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Second Acts: Confessions of a Former Victim and Current Survivor

“MAKE IT STOP”

I’m continually surprised at the way ordinary events trigger revelations about abuse and survivorship. This morning, my daughter awoke to the sounds of jack hammers thanks to a construction project on the street below her bedroom window. She wandered from her bedroom bleary-eyed and bed-headed, her palms pressed against her ears. “Make it stop. That’s all I want right now: Just make it stop.”

Make it stop. It’s a perfectly rational reaction, isn’t it? To want to put an end to whatever unpleasant stimuli one is experiencing? To crave the exact opposite?

Ear-shattering noise? Give me total silence instead. Blisteringly hot food? Hand me cold water. Blinding light? I shut my eyes to enjoy the darkness.

Rape? Make it stop.

But what does it mean to crave the opposite of rape? No sex? No physical contact? No men?

But rape, we must always remind ourselves, isn’t about sex. It’s about power. Our abusers want to exercise dominion over us. They want to steal our agency.

And so what do we do? We take our agency back, however we can.

I couldn’t force that man out of my house, but I could choose not to go to school. I couldn’t bar him from my bedroom at night, but I could get a fake ID and a six-pack at three in the afternoon. I couldn’t stop him from eyeing me every time my mother averted her gaze, but I could start hanging around the people my mother had always called “bad influences.” I needed to know I could make choices that belonged to me.

We have all read about some rape case that goes uncharged or unpunished because of evidence that the victim engaged in consensual sexual activity with another man (or men) immediately after the rape. Why in the world, prosecutors and jurors ask, would a woman who had just been raped go out and have sex with someone else? They assume that a desire to “make it stop” necessarily translates into a lack of interest in sex.

But, once again, I thought we all knew by now that rape is not about sex. If “make it stop” means a craving for the opposite, then isn’t it perfectly predictable that some of us respond to rape by exercising agency over our own sexual intimacy?

In my case, I couldn’t protect my body from him, but I could choose to start sharing it with someone else. And of course I chose an unacceptable “someone else”—at once too old and too immature. That decision in turn led to its own forms of damage, self-inflicted in some sense and yet, it seems to me, still wholly attributable to my abuser.

Part of survival is getting to a place where we are able to exercise true free will, not just a reaction or rebellion against the abuse. Yesterday I wrote about forgiveness, not of our abusers, but of the people who enabled them. We must also forgive ourselves for reacting to the abuse in destructive ways, harming ourselves and others in response to our loss of power. We have to learn how to accept our pasts and determine our own futures. It’s the only way to really “make it stop.”

This evening the blog was being read on a display laptop at the Apple Store in the Meatpacking District. The reader made a point to stand close to the computer, blocking the screen from view of the crowds of shoppers who provided further anonymity.

It did not take long to type a reply to the post:

“I will show you damage. I will show you loss of free will. I will show you harm. And you will never make it stop.”

The typist did not know that on a different computer, at a public library in the suburbs of Buffalo, an ex-convict named Jimmy Grisco was doing some online reading of his own.