“when i was 15 i got drunk for the first time and had my first kiss…”

i was sexually assaulted in my second year of college. the assault itself was isolated, but sometimes i think i had been building towards it for a long time.

when i was 15 i got drunk for the first time and had my first kiss. the first kiss came with the getting drunk. intimacy and alcohol forged a relationship in my life that summer, that night, which would persist in years to come.

we sat on my friends bed. we were both wasted. he asked, and kept asking. i said yes and yes and yes and no, and he respected all of my answers. we took almost all of our clothes off, but not all. i felt okay about everything. i enjoyed myself. i was enthusiastic, i felt desire, in a drunk 15 year old kind of way.

i think that perhaps people, my friends, others who knew, did not expect me to have done what we did. i don't know that that they disapproved, of the way we took our clothes off in a small dark room while they drank in the big bright room next door, but i felt disapproval. perhaps i was the one who did not expect me to have done what i did. i felt shame, but i didn't know exactly how to articulate this, so i kept that shame to myself.

a year or more later, a friend asked if that had been my first kiss, implying that it would be too bad if that were the case. i said no. i told her that i had kissed a boy long before, a boy who cared about me. i covered my small shame in this lie, like a blanket, so i could no longer see its details, only its shape.

after that i did not know how to show to enthusiasm to boys who touched me. i did not understand my own desires. it was a small incident, which could certainly have been insignificant, but i held it close and it hardened and took shape and took up space within me.

i never made any conscious decision about it, but i began to imagine myself as an object in intimate contexts. i did not touch, did not reach out, but rather allowed myself to be touched. i didn't think of a boy touching me as him trying to please me, but as me giving something to him, perhaps him taking something from me. i did not know what i desired, really. i was alienated from my desire and my pleasure.

for a long period, my experiences of physical intimacy were divorced from any emotional intimacy, so this way of thinking didn't really matter. but i continued to ingrain in myself the idea that i should really just allow myself to be touched. if i boy wanted me, it didn't matter so much that i wanted him or not, and i think i often didn't even try to answer that question. i was passive. i was object.

this became more complicated when i was with someone new, someone who did care. he would ask me what i wanted and i wouldn't know what to say. he wanted to engage with me, for me to engage with him, and i genuinely didn't know how. i think i had trouble reconciling his care for me with his desire for me. those things had not yet fit together in my experience. i continued to be passive physically, and removed emotionally. i was cold at times, i was often withholding, without ever meaning to be. i did not know how to open myself in the ways that i needed to be open with him.

once, he began to touch me, and i automatically parted my thighs. he jokingly said, "You always want it." he was being funny, and sweet, and offhand, but the comment took root in my head, because i didn't always especially want it. i just didn't not want it, and maybe felt that i should want it. to be clear, he never touched me in a way that i was at all uncomfortable with. but it highlighted the ever-growing lack of clarity around my desires.

it was when i was no longer with this boy who cared that i was assaulted, by a different boy, a friend. again, i was drunk. very very drunk. i have never known how to talk about this, but when he first touched me i didn't want him to stop. i had never wanted him to touch me in that way, but in that moment that desire wasn't clear to me, perhaps because of the alcohol, perhaps because i always had so much trouble understanding what i wanted. even in that moment, though, even drunk as i was, i think i knew on some level it was wrong. i think i knew because i pulled my dress down over and over to cover myself, to cover what the was doing, but he didn't stop.

i did not immediately call it assault, i did not immediately call it anything. the day after it happened i cried alone in my car, but i couldn't name what i was crying about. for two weeks i held it close, kept it secret. i was afraid. i was confused. i was ashamed, so so so ashamed. i thought that i had betrayed someone else, and that made me feel a terrible guilt that kept me quiet. i thought that it was my own act of betrayal that made my stomach turn.

the day i decided to tell someone what had happened to me, i had a panic attack strong enough that i could not speak through it. when it was over i explained to my friend the details of what he had done. she helped me understand that i had not betrayed anyone. i had been betrayed, been violated, been hurt.

i understand that what happened to me was not my fault. i understand that i was too drunk to consent, if he had asked. i understand that he did not ask. but i also think that i could have stopped it. if i had told him to stop, perhaps he would have stopped. i said nothing. i did not protect myself. i don't think that i knew how to. i think that somehow i had taught myself not to. living with the hurt and the anger and the complexity of that night, i cannot help but feel complicit.

i think that the way forward for me is to accept that perhaps in a way i did fail. not in the exact moment of the assault, but in the way i thought of myself and treated myself and understood myself up until that night. my task now is to work to understand myself differently, to imagine myself differently.

i don't have a neat conclusion. my work is ongoing, but i am ready to continue it.