This piece discusses the impact of sexual violence. Please read with caution and put your needs first. If you need assistance, call RAINN’s national sexual assault hotline at 800-656-4673 or chat online at this link (Spanish online chat can be found here).
I barely recall stepping out of the sexual assault response center.
I had sat in a suffocatingly small and warm room for six hours, patiently and politely waiting my turn to be questioned, prodded and scraped. I can’t remember if, as I left the center, I was relieved to see the pink of a late summer sunset or if night had descended. I do recall feeling tired, hungry and thirsty. There was no readily available food or water in the center, and I hadn’t slept for at least 36 hours. Besides that, I was shrouded by a thick veil of apathy. It struck me numb to realize that with each step, I was reentering a world that I had previously thought I understood. But I now had the all-too-visceral knowledge that my bodily autonomy was fragile, and the world was keen on ripping it apart.
The societally agreed upon boundaries of consent and respect are all that allow each of us a feigned sense of control over our bodies. And as these boundaries rely upon the decency of mankind, they are inherently fickle. But that realization is an abrupt one. It is like crashing through the surface of frigid water. The iciness shocks you. Then it scares you, so much so that you open your mouth to scream, and the water fills your lungs, rendering them useless. You have no space to inhale, no breath to lend to your voice. There is not even enough oxygen for a whisper and certainly not enough to shriek, to reach the level of hysteria that they always accuse you of. Your chest is weighed down by all the words you could not express, and you are suffocated by the cries that will never be heard.
When I was raped, it startled me that the moral code I had naturally adhered to for the 21 years prior was not universal. Any of my presumptions of safety vaporized as the act was committed, the moment that my “No!!!” was overwhelmed by my scream of disbelief. My body became a vehicle for another person’s whims. Self-possession changed from an entitlement, an inherent right, to a prized and unattainable luxury, a carrot that was dangled before it was snapped inches away from my nose.
“The societally agreed upon boundaries of consent and respect are all that allow each of us a feigned sense of control over our bodies. And as these boundaries rely upon the decency of mankind, they are inherently fickle.”
Imagine you are lost in the woods with a radio as your only chance of connection to the world you once occupied. Alone and restless, you hunch over the device, endlessly turning the dial, but you only hear the scratch of static. You are searching, searching, searching. Each day, you wake to sit and spin the dial. It feels like a flimsy attempt at survival, but grasping for the place you came from is the only path out that you can imagine. So you cling to that droning static, straining for a sign, a flicker, a momentary return to the way things were, or at least the way you thought they were.
After my body was violated, I no longer knew what was mine. A constant buzz began to fill my head, making my brain a void. As Brandon Taylor wrote1, “I felt as if I had slipped out of my life and into some gray replica tucked behind the real thing, a life glimpsed at the corner of the eye, where anything is possible” – including the worst nightmares imaginable. If I can’t exercise control over my flesh, what of myself do I truly possess? What of myself can I trust? I questioned everything I had been so forthright about before – my intelligence, my aspirations, my emotional wherewithal, my right to plant my two feet on the ground and take up space.
Having the margins of my body encroached and trampled upon blurred the lines between my physical form and the rest of the world, and it felt like everything could be taken from me. Claire Schwartz wrote2: “My body feels like my condition, and everything feels like an address.” I was sand in an hourglass; each moment and interaction, whether benign or malignant, meant that more of me was slipping away.
Perhaps the least-discussed element of recovering from an incident as violent as rape is the disorientation. I’ve likened the days, months and years after my rape to purgatory. I experienced a depth of emptiness, an utter lack of being and connection within myself, as I began to grapple with my raw pain. Describing those sensations as a state of limbo does not encapsulate my absolute nadir of emotion, and I’m not sure I could ever find the words to do so, but it feels like an appropriate attempt. The world was no longer defined by poles: good or evil, yes or no, black or white. Everything was gray.
“I was sand in an hourglass; each second and interaction, whether benign or malignant, passing by meant that more of me was slipping away.”
My only certainty was that hours, days and months kept ticking on. Time, in the aftermath, felt like I was moving at the pace of a funeral procession. At certain moments, it was a balm to imagine my funeral – because I knew that would mean my strife had ended. I pictured mourners in black greeted by a weathered funeral director. I imagined him as a him wearing a wilted, gray suit, and while I imagined his practiced handshakes and whispers of “I’m sorry for your loss,” I realized there is too much death, destruction and rape in this world for it not to be a man’s job to bear the discomfort of a wailing woman. There are too many bleeding bodies for money and careers not to be made off of pain.
Continuing on after being raped is, in many ways, a procession. It’s an endless march known by all sexual assault survivors. Sometimes, on the way forward, we collapse. We wobble. We dig our heels into the ground just to keep our knees from buckling underneath us. We drag our way forward, fingers clawing into the muck of the ground trodden upon by so many others who have come before us, carrying the same burden that we never asked for. We may crawl, inch by inch, or stop dead in our tracks until someone finds the strength to pull us forward. Regardless of it all, survivors continue, and the procession proceeds on.
With these words, I have asked you to imagine the pain of survivors as something akin to the experience of death. I know I am not alone in feeling like I have to grieve the person I was before I was raped. I have to grieve the dreams I once had before my life was irrevocably altered. I have to grieve the promise of autonomy because it was wrenched away from me. All because a man insisted on taking what he wanted. It was a simple transaction, but I am still measuring its cost.
The world would do better to acknowledge the heaviness of survivors’ pain, as we would for grieving loved ones at a funeral. I ask that society respect and honor our ability to continue breathing, living, working, raising families, supporting friends, seeking joy, cultivating relationships and crying out for change while carrying this disorienting and defiant grief.
And I remind my fellow survivors who know the procession and its exhaustion, relentlessness and hopelessness to remember that, despite all the deeply internal and individual pain, your procession is never one taken alone.
This was adapted from a piece I shared at a press conference in 2023 as part of WOAR’s Keynotes, a survivor advocacy program in Philadelphia, PA.
What I read while working on “Procession” (in alphabetical order):
- “Civil Wars: Observations From the Front Lines of America” by June Jordan
- “Misfits: A Personal Manifesto” by Michaela Coel
- “Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture” edited by Roxane Gay
- The piece “& the Truth Is, I Have No Story” by Claire Schwartz within this book was particularly impactful.
- “The Memory Palace” by Mira Bartók
- “Your Silence Will Not Protect You” by Audre Lorde
- Quote pulled from Brandon Taylor’s “Spectator: My Family, My Rapist, and Mourning Online” in “Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture”
- Quoted pulled from Claire Schwartz’s “& the Truth Is, I Have No Story” in “Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture”
Grace Shallow 
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