Riding Life’s Escalator: A Guide To Loving Yourself After Sexual Assault

*TW: Discussion of sexual assault

Hello there! This is my first blog for Coffee with Cerys so I thought I’d do a wee introduction of myself before we get down to the nitty gritty of things. I’m Jenny, I’m a toddler mum, primary teacher and I’ll have just turned 30 by the time this post is published (cue an internal mental breakdown about my 20s flying by me at the speed of light!) But if I’m being honest with myself, they haven’t flown past me at all, it’s felt more like the world’s longest escalator of; growing up sooner than imagined, processing trauma, and ever so slowly getting closer and closer to the top where I can finally get off and carry on with day-to-day life – which if you’re wondering I still haven’t.

But before we go any further, if you haven’t already figured by the title, with this week being Sexual Abuse & Sexual Violence Awareness Week in the UK, this post will be focused on my own experience of sexual assault and rape, and my journey with learning to know who I am again since. So this my note to you now that if this is something you don’t feel in the headspace to read about then please stop here and know that I am always available for a message if/when you ever need a stranger to talk to/ scream at/ bitch with etc.

But back to talking about me (which you will soon learn I like to do a lot) and my magical never ending escalator analogy. I was sexually assaulted and raped in my very early twenties and now that I can look back on it with a different perspective – that was a really fucking shitty thing to happen! Not that at the time I thought it was a wondrous occasion of course! But when are you consumed with so much grief of what has been taken from you and in the midst of unpacking the trauma to work out if you’ll ever feel safe again, it’s very difficult to remember that not only does such an event turn your entire world upside down but it’s okay to just think that is also just really crappy luck! Because it didn’t matter what I had worn, or how much I had to drink. It wouldn’t have mattered if I was a virgin, or a sex worker, or a broken hearted girl on the rebound. There is literally no circumstance in this world that made me more or less likely to be a part of the 1in 30 women who are raped and sexually assaulted each year* and so as much as being raped is a deeply personal and life altering event, it is also just unfortunately a very high statistic.  

So yes, it was and always will be the worst thing that has ever happened to me, but also at the same time it was just an extremely inconvenient event that well and truly balls’d up my plans for living the life I imagined. And I think it’s okay to be both. To be something that can cripple you with so much shame you can’t get out of bed in the morning and have you laughing with your friends and cursing the motherf-cker’s name (I’m talking about you Ricardo, you ass-wipe!) by the evening. 

So what do I do with this eye-opening insight? Initially, this post was going in the direction of things I would tell my younger self, the version of me who had no clue how to process what had happened to her, or didn’t believe life would ever get any better than anti-depressants and being scared of the shower. But since sitting down and starting to write and think about all of my experiences again - something I haven’t done since it was fresh and raw and all-consuming – I don’t think it’s my place to tell that version of me what to do. If I did then maybe my recovery process would have been completely different. Maybe I would be happier. Maybe I would be angrier. All I know for certain is I wouldn’t be the me I am today, and I quite like this current version of me. So instead, the best I can do is impart what I’ve learnt in the aftermath. 

So without further ado, may I present to you my incomplete and by no means factual guide to life after sexual assault:

1. You will never forget your experience – Try as you may through counselling, medication or self help, an event as big as this will change you to your core. The key is not moving on but learning to live with the new version of yourself. You don’t have to like what’s happened and you certainly don’t have to believe everything happens for a reason and you have been changed for the better because of it because quite frankly that’s a load of bullshit! You just have to aim to get to a point where you can say ‘a really rubbish thing happened to me, and that influences who I am and how I live my life now’.

2. You should never forget your experience – as much as I hate to say it, what happened is part of your identity now and it moulds and shapes the choices you make, the paths you take and the people you choose to let in. For a while, I took that to mean being raped ruled my life and every bad thing that happened was a consequence of it. But it’s okay to flip the narrative and decide that from being in that low place you can look back and reflect and value your time to be happy more carefully. Don’t stick around in jobs that make you miserable, don’t feel obliged to socialise with friends who give nothing back, and certainly don’t ever let anyone tell you how and when you should process your own trauma! It does not matter if you were assaulted 5 days, 5 years or 5 decades ago, you are the person who has shown up for yourself every day since and anyone trying to silence you or tell you it’s time to move on can quite frankly mind their own damn business..

