I am not a survivor…

CW/TW: rape, sexual assault, attempted murder

I am not a survivor. Yes, I have been raped — more than once…

But I am not a survivor. For one thing, the person I was before I was held hostage and violated more times than I can count is gone. That person died and is never coming back. The person I am now was born of those events, she is not the same person who existed before them…

And survivor has always felt…passive. It makes rape out to be something that happens — like a natural disaster or illness. To me, it doesn’t put enough focus on the fact that this didn’t simply happen, someone did this to me. It wasn’t an act of the gods, it wasn’t fate. It was the act of a cruel and malicious person who wanted to break me , who wanted me to be 'his’, to ruin me for any other man. I was victimized and victim comes closer to what I feel.

These days, victim seems to have become a dirty word. “Victim mentality” and “stop playing the victim” is used against rape survivors/victims almost constantly — as if we shouldn’t feel victimized by what is a horrific violation of our autonomy and our bodies.

This is another reason I don’t like the word survivor: it puts a pressure on us to “survive”, to “rise above” what has happened to us — to no longer be affected by it. To no longer be a victim.

But I will never be unaffected by what happened to me. I’m not even sure if I will ever heal — not in the society we have now, certainly. We cannot avoid reminders, we cannot avoid messages of “it’s your own fault” and “why didn’t you fight?”. We are constantly blamed for our own victimization.

I did, for the record, try to fight. I was on painkillers at the time for kidney stones and I was five months pregnant. I couldn’t take it happening again, it felt like it was too much and I fought back. For a brief moment, I overpowered him, i fought him off… and then I was slammed down onto the bed by my throat and held down until I blacked out — along with the vow to kill me for being “such a bitch”.

I bring that up every time someone says “if you didn’t fight, it was your own fault.” Because that admonition is going to kill people. There is no “right" response to rape. The only “right” response is to do what you think will get you through it with the least amount of damage.

But increasingly, the more I hear, the more I see… the less I feel like a victim. The rage, the anger that’s building inside of me? The urge to save and protect the people I know who have been through this as well, the longing to fight is slowly erasing that feeling of being a victim.

I have never identified with being a survivor and I can’t consider myself a victim anymore — I have gone beyond that at this point.

I have fought tooth and nail to build the person I am now. I fought so, so hard to become someone who can keep going — even though I don’t want to all the time. I fought. I am still fighting, i will never stop fighting.

I’m not a survivor, I’m not a victim: I am a fucking warrior.