By Johanna
A friend gave me a metaphor recently. She said: “You’ve planted a seed and you’re standing over it, yelling at it ‘Grow! Grow!’…You are going to exhaust yourself. Just wait. It will happen.”
And when I look back on the last ten years since I was assaulted, I can see that I’ve spent a good deal of that time yelling at myself “Heal! Grow!” while I overwatered, composted, brought in sun lamps, repotted, etc—when I needed to wait.
I like this metaphor better than others. Sometimes I think of my struggle to recover as endlessly picking a scab, hoping it will scar over. I tried getting justice, but giving the police statement only made the wound fresh again. I tried writing and talking about it in therapy. I tried convincing myself that what happened to me was part of a larger problem with the sex-gender system, putting stacks of books and articles between myself and the person this had happened to.
I tried a wildly passionate affair with a much older married man (whom my friends called “the Dark Lord”), the kind of person who couldn’t hurt me because I always knew he would. Not being used without my permission, having control, was vitally important to me. And frankly, I was repulsed by men my age, by any man who reminded me of…
But that relationship, predictably, exploded, and in the ashes I decided I should try to get over my fear of physical and emotional intimacy with appropriately aged men. I attempted online dating, but the pool is shallow in New Hampshire. Eventually, a friend set me up with a guy she described only as “tall, Greek and handsome.”
He was all of those things. A three hour dinner-date eventually culminated in a bedroom tumble, which was not as terrifying in the moment as I expected (actually, it was boring—especially compared to the fierce, forbidden passion I’d had with the Dark Lord).
But the next day I couldn’t shake the disgust, the revolting flashbacks. I wanted to peel my own skin off.
I dreaded our next date, but determined to fight through and overcome my fear and revulsion at the idea of sex, I allowed a second date to be arranged.
We were meeting for drinks before a show. I came prepared with an excuse to go straight home after—I didn’t want to give up on dating, but I knew I wasn’t ready for another intimate encounter. The first time I had allowed myself to get carried away with the hope that I would conquer my aversion to men, that I would relearn desire. That miracle having failed to occur after the first entanglement, I was left with the simple question: did I want to have sex with this man that night? No, I did not. And I told myself this was okay. I had a right to not be in the mood.
But figuring out how to communicate this proved challenging. I was afraid that if I didn’t preemptively establish that sex was not going to happen, then in the moment I might pretend to myself that I still had agency and say “yes” just to avoid the potentially traumatic experience of saying “no” and being ignored again, which was too terrifying to contemplate.
So, after we ordered our drinks, I said to TallGreekandHandsome, “I’m glad we’re seeing this show tonight, but to be honest I’m feeling pretty exhausted, so I think I’m going to head home after.”
“Well,” he said, “If you’re tired, you can spend the night at my place.”
“Thanks for the offer,” I said, a bit shaken, “But I don’t think I’m ready for that.”
“I don’t understand.”
I took a gulp of cocktail. “It’s just that it’s only our second date. It seems a bit too fast to me.”
“I don’t understand,” he repeated.
Maybe it was all of my namby-pamby qualifying. Maybe it was that I had put on such a good act of fun and interest on the first date. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t getting through. I could feel myself getting flustered, like I was playing Woody Allen playing me, and I wrung my hands comically and stuttered through my next attempt: metaphor.
“You know, a lot of people think of dating as a linear equation, where things get more and more intimate as things go on.” I traced an upward sloping line. “But for me it’s more like a quadratic equation.” I traced parabolic curves. “Where sometimes it’s going up and sometimes it’s going down. And right now it’s going down.”
And he said, “I don’t understand.”
“No, I guess not.”
“Can we talk about it later tonight?”
“No. You know what,” I said. “I think I’m going to just go.”
“All right. Calm me when you’ve calmed down.”
If I weren’t so relieved to be free of his presence, I would have really let him have it. To take a page from Rebecca Solnit’s book, it felt like he was treating me as an unreliable witness to my own life. I was totally within my right to be frustrated (and not a little creeped out) by his incomprehension when I expressed my will. I did not need to “calm down.”
When I look back on this scene, it is mostly with amusement at his inability to accept that I had my own will and desires, and at my failure to assert them clearly. Since then, I’ve attempted dating about half a dozen other men, but always with the same result. I freak just before or after the physical side accelerates to sex, and often end things over text message by telling the guy I’m an assault victim and that “I keep thinking I’m ready, but I’m not.”
I have finally accepted that I can’t expect to conquer my fear of men and the skin-crawling nausea I feel at the thought of sex by forcing myself to try again and again. There is part of me that worries I will never relearn to love sex if I don’t keep trying. They say sex is like riding a bike—you never forget how it works. But I’ve been in a bike accident, so I’m riding unsteady and it’s not that much fun.
“Grow! Heal, dammit!” I’ve been screaming at myself, but the greatest progress I’ve made in recovering came from waiting.
That is not what anyone wants to hear, but one thing I’ve learned from this long recovery (a lesson reinforced by the trial by fire that is becoming a mom) is that I don’t know myself as well as I think I do. I do not have absolute knowledge of myself--none of us does--and I should trust my instincts without jumping to conclusions. I feel pain and immediately want to identify its source, take a dozen ibuprofen and walk it off. But sometimes you just have to feel your pain, rest and recover.
One of the deepest pains I carried was the sense that I was a different person than I thought I was. Pre-rape Johanna was a courageous no-fucks-given feminist who spoke her mind, looked people in the eye and had desires. Post-rape Johanna was a coward who bowed her head when she passed strangers on the street, was afraid of saying no and recoiled at intimacy.
But one day I found the courage to tell a friend that this was how I felt about myself. I showed her the pain I had been trying to hide, even from myself. “I am so filled with fear. I used to think I was strong, but the one time I had where I needed to prove I had courage, I failed. I froze. I’m not as brave as I thought I was.”
She said, “Johanna, you are the bravest person I know. You survived. You had a baby when you were twenty. You finished college, went to grad school, and you’re writing and talking about this and doing something. You are brave.”
And because I had left this little sprout inside me alone, it was ready for my friend’s loving rays of sunshine. While I’m still not particularly patient when it comes to dating, other parts of me are beginning to grow, to heal. It is Spring, and I feel myself coming into full bloom for the first time in ten years.
It was worth the wait.