Alright, alright. It’s been awhile since I last posted, and I guess I owe you an update. As of this moment, I have four places that I am seriously considering for me and AAS when he gets here. I am going to check one of them out on Sunday hopefully. I think that that will be the right place for us, if they like us well enough. I think I landed myself the retail job, but I have an interview at a bank on Tuesday. The manager who interviewed me asked me to sell her the pen she was using, and I was like, hmm, it’s a clickie pen… Then I turned to her and said “Manager, this is a great pen, because you can use it with one hand. You seem like a busy woman, so when you come into the office, and you have coffee in your hand and need to sign something immediately, it’s one click with the hand you’re holding the pen with, and you’re in business. Besides, look at the lovely color of the ink!” She said to me, “If you can sell me a pen, successfully, in 30 seconds, you can sell anything with training.” She also told me that she’s “still interested if [I’m] still interested,” which I am, because I need something that pays the bills, and I need it in a hurry.
Yesterday was my first day at the DA’s office (for my internship), and I am proud to say that not only did I take my first call (SCARY, at first) but I was assigned my first case, and successfully completed the first steps that I needed to take for that. I also got the fancy little key-card thingie that magically unlocks doors when I wave it like a wand in front of the little black doo-hickies next to them. I also set up my phone line, and felt like an idiot when I had to ask a secretary how to turn off my computer because it kept automatically restarting when I shut it down. It was ghost computer.
Speaking of ghosts, the WDC concert is this weekend, so I’ve been teching it up x.hardcore.x all week this week. Last night was Opening Night, and I feel proud to say that I designed a damn good light show with what I had available. The stage manager of SA helped me A LOT, and taught me how to do stuff that AHarv never taught me to do while I was working in the light shop. I knew how to focus lights before I started working in SA, but I didn’t have any experience with bounce focusing, which I did successfully the first time on the second light that I tried. I also got experience in setting up microphones, and such like that. Seriously. Great experience. He watched the show last night (the SM of SA) and gave me kudos for successfully pulling off so many light cues for one show. The only problems that I’ve been having with this are these three damn lights. They’re in the very back, and they come on at random, and go off at random. We in the business call this “ghosting”. Hence the “speaking of ghosts” earlier. We managed to get to the last song (out of 12 dances) before the ghosting lights came on. I think that that is pretty damn good.
Finally, this week was sexual assault awareness week. I went to “Take Back the Night” in Campus Chapel after rehearsal, and no one was there anymore. I still went in, with the intention of praying and processing. What ended up happening was another person who was at my rehearsal came in late, and I ended up telling him my story, and crying about it for the first time. Like I told him, I have difficulty with it, and complicated feelings about it:
It wasn’t night. It was day. He had just asked me to be his girlfriend, and I liked him well enough, so I said yes. I told him before anything happened that I didn’t want to have sex, so he did everything but. Many things I was uncomfortable with. After my sexual assault training with the DA’s office, I realized that even the steps before the actual thing occurred were considered sexual assault, because I felt violated. It’s why I never liked receiving head. I never said yes. Then he started pressuring me. Pressing up against me. To the point where I knew he was going to rape me. He didn’t have protection, because we weren’t having sex. This is where it gets confusing. I got up. I dug in my drawer for a condom. I handed it to him. This was to protect myself. Now, I ask myself why I didn’t just leave. I was up. I could have/should have just put my clothes back on and left. The DA training says when women ask questions like that “You did what you had to do to survive.” I didn’t say yes to him. But I didn’t say no either.
When my mom returned home that night, I told her what had happened in my bedroom earlier. I guess take back the night wasn’t the first time I cried, because I cried when I told her. Do you know what she said to me? She reminded me of how many men I had slept with in the past year. She told me I was being promiscuous. She called me a whore.
Now, my mom and I were close. Still are. So you can see why I started to believe her. Why, for almost two years, I believed that it wasn’t really rape, that it was just a bad sexual experience. Then I took the DA training. I realized that my feelings of being violated were valid. Friends and relatives often blame the victim to distance themselves from it. This is what my mother was doing by calling me a whore, by telling me I was just being promiscuous. I realized that that boy had touched me in the confusing way, not the good touch or the bad touch. The confusing touch. And my responses to said touch were just as confusing.
He left hickies on my neck. I had to wear those for at least a week. And every time I looked in the mirror, I was reminded of what happened. I was reminded that I had been a part of this, that I didn’t know what that part was. But I did know that I didn’t want it, and I did know that I felt like crap because of it.
And just now, because of what she said to me, just now, I am able to process what actually happened to me.