The Worry Stone

This piece requires a content warning for describing sexual assault.

WTF believes these stories need to be told, though we are conscious of the emotional distress it may cause readers. We remind our readers to take care of themselves.

The Worry Stone

By Liv Velarde

Fiona Apple once gave a quotein an interview that has alwaysstuck with me. When askedwhether she writes songs aboutthe rape that she endured at 12years old, she stated, “It’s a boringpain. It’s such a fuckin’ old pain that,you know, there’s nothing poetic aboutit.” That’s how I feel dredging this up. Thistrauma is a worry stone in my pocket that I’vegone over and over again with my thumb, so many timesthat the depression could be an ancient inkwell used towrite on papyrus with a reed pen. The pain feels equallyas ancient, even though I had lived most of my life beforeit happened. It’s something that I’ve screamed about somuch, written about so much, blamed myself for so much,that there’s nothing poetic about it. To be quite frank,there never was. It was a boring pain before the blamingand the screaming and the tears. It’s a pain that’s beenwoven into my life in a million different ways becausethere’s not a woman I know who doesn’t feel it too.

That’s why this essay isn’t about Will Dodge. It isn’t about the 60 or so minutes that changed me permanently. It’s about what came afterwards. Not immediately afterwards, but at that point down the road where you think you should have gotten over it, but it still gets to you almost every day. It’s about my own healing that I’m more confident is possible every day, it’s about my future as a whole, complete person. One who can live with this pain because there’s no point in pretending that it’s possible to go back to a time when it wasn’t there.

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5 years ago, I classified Will Dodge as one of my best friends. We spoke everyday through our mutual membership of our high school’s ski team. He also called and texted me incessantly and would become very agitated if I didn’t respond. I was always a little scared of him. I was never sure what he was capable of, so I usually went along with the things he wanted to do, even if they made me uncomfortable. He was very jealous of my other friendships, even though we were never in any semblance of a romantic relationship. I had always felt a lot of guilt about that situation because I felt it must have been my actions that led him to believe he had more importance in my life than he actually did, therefore justifying his possessive behavior.

By my count, Will sexually assaulted me 3 times, each escalating in severity until I decided never speak to him again. I could not count the times he sexually harassed me if pressed. There were an avalanche of red flags in our friendship that I had always been taught to get over. These sorts of behaviors were “cute” and “trivial,” the only way that men knew how to communicate their strong feelings. Will was just one of many boys in my life who felt entitled to my time and body.

I don’t want to get graphic, so I’ll explain what happened in the simplest way I can: on the night of my senior prom, Will forcefully penetrated my mouth.

I had to take a break after writing that. I already knew the words that I would use, but took me three days to have the courage to write them down. I was afraid that on paper, it wouldn’t look that bad.

I initially found my assault hilarious. I woke up in a smelly basement, rushed to a tennis tournament still drunk and thought, Wow, I can’t believe I hooked up with Will. I was so set on not doing that. Then I realized what that meant. Denial really can be the most powerful drug.

I panicked and blocked Will on everything. I shut down. I was afraid of backlash from our friends, and I was afraid of being anywhere near him. I knew I wouldn’t be able to control what he would tell other people, but at least I could control his access to me. I knew immediately and forever that I’d never be taken seriously by my friend group, and I never considered going to the police for a single second. It was a “party rape”—it was prom night, and alcohol was involved. At no point did I think that telling someone else would help me get through it.

Throughout our friendship, Will habitually encouraged me to use and supplied me with drugs and alcohol until I was intoxicated to a level where I was “easy” to take advantage of. His actions that night fit into a pattern of coercive behavior that he had always exhibited towards me. I don’t believe what he did to me on prom night was an accident, or a mistake, or a miscommunication. It was a malicious attempt to take what he thought he deserved from me.

I have not spoken to him since that night, but I know that he vehemently denied that he did anything wrong. Will has texted lots of my friends since then, making it clear that he thinks I need to grow up and talk to him, that I am being overly dramatic, that he’s sorry that I misunderstood what happened that night. I never sought an apology because I knew I wouldn’t get one.

