I have been digging through my memory, remembering what being raped feels like. That feeling of total violation. Being forced to do what you do not want to do against your will. I won't get into my personal history of violations in my life, but suffice to say, I know how I feel when I have been violated.

I know what it feels like to feel dirty, used and creepy inside, like you will never heal from it all, like it's all your fault, like you deserved to get hurt like that. After all, you are the one who put yourself in that position where you got hurt, especially as a 3 year old, it's all your fault. Just being born was excuse enough for you to deserve to be treated like you have no value. I know what it feels like to let it just fester for years and years until it becomes this putrid flesh laying off to one side, smelling of decay and death inside of you. A blackened part of your soul that you have tried very hard to hide from everyone, including yourself.

It's something you never talk about, something you have to keep to yourself for fear that others will see you as less than whole, less than them, less than a real person. Even though as the years wear on, you learn to keep it hidden away, even from your own memory, still, every step you take is one to avoid touching it or going near it. Every move you make is one to keep you from having to see it, face it, watch it writhing there in the corner, broken, decaying, shattered, silently screaming in pain.

Every relationship you ever have is one to make you avoid it, or maybe even worse, one that slams it hard with whips and chains, that make the pain so intense that you still cannot really see "it" because the pain you are allowing yourself to experience in relationship is almost greater than the original pain you are trying to avoid. You spend years on end seeking out that which will abuse you worse than your original abuse. Something that will make you hurt worse, somewhere else in your being, anything is better than that original pain.

And after years and years of self abuse, allowing yourself to be used and shit on spiritually, mentally, physically and emotionally by not only your self, but everyone you call into your life, one day, if you are lucky, if you get tired enough of all the pain (which is really all you have ever known),  you decide you just can't take it anymore, that you really do want something different, that you really do want to be happy.  For once, you want to know what real happiness might really be like and you have finally figured out that repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting different results really is insanity. And so you seek out a different approach, you look for a different way other than the one you have always tried since the first time someone violated you. If you are very, very lucky, you find the help you need to stop the insanity, to stop the running from the pain and shame and to attempt to heal from the festering, blackened wound inside your soul.

And then if you are very honest and very real and very brave and look at it openly, you probably will eventually heal. After all those years of stepping around it to avoid it, you find you must go through it to finally once and for all make it go away and stop hurting forever. One day, the pain is no longer there, and the memory is just that, a memory of something you survived. You find yourself no longer seeking out that which will cause you pain anymore. You find yourself trying to establish healthy relationships with people who don't need to abuse or be abused to feel alive.

And if you work really hard, you grow spiritually in ways that allow you to be able to share with great unconditional love and vulnerability with others. It takes time as an adult to learn who is safe to be that open and vulnerable with and who is not. Slowly but surely you learn though, and you try hard to not let yourself be hurt, you work very hard to be a good caretaker with yourself and to love yourself enough so that no one else can honestly hurt you inside. You learn who you really are and fall in love with that incredible person. Love them enough that you actually can love others sincerely and honestly from your heart of hearts.

So when someone comes along, someone you allowed yourself to be completely open and vulnerable with, and they perpetrate against you in the worst way possible, despite all you have been through, despite all the healing you have done, despite all the love you have for yourself, and how hard you try to take care of yourself, you are still wounded to the core because their violation of you is so great. And what happens inside you is that you feel that violation, that perpetration just as strong and painfully as you did when it happened to you the first time in life.

Especially when they act like the violation never really happened, like you're making it all up. When they claim they never raped you, that you are lying. When they lie so blatantly to themselves and everyone else as if what they did to you, you had asked for or worse, make you out to be crazy like they have no idea what this crazy thing is you are accusing them of is all about, well, you feel powerless and violated even more. You pay the price for their shame and guilt. They dump all their shame on you and make everything you are feeling your fault. And you feel completely powerless to do anything at all as you lay there writhing in your pain from the new wounds that have been inflicted.

And when you look around you, even the few people who witnessed your rape are denying it too. Then to have one of them become a party to the rape, someone you thought loved you as a friend, the pain only grows deeper and more intense. With everyone around you telling you to forget about it all, to just walk away, yet they are not seeing that as you try to get up and walk away, the rapist is kicking you and throwing rocks at you when they are not looking and mocking you even more. And if you say anything to people, they say, you are exaggerating it or imagining it, just walk away. You wonder if they would walk away if they were having the same experience you were having.

You wonder if this rapist could actually be punished by law, if there was some law on the legal books of this country against what they did, would others still tell you to walk away? You wonder if they would tell you to press charges and go to court and testify against the person who wounded you so deeply. You wonder if they would tell you to walk away from that scenario. They would probably tell you that you should press charges in that case, because after all the rapist broke the law. But all these well meaning folk don't see the spiritual law(s) that were broken with my rapist and how deeply I was injured and wounded when I was assaulted by this rapist. They say I am being overly dramatic. Call me drama queen behind my back, and yet had I physically been attacked, they would not feel this way. Yet I was spiritually, mentally and emotionally attacked and in a most brutal way and the attacks have continued, rocks keep being hurled, and kicks to the groin when no one is looking. And no one gives a fucking rats ass about what is happening or has happened. Because it doesn't appear that I am being violated, at least not in their eyes.

I have no police to go to, to court to address my injury with. No prison or punishment for my violator to recieve for all the pain inflicted. No, I am supposed to walk away and just forget it all and let karma do it's thing in it's own time.

And what I have to say to that advice is this: Not this time.  

I walked away as child so many times I cannot remember them all, each time losing a precious piece of my spirit to the attacks and the perpetrator. And as an adult, I walked away over and over again, each time my soul bleeding, scarred and powerless. No, this time I am standing up for myself and I am fighting this. I am not going to walk away from my rapist feeling powerless and victimized. Never again. I refuse to ever be abused again. And I refuse to let anyone get away with abusing me, attempting repeatedly to take my power away and not having to make amends for it.

No one is ever going to abuse me again. I am never going to be raped again. And the abuse I continue to suffer at this rapist's hands is stopping right now. No more stones cast or kicks to my groin when no one is looking. No more attempts to hurt me further will be tolerated.

And if you feel you need to judge me for feeling this way then, whatever, that's your lesson, not mine. Mine is to protect me from further injury. My lesson right now is all about loving me enough that no one is or ever will be allowed to purposely violate my person and power again. No one. Period.