3. Learn to exist again before you even try to live – I have a saying that I like to throw around on a bad day at work that I’m ‘surviving not thriving’ – but that is exactly what you need to do for as long as is necessary. It may start off that you’re eating because you have to, then one day you might actually feel hungry and before you know it you’re desperate to try a recipe you’ve seen in the latest free Tesco magazine. If you give your mind and body time to recover at its own pace without the pressure of meeting society’s expectations, you will be so much prouder once you finally feel ready to thrive! 

For me, this is still an ongoing process as I learn to get braver having showers. For the first few months afterwards I would not shower full stop. Then when I was ready I would sit in the shower. It took about 5 years until I was able to stand in the shower with no one else around to talk to. And now, 9 years on, I still can’t shower at home alone and so there is many a time I go into work with hair greasier than I would like. Society tells me this is a major social faux paus and I should put myself through the trauma that showering would bring me in order to relieve others of the burden of looking at my one-day-less-clean hair, but knowing how much having that shower would set me back mentally, I would politely tell society to get f----ed!

1. Relish in your bad ass-ery – YOU’RE A GOD DAMN SURVIVOR! Literally. You survived something horrific and you’re still here. So what if you still don’t feel like you’re fully yourself again? It doesn’t mean you’re worthless. Look at the progress you’ve made so far. Whether that’s going back to work, putting your feelings on hold on a bad day to show up for others, or even just allowing yourself a good banshee-style wail when it all gets too much. You’re doing all that yourself. And do you know how? Because you had the strength to mentally survive being assaulted or raped, and if you have the strength to do that then you have the strength to do whatever the heck you put your mind to – you’ve just got to use that inner anger and emotion and find a way that works for you to channel it.

2. Know that you will make it through – in the year after my attack when I started my blog processing the immediate aftermath, I had so many survivors message me telling me it will get better and life would one day feel normal again. And although I believed them, it did not help me in the slightest in that moment of time. But what I didn’t expect in the years that followed was that after making it through the roughest parts, that some aspects of life would actually improve! Now I am by no means saying I am now fully healed and resentment-free because I’m not and I don’t know if I ever will be – I still have a tough relationship with alcohol, a vastly unfair prejudice for men and an awful lot of work I need to do on my own anger issues.  But had you asked me before my assault did I think I could be a married home owner with a baby of my own, all before my 30s, I would have laughed at you! Back then I didn’t even know how to talk to a guy never mind to dare mention the word sex!!! But that naivety and innocence was very quickly stripped away from me which left me with nothing left to lose but shoot my shot with boys I liked, telling them all the gory details of my trauma on date one to get rid of those who couldn’t handle the baggage, to leave room for the gem that is my now husband, who met me one year post rape and has been my rock every day since (insert cute heart emoji awww).

So that’s me in a nutshell! If anything in this post has resonated with you or you have tips of your own to add from your own experiences, I would love to hear from you. It blows my mind that rape and sexual assault is still such taboo subject when it is happening all around us, so the more we can normalise talking about the many many different ways it affects our lives then hopefully the more confident people will feel to open up and ask questions of how they can help. Whether you have been through an experience of your own or you’ve come here to get an insight of what a friend may be going through, thank you so much for sticking around! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an escalator I need to keep riding, I’ll let you all know if I ever reach the top – Jenny xoxo

*Statistic from Rape Crisis UK -  https://rapecrisis.org.uk/get-informed/statistics-sexual-violence/

Meet Jenny

Pin It!

Hello! My name is Jenny, I'm a toddler mum, primary teacher and dinosaur fanatic! I'm loud, extravagant and a big lover of being exactly who you are, despite what others may think! I'm here to talk about accepting the chaos and flaws of everyday life and hopefully being a good reminder that reality is nowhere close to the edited version you see of people on social media! I'm also a massive advocate for women's rights and want to help continue to break down the stigma and taboo around topics that can be sometimes a lil tricky to approach.

More Like This