Trigger Warning
Welcome to our column written by Managing Editor Caitlyn Mae Araña, called Catching Up With Caitlyn. Through letters, she addresses the trials and tribulations that come with learning and growing as a 20-something. Tune in for your weekly dose of drama. Love, work, relationships, health… Nothing is off limits here.
Trigger Warning: This article includes difficult topics such as sexual assault/sexual harrassment.
Dear Asher*,
I write letters in which I document my experiences, and this is the one that I’ve been debating in my head since I started. Would I write one to you? Would I give you the satisfaction of having your own letter? So, I thought to myself: I could write this letter to you and then draw attention to it, which I don’t want to do, or I could let go of what happened. But unfortunately, I can’t see myself letting it go anytime soon no matter how much I want to. So that leaves me with one choice: write the letter.
Before I start, I need to explain a few things, or well, definitions.
Sexual Harassment is defined as “behavior characterized by the making of unwelcome and inappropriate sexual remarks or physical advances in a workplace or other professional or social situation.”
Sexual Assault is defined as “any type of sexual contact or behavior that occurs without the explicit consent of the recipient” by the Department of Justice. Examples of this, according to The Washington Post, “include forced sexual intercourse, attempted rape, child molestation, incest, fondling and forcible sodomy.”
To understand the extent to which this event has impacted me, one must first know the difference between the two because I didn’t. To understand the way that you have damaged me, you must understand the difference between the two and that neither of them are right.
There are things that have stuck with me since that day that I still have flashes of — that I can still feel. I can feel the uncomfortability just sitting next to you in your car. I can feel the uneasiness I felt when you asked me to sit on your bed. I can feel the lightheadedness that came with every inch that you moved closer to me. You bombarded me with sexual questions and advances that made me feel unwillingly trapped in my own body, I was visibly and verbally uncomfortable. That was where you crossed the first line.
You tried to kiss me, and I moved away. I still remember the feeling of your fingers, rough, on my skin. You touched me in ways that I would never have wished anyone else to be touched. And that’s where you crossed the second line. I feel sick to my stomach writing this to you now, but I’m still writing it because it’s important. I remember asking for help through my phone without saying the words I don’t want to do this and I don’t want to be here because I feared that I would disappoint you. I didn’t want to disappoint you, and that is on me. I didn’t want to anger you.
I think about it now and how naive I was. I was in a vulnerable place in my life, which you knew. And so when you made more advances that induced a headache and adrenaline, and I said no, you thought I was joking. My tone became more serious with added discomfort as your grip roamed, and still, you thought I had to be joking. I wasn’t.
You know what the craziest part is? When you realized I wasn’t joking, and that I wasn’t going to give in to whatever sick fantasy you envisioned, your demeanor didn’t change. You told me to get up and that we were leaving. You brought me to an unfamiliar place in what seemed like a high-risk area. And for the next few minutes, I felt safer in this unknown place than I did with you that entire day.
I am lucky. I’m lucky that I had people to fall back on that were able to pick me up and stay with me, no questions asked. For that, I’m lucky. But not everyone else who goes through a similar or worse situation is.
I remember having a conversation about the incident, and I remember being told that what happened was sexual assault. I shook my head in denial and thought that there was no way. It couldn’t have been. It wasn’t serious enough to have been sexual assault. I thought you had to have injured me in some way for it to be sexual assault, but that was not the case. It was sexual assault, and it was serious.
After that day, I didn’t think about it much. It lingered over me the way that cliché rain clouds follow a person in antidepressant commercials. But I still didn’t really think about it much. I occasionally felt disgust and betrayal and how not in control of my body I was. But I really didn’t think that the event affected me that much.
I didn’t realize that I couldn’t say your name or even see it typed out without my mind racing at a mile per minute with images flashing back in my mind. I also didn’t realize that I would never be able to look at you. It’s not that I wouldn’t be able to look at you the same way. It’s that I wouldn’t be able to look at you ever.
We have mutual friends, and I remember looking at a Snapchat story one day. You were in it for 0.5 seconds. It was just a video, and they showed you in it. At that moment, I remember feeling my stomach turn and drop and my mouth begin to over-salivate as if I were going to throw up. I didn’t throw up, but that’s not the point. The point is that I saw you and my body felt the need to puke.
So, maybe, yes. I would say that you’ve scarred me. But not in any way where you have control over my body or my thoughts or anything like that. Let me be clear. Because of you, I have felt disgusted with myself. But because I have people that I was able to rely on and because I am not someone who is easily broken, I have been able to become the person I am today. You are not to thank for the strong, independent person I am today. My support system is to thank. I am to thank. You were merely an inconvenience along the way.
Caitlyn Mae
**Hotline: 800-656-HOPE or 800-656-4673
*Names have been changed to maintain privacy