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Three years and three weeks after prom, I was in the backseat of my dad’s crammed Jeep Wrangler on the way home from a fun weekend on the lake. I was sitting next to my elderly pet, holding my nose out the window to avoid her lake-dog smell when I saw an Instagram post that made me feel physically ill. It was a picture of a classic Memorial Day in Michigan, featuring a couple on a pontoon boat dressed in red, white, and blue. The two were Cordelia, the younger sister of one of my best friends, and her newly social-media-official boyfriend: Will Dodge.

I felt trapped and useless. Responsible, but helpless. I felt a lot of things at once, but mostly desperation. I was desperate to stop the relationship from progressing any further, to keep her from spiralling into something harmful that she couldn’t get out of. Cordelia had just graduated from high school and was heading to Wayne State in the fall. I was afraid that another young woman was in the process of being sucked into a man’s toxic sphere of power and control.

Her sister Selene, my friend, had left a comment on the post that implied she was supportive of their relationship. I turned my desperation into frustration toward Selene, sending her an angry text that made it seem like Cordelia was a pomeranian that she could send through hoops on command rather than her autonomous younger sister. I assumed that Cordelia would never have started dating Will if she knew what he had done to me, and I put that responsibility on Selene. My mind was racing. How could Selene watch them and not tell her sister what had happened? She was my best friend, she was supposed to believe me. She was a survivor of sexual violence herself. How could she not tell Cordelia? Did she really not believe me?

She responded five hours later that she didn’t want to invalidate anything that I had said, but she wasn’t going to be able to talk to me today. It turned out that she wasn’t going to be able to talk to me for a very long time. When we did talk, Selene didn’t seem very interested in working things through with me, and even less interested in coming between Will and Cordelia, asking me, “Why should Will carry the label of “rapist” for the rest of his life?”

Most survivors would say that their assault haunted them for the rest of their lives, so why should Will get to hide behind the facade of miscommunication? A better question is, Why do we think that sexual predators deserve peace more than hurt women deserve a voice?

Part of the reason that I was so angry with Selene was because she had always claimed to support and live by the tenets of feminism. It was a part of her social media persona, and she always told me that she wanted to do more for women. I felt that her choice to condemn abusers from a distance while supporting Will Dodge’s involvement with her sister was hypocritical. And I told her so.

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It’s been four months since the original confrontation with Selene. She lives on the other side of the state, so it would have been easy to stay out of touch. Sometimes I felt that cutting her off would be the only thing that could possibly make me feel better. There were certainly points throughout the summer when I resolved to do just that. I thought there was no way she could remedy the situation because Cordelia would continue to date Will, and I couldn’t have someone in my life who was intertwined with my sexual assaulter. I was determined not to empathize with Selene; I couldn’t even entertain the thought that the situation might be out of her control.

Eventually, I got tired of being angry. You can’t be an American and not know about #MeToo. You can’t be a citizen of the internet and avoid the never-ending revelations about your previously unproblematic fave. Articles outing sexual predators flood my timeline every day and not one of them has surprised me. I’ve known too many women nursing this same pain to think that famous men are any more morally upright than the ones that I know personally. If you can avoid this barrage, I say shame on you for soaking in bliss while I envy your ignorance privately. It feels hard to be a woman, but it’s even harder to feel like nothing will ever change. I decided that I needed to reevaluate, swallow some of my pride, and see if healing can start with mending a friendship.

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Scheduling 24 hours to drive to western Michigan proved easier than I thought it would be. All the logistical barriers that I thought had kept us apart were not that challenging to overcome. If the both of us genuinely wanted to see each other, we could make time. I was planning to drive out there for a school assignment, and I knew that it was my moment. I texted Selene and said that I wanted to see her while I was in town. She meant something to me and we were not going to drift apart because neither of us wanted to go headfirst into confrontation.

I was nervous that she’d bail up until an hour before we had planned to meet, but Selene stuck to her word. We started off with the regular updates. She talked about getting her Associate’s Degree in December after a lot of transferring and roadblocks. I told her a bit about the time I spent abroad over the summer. At that point I couldn’t tell when we would talk about why we were there. Since Selene is non-confrontational to a fault, I thought I would be the one to bring it up, but she surprised me.

She took a deep breath and told me that she had never doubted my story, regardless of the words that she put up in defense of her actions. In my heart I knew that was true. I saw that she felt serious remorse, and in that moment I took her hand.

