Hi.  I'm Kat. I am a rape victim. I have no other way to say this than to say it is all I've ever known. It's all I have been since I was a child was a sexual assault victim. Now, I am determined to be a survivor and get through all of this and have a better life. 

Am I sane? Oh hell no, I am most certainly not sane. I'm not a delusional lunatic, but my trauma has made a trauma response my baseline. Fight or flight, as they say. I choose to fight at the wrong times and I choose to flight at the wrong times. My trauma has created my identity. 

I'm not a great person. I'm overall a good person but I have had my moments of just being mean. I am a wonderful, sweet, caring, heroic, evil genius. I'm good, but when I'm bad, I am truly the biggest bitch you have ever met. It's who I am. I can control it but I don't ever want to change that fight about me. I'm a fighter, it's the one thing I will say I am really proud of about myself. 

it started when I was young. I've been conditioned to accept sexual trauma and perceive it as normal or make excuses for it if it goes above and beyond what can be perceived as normal by my brain. 

That night, when the video happened, I didn't realize what happened. I just didn't see it. I made excuses for how I felt about it but it never seemed normal to me. I went so far as to romanticize it into this beautiful weird wackly love story about a man and a woman who had known each other for half a decade and feel in love under the most improbable of circumstances. 

That is going above and beyond fucked up. I am in intensive therapy now. He is an alcoholic. He was very drunk but, that is no excuse. 

I was in a room with three people I knew for a long time.  They were safe people to me. You expect the people you have known for years are the ones who would never hurt you. These weren't strangers and while the other two did not engage as horrifically, they were my friends and they should have protected me.

 

I am, if nothing else weird. I have an off sense of humor, I am self deprecating, I try (and often fail) to make everything funny. This isn't funny  but I am trying.