myself outside covered in blood with my hands banging against the pavement screaming for someone to wake me up from this nightmare, that was now my life.
What had happened to the darkness I was floating in. The beatings smashed into my head. The hands around my neck, gasping for a breath of air. The eyes I saw moments before I thought would die. The moment I too, wanted to die, thinking was this what it was to be a woman?
Surrounded by men since the ‘ripe’ age of 12, that lurked and preyed on my newly developed body- as if they could smell the blood of my womanhood. The feeling of disassociating through sex, because the first male hands to touch near my vagina, was that of a cousin 20 years older than my 14 year old self. Always feeling myself floating to a place of safety. My head banging against a cabinet door, catching my wrist as I am thrown down a pair of stairs. No one ever coming to save me.
The day two men put a gun to my neck in my own household and my neighbors hearing me scream, but they thought my boyfriend was just abusing me again. All the times after I couldn’t bask in the sun, so I hid behind my neighbor in her shadow. So no one could see me. My head down, eyes pointed to the ground. To live like that for so long, trying to find meaning to life again. Learning to trust in a world that I believed gave me up, was the hardest thing I would ever have to do.
I never thought the darkness would end. There were days I found myself holding onto anything sturdy on the NYC subway platform, just so I wouldn’t jump. I woke up almost every morning hearing gunshots in my head. I would race to grab my phone and throw on a meditation tape to reset my brain and calm down my breathing.
Every night as I drifted to sleep, I would chant to myself- “It’s not real, It’s not real.”
Remembering to myself that I am not what happens to me, I am how I overcome it! I will not fall into the trap that I have sunken low. No one can sink my spirit, but me. It’s how I choose to react to this.
And react to it, I did. I sat for 8 months with myself in celibacy. Making vows to me for my own personal development. I would force myself to dance, to write, to breathe. I would find me again. I would find the Teisha they tried to take. The spirit they tried to kill and I would be free. The, “They” who little by little since the age of 12, tried ripping off pieces of me...but they can’t take my soul, not without my permission.
If I could meet my 9 year old self with the uneven hair and the purple cotton vest that I swore was the coolest. I would shake her, I would hold her, and I would tell her; That no matter what is going to happen and it’s going to happen, do not let it break you. You get one life- do it right. I would tell her that there are people out there who will love you, but you have to love you.. or else you will never see their love. Above all else you will have to trust that no matter how hard it gets and it’s going to get hard, do not sink.
Learning to have compassion for myself was harder than anything I had been through. It was so easy to give others ‘love’ and yet so hard to give myself the same type of love. I had to learn to forgive myself for the things I allowed and didn’t allow. I had to be honest with who I was and where I was heading. Not only did I have to create boundaries with other people, I had to create boundaries with myself.
I spent most of my life treating myself as a liability and not an asset. I spent so much time investing in others and nearly lost my life for it. Now was the time to invest in me. I had nothing to lose, since I almost lost everything.
I took classes, became a drama and english teacher. I spent 2 years abroad teaching in Malaysia and South Korea. I enrolled in my local college and took the opportunity to do online classes, while I travel the world. I got lost in Japan, lost in Thailand, and just lost in general. Wandering through cities, jungles, and countrysides meeting people from all walks of life. Nights that turned to mornings as I chatted with strangers who became friends. People who taught me that kindness exists and that the majority of humans don’t want to harm you. I stepped out of my fear based reality and into a world of love.
Eventually the storm did pass. I woke up one morning and realized I hadn’t had nightmares for a long time. I don't know when it happened, but it did. Before that there were days it felt like it would never end and someday’s I felt like I had taken a million steps back in my progress. On those days I remember a slingshot must be pulled back before it can spring forward. So I kept going.
Now here I am on my second trip around the world, studying full time, teaching full time, and living life by my own expectations, my own merits. You have one life (that you know of), but if you do it right-one life is enough.