When I was angrier, I had planned to bring up the insensitive things that she said when I had provoked her. I no longer thought that was necessary. I had planned on describing in detail what had happened to me so that she’d feel guilty and ashamed that she had ever questioned my legitimacy. As soon as I got there, that fight went out of me. What would it have accomplished? I could make up with her without proving some moral high ground. Why take out my anger about something I can’t control on a woman who genuinely cares about me and hurts every day from the same pain of this patriarchal mess that we’re all living in? Approaching this topic in black and white might make me feel righteous, but it wouldn’t help me heal.

I’d say I was already ready to forgive her, but forgive isn’t the right word. I don’t think that I was all that fair to her in the first place, and to say that I’ve forgiven her implies that I was in some sort of higher position. I took my pent up anger out on the wrong person. It was just another situation in which Will had made me feel helpless. I was angry that no one had helped me, and I’d be damned if I didn’t try to help Cordelia. But there isn’t really anything that I can do. Selene talked to Cordelia and advised her to have her own conversation with Will. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can ever be sure that that conversation happened. That’s just how things are. I have to let go of the idea that I have any control over what people do. If there was a time where I could have him punished, it passed a while ago. I don’t know if I have the responsibility to call him out or write a #MeToo essay with his real name. Right now the only thing that I know is that I want to be happy and whole.

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When I got to campus three months after Will assaulted me, I decided that I would join the Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center as a volunteer. It was the best decision I’ve made during college. I’ve dedicated a lot of time and energy to combating sexual violence on campus. That’s definitely been fulfilling, but there’s one thing that’s common to a lot of us in this group: Most of us are survivors and none of us have answers. We seek healing and comfort in various ways, but our motto is that only survivors know what is best for them in their individual cases. This makes sense; no one should tell another person the right or wrong way to deal with trauma. But I’ve always had this suspicion that we parrot this line not because we believe in the inner compass of every individual survivor, but because none of us has ever found a satisfying answer. Telling survivors to search within themselves and find their personalized solutions is easier than admitting that there isn’t a straightforward path towards healing.

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The list of people I know who have been sexually assaulted and/or harassed is much longer than the list of people who have not. It would be a longer list if it weren’t so hard to see. Every one of my best friends is a survivor of sexual violence, my mother was never the same after childhood sexual abuse, my best friend’s mothers were never safe in their own homes. Sexual violence permeates every single day of my life, and it is exhausting.

The most insidious part is that it’s not always committed by the scum of the earth and the definitively sociopathic; it is codified by the difference in how boys and girls are raised. The problem of sexual violence isn’t something that magically pops up once someone hits puberty. I can pinpoint moments where rage filled up and flowed over because I was acutely aware that boys had a certain range of acceptable behavior that forced me to absorb their consequences. The pattern of coercive behavior that Will fit into didn’t come about because of anything that I did or any feelings that he had about me. It was present because he had been a little boy who had always been told that he could get away with small violations, so what was stopping him from getting away with bigger ones?

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A year ago, I would not have been able to write about this, although it has still been difficult. Not because it permanently changed the way I view relationships, the way that I feel about my body, the way that I fight for change, or the way that I cry constantly because I can’t remember a day without a new #MeToo story, but because I feel like no one gives a shit. I feel bad that I’m subjecting my classmates to reading about a trauma that no one really cares about. I feel bad taking up space when there are people who were hurt worse. As soon as I start to write about my feelings in depth, I quickly feel that I’m being melodramatic and that it wouldn’t have that much power over me if I simply stopped thinking about it, stopped giving it power. But speaking out takes power away from my assault. Defying shame is the only way to make it go away.

I want to heal more than anything, but I can’t see a straight path towards it. Instead I oscillate between recovery and anger until I land on apathy. I always thought that I would either need to forgive or forget Will in order to become my whole self again, but I see that as an incomplete perception of healing now. Healing doesn’t mean that I will be able return to the naive 18-year-old I once was. There was a part of me that was shattered, and even though something shattered can become whole again, it will always be tender and I must always be gentle with it.

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After our lunch, Selene and I shared a smoke on her terrace. I felt so comfortable, like no time or harsh feelings had passed between us. It felt so easy to talk about nothing with her, and we felt stronger because of our falling out. I will never forget my assault, but rekindling my friendship with Selene helped me realize that in order to move forward, I need to cling to the bright spots worth fighting for rather than clinging to my trauma. The depression in my worry stone will never flatten out, but now I reach for it less.