I'm the Girl Who Was Raped by Michelle Hattingh

Author:Michelle Hattingh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inanna Publications
Published: 2017-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

9.

I COME BACK TO CAPE TOWN with three bags, four boxes, and a whole lot of anger. It is seething inside of me, ready to boil over at the slightest provocation. I am angry, and I am finally ready to talk about it to anyone who will listen. In fact, I fight the urge to shout at everyone who walks past me on the street, to yell into their faces that I was raped. But not everybody in my life can understand it—or me.

Some people I know stop contacting me after they find out that I was raped. Others never talk to me about it at all. And I am mad about it. What is it about my rape that has inconvenienced you? That makes your life hard? All those thoughts about not wanting to “burden” people are gone.

I’m angry at everyone who ignores what happened to me. I am angry at the way the people at the hospital and police station treated me. I’m angry because I don’t know what I’m supposed to do or feel. And I’m also angry because a couple of months after I was raped, people start to move on. The power of the mind and its adaptability allowed them to file me under, “the girl who was raped but now does other things.” They have integrated it into part of who I am and what I stand for. It isn’t on their radar 24/7. And why should it be? They have lives to live and things to do.

The girl who was raped is still stuck on, “Are you fucking kidding me?” and wants to shout it at people all the time.

Sometimes when you tell someone you were raped, they’ll say, “I won’t tell anyone!” While this would have been a relief to me in the first couple of weeks after I was raped, now it just pisses me off. Who was I protecting by keeping what happened to me a secret? I don’t need to do that anymore, but sometimes I feel like it makes others more comfortable if I contain it.

One day I get home from writing at a coffee shop. As I throw my things down on the floor of my room, my eye catches my teddy bear, sitting on top of my bed. I am so mad that I decide to murder him. The world is no longer making any sense and I can’t breathe and everyone is wrong and irritating and it’s like everyone is trying to hurt me and my blood is trying to escape, it is gnawing at my arms, my feet, my face, just eating away at me so I take my teddy bear and I tear at him, I smack him against the wall. I throw him down and jump on him. I tear off his jean jacket and bite him. After a while I stop. I sink down onto my bed, curl up and lie there. I can’t remember why I was mad.

Before I can go properly, stark raving mad, I hear that I have a job.

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