
thorn
CN: sexual assault, aftermath, alcohol/drug use, psychiatry, bureaucracy
there is a thorn in my side and usually i am pretty good at just not paying it much heed, and it feels like i’ve done and earnestly achieved everything i could hope to in service of removing it but heck. i have always been an anxious person and prone to carefully freaking out inside when shit gets bad. a while ago when i was very stressed i’d get racing thoughts and some light auditory hallucinations but nothing too bad.
threeish years ago my company hosted an industry event in the city and i tagged along in a semi-official capacity. free drinks were great, a friend and a casual datefriend also in the industry happened to turn up, we all had a really good time. went out together with some other coworkers for icecream afterward, super good vibes. i might’ve had like eight drinks in the span of 4 or 5 hours. at the end of the night datefriend asked if i wanted to crash at their place instead and it sounded good. got to their place, smoked some weed, very comfortably crossfaded, and then in some haze during sleep-wake they raped me. it’s still fucked up that i still feel shame that i froze up in fear and panic instead of saying “no” or pushing them away when they did something i had never and would never have consented to, given the opportunity. it was really weird because i had to go through all the motions of what someone does when that happens to them; break it off with them, get sti screened a few times – kind of attain some awareness when the nurse asked “.. do you need someone to call the police?” – and enter a small self-destructive spiral, but still not quite connect the dots. it took much longer than i expected it would to understand what had happened and to put words to it (like i’m able to now).
for a while i was hearing voices again, thoughts slippery, broke off my relationships, leaned heavily on drugs. at some point i realised i was really not managing with life and made an appointment to see my psychiatrist. we tried an antipsychotic first – i’d had a really bad experience with one in the past so we tried a different/new one. it kinda “worked” but made me narcoleptic and i had to stop it. by this stage it was maybe a month after it happened. so we tried a mood stabiliser. i had to titrate up on it really slowly over two months, and by the time i hit the target dose i was pretty much feeling okay. i’d corrected my course a lot, and i don’t really know if it was the drugs or just time, distance, psychic space, reconnecting with friends/partners, what.
years later i was at a queer rave and i saw them from across the room, and they saw me and they were like a deer caught in headlights, eyes wide open, stunned. i tried to avoid them and i could tell they were avoiding me, but a few months later i saw them there again, and then again. we hadn’t spoken at all since it happened, and i thought maybe enough time had passed that it might be good for both of us. i didn’t hate them or anything, just what they did. so the next time i found myself in the same room as them, i approached them and asked if they wanted to talk. and they did (if i wanted to). and it was clear a lot had changed. they were kind of a huge mess when i knew them before, but it seemed that moment was kind of a rock bottom for them too. they apologised, really earnestly, and at the end we hugged (my suggestion) and it felt good, and it wasn’t awkward to be in the same room as them any more or near each other on the dance floor. we both still keep some distance and that seems right.
but i still take this fucking mood stabiliser every day and i don’t know if it’s doing anything good or necessary or what, but i’m too much of an anxious mess to really try coming down off it. it’s like this thing that keeps reminding me of how bad things got, every single day continuously for the last three years. lately i’ve been having racing thoughts again, i think just pandemic anxiety increasing baseline ick-feelings, and it’s pulling me back to that time in my life when it happens and i hate it.
worse, when i was seeing my psychiatrist to try to get help, i told him everything that happened at the time and what i was doing to try to manage it on my own, which he would later write as “confirming his diagnosis” of me as having bpd. it turned out he secretly (!) semi-diagnosed me with it when he saw me for gender evaluation stuff back in 2013 (because i had ‘mild identity disturbance’, no fucking surprise, everyone around me was telling me to repress my gender feels, some with threats of extreme violence, and i was trying to keep the peace), never mentioned it to me, and now took what happened in the aftermath of my being raped (drug abuse, dropping close relationships, etc.) as ‘confirmation’ of it. he again didn’t say it directly or in as many words – instead it came up when i (an anxious hypochondriac) applied for life insurance through my super the following year, because i stupidly disclosed that i thought i had a mental health disorder, thinking at worst i’d just get insurance with some exclusions for mental health-related stuff. that led to a 2+ year fight with my superannuation company’s life insurance underwriter with/through the financial ombudsman, which took so so so much out of me, wherein i eventually got copies of my psych’s notes on me, including the “semi-diagnosis” and “confirmation” after i was assaulted, and after the ombudsman and life insurance company had meetings “at a very senior level”, after writing so many submissions (with so much help) with so many references, after getting new reports from my therapist and GP, after two fucking years of just trying not to have it rejected outright (because i’d have to then disclose in any future applications), finally, less than 3 months ago, i got the final, binding resolution, which was that i failed, and the decision to reject all parts of my application was upheld.
idk why this morning it’s all feeling so particularly raw. i’ve done so many things to try to move past this, from so many angles, but it keeps beating down on me in different ways and i’m just a bit tired.