It Took Me 8 Years to Want to Heal & Healing Didn't Increase My Value

What I wish someone told me when I was liberated from my childhood rapist

If I’m being honest with you, I didn’t even know I was being raped until a case worker assigned this title to the abuse I was experiencing. Because my abuse began at five years old, that thirteen-year-old girl in her office had no experience with a life without rape.

For who I was then, rape was normal. Uncomfortable but normal.

As I sat in her office and was crowned the gut-wrenching title of "Rape Victim," police were removing my rapist from my home. My life completely changed that day. While my sexual abuse was something my parents weren't completely ignorant of, it was really a "don't ask, don't tell," type of situation. All of the sudden, something everyone knew about but never talked about had dozens of eyes on it. Police, detectives, district attorneys, therapists, psychiatrists, social workers, child protective services, and even my principal knew the details of something I was not allowed to even talk about a week prior.

As soon as I was no longer being raped, I began to feel pressured into healing from a lifetime of rape as quickly as possible. The various therapists and psychiatrists that treated me urged me to adopt the term “survivor,” instead of “victim.” I can understand why this small change can lead to empowerment, as “I am a survivor,” is much more powerful than, “I am a victim.” But personally, I never liked the word “survivor," and "victim" was never a label I attached to myself. For me it felt like I was publically branded "Rape Victim," then the same people who gave me this label immediately began telling me I needed to transform a label I never asked for into something that empowered me.

I didn’t feel like a victim. I didn't feel like a survivor. I felt confused.

This pressure to get better became omnipresent in my life for years. I struggled a lot in this period of my life. Healing seemed like an impossible pipe dream. While people were sympathetic to my circumstances, everyone around me wanted me to overcome a lifetime of being raped as quickly as possible. They were patient for the first year or so, but then my persistent pain became almost irritating to them. Not only was I expected to keep up with the expectations of a normal teenager, I was expected to accomplish a task many adults struggle with — facing my pain and transforming it into joy. I crumbled under the weight of this. While my friends were having their first boyfriends and attending football games, I was in and out of emergency mental health facilities.

On top of being traumatized, I felt like a failure. It didn’t matter how many different ways my care team tried to provoke me into caring about my life. It never worked. I spent years in this phase of extreme apathy and dejection. I didn't care about anything. I didn't care if I got better because I didn’t care if I lived or died.

In a perfect world, my response to being liberated from my rapist would have been an immense and moving emotional story about my immense strength and dedication to overcoming all that had been done to me. But it wasn’t. My reaction was very abnormal. I spent eight very long years trying to process the very idea that what happened to me wasn’t normal. How could it not have been normal? It was all I knew. In a way, I continued to exacerbate my traumas by seeking out abusive friendships and relationships. I wasn’t ready to stop being abused. I didn't know how to function unless I was being abused. For years, I switched from one abuser to another over and over again. This is something I still struggle to fully understand in myself.

I didn’t get better until I chose to get better. I didn't want to get better for any reason other than this: I realized my responsibility to myself was creating a life I wanted to live.

I can’t say exactly where this inspiration came from. It was almost night and day. One day, I didn’t care at all about my life. The next, I couldn’t unsee all that I was doing to make my life a continuous hell. It was almost as if I experienced a mini-spiritual awakening a year before my actual spiritual awakening. After I made the choice to heal, my dedication to healing was almost as if I had been possessed by an entirely new person.

I didn’t care what I had to leave behind. Anything that contributed to my pain had to go.

Within one year, I completely changed my physical life. In the next year, I found spirituality and through a very long and painful ego-death, I healed most of my internal life. Healing is possible. It is not easy, and it is not fast, but please trust me when I tell you it is worth it. You've probably heard this before a million times, and there is a very drastic difference between knowing something to be logically true and emotionally feeling something to be true. I can't convince you to emotionally understand this truth. I can't preach to you all the benefits of a healed lifestyle and expect that to be enough to convince you to take accountability for your pain. If you are hurting, there is almost nothing I can do for you. I know this to be true because I have felt this to be true.

But here is what I wish I knew ten years ago, back when I was freshly liberated from my rapist: You deserve to feel like you belong on this Earth. You deserve to feel like you understand why you’re here and what you’re supposed to do. You deserve to feel like there is something larger than life looking over, protecting, and guiding you. You deserve to feel loved on a social, internal, and cosmic level. You are entitled to feel your pain, but you are not obligated to be in pain. You are allowed to create a life that excites you. But there is this one little catch here.

You will never get better until you decide to get better.

This is the most biting truth of being in pain, or having gone through any trauma. There is nothing that can save you from your pain but you. There is nothing anyone can do for you unless you decide you're ready to stop hurting. If you are not yet done living your pain, if you are not yet absolutely sick with the pain you unconsciously put yourself through, no amount of attentive care or external shame will light that fire under your ass. There is no knight in shining armor coming for you and there definitely isn't an easy way out of pain. If you want to lead a better life, you can. If you do not want to let go of the pain that paradoxically makes you feel safest, you are completely within your right to do so.

If you do not want to get better, that is valid. You are living through your own process. I spent eight years in this state of apathy. I needed to. I had to spend eight years making my already shitty life even worse before I realized what I was doing. How could I have argued with eight years of evidence? I couldn't. Eight years of not wanting to get better was what I needed to finally want to get better.

If you don’t want to get better, that is perfectly fine. If you don’t yet understand the responsibility you have to yourself, you can continue on as you are until you do. You’re allowed to keep hurting. You are entitled to your own pain. In fact, I encourage it. Feel your pain until there's no more pain to feel. Let it consume you until you get absolutely sick of it.

You do not owe your healing to anyone but yourself.

You are not doing anything wrong by hurting. The only life you’re harming is your own. You’re allowed to do anything you wish with your own life. If you do not want to get better, that is a perfectly understandable choice. You still deserve love. You still deserve compassion. You still deserve help and care. When you finally decide you’re ready to begin that journey, you will not be worth any more than you are right now. Healing does not increase your value.

If you are hurting, and you are not ready to heal, I empathize with and respect your current position. We all make progress at our own pace and in our own timing. There is nothing wrong with needing, or even wanting, to continue to exist as you already are. Even if that existence is riddled and infected with pain.

Your responsibility to heal is only to yourself.