Status Updates From One Way Back

The survivor’s Catch-22: you’re told not to tell too many people, but then later you’re told your story isn’t credible because you didn’t tell anyone. You can’t win. It’s one of the many ways survivors aren’t supported in coming forward.

Everybody experiences trauma differently, and unfortunately what happened to me in high school has been eclipsed by what I’ve gone through the last few years. Being retraumatized has made the original wound much worse. I was not as messed up by it in earlier years as I am now.
–We are being retraumatized over&over by the epic failure to hold rapists accountable, from the Epstein Files to the Cornell 7 & legions more.

I never got to thank the people who wrote [letters]. Statistics had helped me quantify them all...I was able to look at the data and see that the prevalence of sexual assault was so high it was basically at an epidemic level. It seemed to have happened to almost everyone, and while the stories were all different, the effects they had on the letter writers echoed each other again and again.

Once [Brett Kavanaugh] was confirmed anyway, it was clear that I, and Anita Hill before me, hadn’t solved the problem. Unfortunately, many others after us would need to come forward to bring about a larger systemic change. The strange part was that it didn’t feel like I hadn’t been heard. It felt like I had been believed, but then the response was a proverbial shrug. I couldn’t fix the fundamental injustice of that.

I am not usually a memoir girlie but in the family we support women, so here we are. I’ll give it a go.