Revisiting the Time I was Raped
An updated version of an essay I wrote about a thing that happened one night in Cincinnati.
** Trigger Warning: This story describes instances of sexual assault that may be triggering to some readers, and as such, it is only available in full to paid subscribers. Apart from author Michael Alan Singer, all names and identifying details have been changed.**
I was riding on the back of a motorbike in Bali when it dropped from the depths of my subconscious. It was the kind of memory I’d suppressed for so long and with such fervor that I’d almost forgotten it had really happened. The recollection took hold in my chest; I was half a world away from where it happened when I gasped, finally feeling the breathlessness of a night I’d worked so hard to leave behind.
My husband didn’t register my panic as he drove in meandering oblongs around puzzle-piece plots of the lushest farmland imaginable. I called out directions at random from the back. We were lost. The tiniest tears formed in the corners of my eyes, and I hoped he wouldn’t notice the shift taking hold in me.
This was the burning sensation that Michael Alan Singer explained in “The Untethered Soul,” a book I’d been simultaneously devouring and proselytizing for the last few weeks. The pages contained an open-heart meditation that became my near-constant practice. I was unprepared for the moment when the author’s words finally delivered on a promise.
The meditation’s premise was simple: Whenever you feel your heart closing (when, say, someone cuts you off in the supermarket checkout line or makes a snide comment about your new hair color or picks a fight with you at the dinner table for no goddamn reason), you consciously choose to keep it open. You accept what’s happening in the moment, address it earnestly and move on to the next moment in the space-time continuum. The troublesome situation loses its power as it fades into the past.
The burning sensation is the consequence of moving beyond the checkout-line nonsense to address the deeper traumas you’ve been trapping around your closed heart since you first learned the world was filled with hard knocks. The emotional release of these moments causes physical pain. You can endure it now or suffer through the souped-up version later, but there is only one way beyond: You have to let it go.
Easier said than done. The fire in my chest rose to my throat, my past strangling me in the present.
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I’ve never told this story to anyone—not the whole of it anyway. I may have alluded to parts of it or sliced the details into slivers, but I wasn’t quite brave enough to share it in full. That’s the way it plopped onto the page, too. In pieces, that is. An r-word reckoning in fits and spurts.
I hated every moment of this essay’s creation. Currently sheltering in place in Thailand, I’m far from my husband who is doing the same in India. That left me too much time alone with my thoughts. I would sit down to write, only to delay and pace and stress eat 160-gram canisters of pineapple jam cookies. Suddenly, I found myself falling out of simple balancing asanas and crying through savasana. I’d wake up at 1:42 am to clean my Airbnb bathroom. I watched A LOT of Ozark.
The distractions served as fantastic stalling tactics, but ultimately, writing was the only way to walk through the fire of a burning heart.
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I once read an essay about a girl who asked her friend if she’d ever been raped. The friend responded by saying something along the lines of, “not, like, back-alley raped.” The author then explained that she’d been not-back-alley raped, too. Maybe we should start a club.
I imagine we’d have a lot of members. The unsettling fact is that most women aren’t violently assaulted in the shadows of alleys on the wrong side of town. It’s primarily close-ish acquaintances and work colleagues if you’re “lucky,” hard-to-escape relations and abusive partners if you’re not. Sometimes, it’s the visiting friend of a friend who has a very pregnant girlfriend back home.
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