All Of My Issues

Okay, here it is. This is the trauma that I was dealing with a couple weeks ago. I had a dear friend read it, and she said that it did not change her perception of me. By now, I knew that that was the sort of response I could expect from her, but there are always the competing voices that imagine the worst replies. 

Sometimes, in contrast to the norm, girls chase boys.

The year was 2012. I had traveled to Uganda that summer and then preached a sermon that fall. Then, a week or two later, she came over to the blanket fort. Having been single for all of my life, I naturally have a desire to cuddle, and she flirted with me and had expressed similar desires. We had been friends for a couple years. Unfortunately, I did not know that she was sexually active at the time, though I am unsure of whether I would have been more cautious even if I had known. Hopefully I would have. In any case, we cuddled. She knew that I had had dreams which had made me form rules of no kissing or having sex. But as we were cuddling, she used her hands to guide our hips to introduce a vertical motion. Breathing patterns changed and I was suddenly doing something that confused me. We were fully clothed. None of my rules were technically broken. But then the guilt washed over me in powerful waves immediately afterwards.

Such an action triggers a release of oxytocin that helps to form a stronger emotional bond. She was still my friend, but now I had this odd fear of that guilt mixed with longing. Other opportunities arose, but I was a tease about it.

Fast forward four years. I had recently returned from two years of living on an island in the Caribbean for medical school. It was the loneliest, most depressed I have ever been (and lonely often seems most of what I am, so it is saying something). I had no prospects in the dating realm, and since I never dropped my standards, I felt as if I would never find anyone. Loneliness without hope. And election season was in full swing, with many I had had my eye on either choosing the wrong side or no side at all. It was a time for taking sides. Anxiety was quite present.

Anyway, she had gotten married while I was away. And birthed a baby. So other friends and I visited her apartment for some occasion and I stuck around a little after others had left, with the intention of catching up. She was smart and we had had a few good talks in the past. But although the memory has become more fuzzy, I remember a very sudden transition from nothing happening to her on top of me, kissing me. My body went with some of the motions as I became very anxious and confused. The baby was in a crib nearby and her husband was in the bedroom, as he had work in the morning. My main thought was that if he got up to get a glass of water, he would see this. And I would have ruined their marriage, their family. She asked “is this okay for you?” at a certain point and I did not answer except perhaps with a confused look. After all, it was never my intention to be a part of a married woman’s affair. (Once again, fully clothed and all that)

I had difficulty processing this. My usual approach is to blame myself for my part. But as in the past, it was more difficult with her, because she had sexualized things. Lust and objectification of her became a significant aspect of my thought processes for awhile. I had acne for a week, which really does not happen except when stress is notable. She was one of my few friends in the area, and that crude form of intimacy was my only escape from loneliness. I was just so resigned to a lack of hope. So another few occasions came about. The last such episode was in January of this year. She referred to it as flirting “a lot”, which I suppose was an attempt at softening the gravity of such awful actions.

Because of the election, I had stopped attending church. My close friends tended to be associated with her friend group. So I was more isolated, studying for an exam that I was doomed to fail, and trying to come to terms with myself and what I had done, along with the fact that I had intentions to seek out opportunities to repeat these mistakes.

I now had alternate selves with which I had to contend. I had the me that I had always been. Sure I liked to flirt, due to loneliness, but I kept my thoughts pure, never tried masturbating, and always sought to see women as whole people rather to than sexualize them. ‘Cause that’s what they are: people. This is a big reason why (in my opinion) couples are meant to wait till marriage to have sex, because we are meant to love a person as a whole. And I of course respect marriage. My parents’ divorce led me to respect the sanctity of marriage even more, as I see the devastating effects of their divorce even today. But now I had this other self, this one who was somehow willing to involve himself in a woman’s cheating on her husband in a mockery of the sanctity of marriage. These two moralities could not coexist in a person, and thus the seeds for an identity crisis were planted.

In multiple personality disorder (from what I remember from some audio lectures during my psych rotation’s drives between hospitals as I fought the urge to doze off), traumatic events can force someone to develop a separate personality for each aspect of themselves. We have separate versions of ourselves for parties, for intimate time with friends, etc., but in that disorder, the person’s personality supposedly fractures. I struggled for a significant amount of time to keep myself from fracturing over this. The main problem, I think, was that I was so very focused on what I had done in response to the trauma, rather than focusing on the trauma itself. I had not even considered it to be trauma, even though playing a critical role in the thing you hate and fear most in life certainly could be considered traumatic.

So I had simply considered myself to be guilty of something wrong rather than recognizing myself as a victim. And since I had no one to talk to about it, I left it at that and tried to accept God’s forgiveness. But that duality formed by hypocrisy remained. When I found my dearest friend (and crush), someone else with whom I had been honest and open from the start aside from this issue, it ate at me. She had spoken of herself as fractured as well. When we both affirmed that we were each other’s favorite person, what I had held back before began churning within me. I saw a movie with a rape scene and pictured her and became nauseated and cried; I have cried only a few times as an adult. I went to the theaters and after the movie, I was shaking and crying and nauseated once again. So I texted her to let her know that I needed to tell her things, but only in person.

I wrote this a year and a half after the fact because I did not recognize the impact of sexual assault upon my person. I blamed myself for the role I played, but I apparently cannot leave it at that. #MeToo I guess. Weird. To clarify, I am always responsible for my actions, but a review of my genuine beliefs leads me to think that this was my response to trauma in a period of great vulnerability. I don’t know if that helps or redeems anything.