Tag Archives: rape

AFRAID OF THE DARK

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I awoke this morning around 4:30a.  Yes, it is still dark, at least in Southern California.  In my ‘old’ life, BTA (before the attack), I would have gotten up, put on my workout clothes, left my house by 4:50 or so  and gone out to do my daily walk.  I would have done between 6 and 8 miles and would have been home, at the latest, by 6:30 or 6:45, if I had chosen to walk 8 miles.  These days I am unable to do that.  I have had to relearn how to operate in the morning.  I am a natural early bird and I have had some difficulty adjusting to not being able to go out in the dark.  Realistically, I know it’s not the dark that attacked me; I know that the odds of another attack are ridiculously low; I think I would probably be perfectly safe; BUT I cannot do it.  Unless I am with someone else.  I do have one friend that gets up as early as I do and we try to walk once a week at 4:30.  The difference now is he has to come to my front door because I can’t walk the 4 blocks alone in the dark to meet at the corner we used to meet on.

BTA, I walked between 60 and 90 miles a week.  I live on a small island and I walk or ride my bike  everywhere.  I rarely drive my car unless I am leaving the island.   Not only did I do a fitness-type walk early each morning, I also walked all my errands.  It adds up.  (You should put a pedometer on and see just how many miles you walk in a day.  You might surprise yourself.)  So, I went from 60-90 miles a week to ZERO.  As you might imagine it was a huge loss for me.  Luckily, I had just started to do yoga, had been to one or two classes before the attack.  I continued to go to yoga each week.  I was able to walk there because the class I attended didn’t start until 7a.  Even in the winter, it was light by the time I needed to leave my house to get there.  (I know I could drive, but, to me, it seems silly to get in the car and drive to workout, especially when I can walk there.)  Over the course of this last year, I have continued to do yoga and now do it 2 or 3 times a week.  I feel like it was very important in the entire process of my healing.  For one thing, it was exercise and since I basically was not walking, it was my only outlet.  For another, in spite of the men in my class, I felt safe in the yoga studio.

 I definitely mourn my walks in the dark.  The truth is I loved walking alone in the dark.  That was my meditating, praying time.   I could talk (quietly, of course) out loud and no one could see my lips moving.  I would listen to inspiring books.  I saw the sunrise every single day.  Not anymore.  I think I have only seen it once since then and that’s only because I was taking a friend to the airport just as the sun was coming up.  I understand that in the scheme of things this is relatively minor, but it was something I loved to do, something I looked forward to each day.  It would be one thing if I had decided to stop getting up early, but I didn’t.  The option of beginning my day with a walk alone in the dark is gone.  Chances are I will never do it again and that makes me sad.

These days I wait until it is light to walk.  And if I go to the 6a yoga class, I do drive.  This morning, for instance, I will go to the 10:15a class, so I still got up early, but I will do work until it is time to leave to walk to the class.

A Life Changing Event

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I chose this image (and I apologize to the person who designed it and posted it on Pinterest.  I would give you credit if I knew your name) because I am so NOT ready to begin this adventure.  I’ve been thinking about it since January, when the idea came to me, but was not allowed to speak publicly about my ordeal because anything I said could have been used against me in a court of law.  Nice.  Well, after the sentencing hearing, I no longer had to worry about that.  And still, I hesitated.  I kept pushing the date back until launching on the one year anniversary seemed the ideal time to take the plunge.

So I need to ask your indulgence as I muddle through.  I am new to WordPress and am definitely still learning how to use it.  I expect I’ll continue to tweak it and will eventually get it to the point that I am happy with the way it looks.  More importantly, though, is the content and the visual will, hopefully, not take away from that.  And if anyone has any tips to pass along, I am open to all suggestions.  So onto the important stuff:

We all have things happen, large and small, good and not-so-good, that impact our lives.  Sometimes the seemingly worst event can change us the most.  For months, maybe even years, I had been asking God for something else, something different to do.  I felt like I wasn’t quite doing what I was meant to be doing anymore.  For the previous 20 or so years, I have had my own business.  I am able to use my creativity and help bring beauty into the lives and homes of my clients.  It wasn’t exactly that I didn’t want to do that anymore, but more a sense that I wanted to make more of an impact in people’s lives.  I had trouble verbalizing what it was I wanted and thought that was probably contributing to not much changing.  For a long time, too, I have had the feeling that I was meant to help women in some way.  For a time, I thought it might be by teaching and I did a little of that, but teaching did not seem to be the direction I truly wanted to go.  My photography was another possibility and still may be something I pursue at some point.  Honestly, though,  nothing was ‘grabbing’ me as my new calling.  That is, until MY life changing event and rather suddenly, though not at the moment it actually occurred, I knew what I was meant to be doing and the completely new direction my life was going to take.  You always hear, ‘be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.’  Well, I got the change I had been praying for and it came in a way that I could never have imagined.

On 24 September 2011, I was the victim of an attempted rape.  The attack itself was extremely violent and though he was unable to follow through with his intention, the last year has been the most challenging of my entire life.  My purpose for starting At Long Last Heard is to give women who have been sexually assaulted or raped a place to tell their stories and to help them heal from the experience.  It doesn’t matter if the attack was yesterday or 50 years ago.  My experience has been that so many are reluctant to talk about it.  I can’t shut up about it, and my new mission in life is to tell my story in the hopes that I will encourage others to do the same.  And, in the process, if we can change the attitudes people seem to have in this country about sexual assault, then that’ll be an added bonus.

After my attack, I thought I’d write about it and when the time came, I’d have a complete record of it.  Oh, I had the best of intentions, but the reality was I simply couldn’t write.  It was partly that I didn’t want to think about it, although, of course, it’s all I thought about.  And I now know that I physically couldn’t do it.  I know this sounds a little strange.  What do I mean by not ‘physically being able to do it.’  Well, it was my brain.  I could not concentrate for any length of time, so trying to write was impossible.  And at the beginning I didn’t write a single thing about it.  I made no mention at all in my journal until 1 October and all I wrote that day was a quote by Maya Andelou.

“I can be changed by what happens to me.  I refuse to be reduced by it.”

And then on 5 October I wrote:  My life will never be the same and that’s not a bad or negative thing.  It won’t be the same; it will definitely, is already, different.  It’s up to me to make it better.