My Rape Was Not My Fault

I was wearing an oversized men's buttondown and leggings. My hair was unwashed, in a mess of a bun, and I wore no makeup. I hadn't been drinking. I wasn't walking home alone. I wasn't at a party with "bad" people. I was sober, covered from head to toe, and with a friend that I had known for five years.

Despite not fulfilling the popular stereotype a shamable victim, I was sexually assaulted.

First, he pinned me to his bed and began trying to kiss me. When my demands for him to stop made kissing too difficult he began moving his mouth to my neck while trying to open my shirt and expose my breasts.

I'm not sure how, but I did manage to escape from underneath him. I made it six steps before he caught me and continued his assault.

He threw me against the wall and used the weight of his body to pin me there. He continued to kiss my screaming mouth, my neck, and my breasts and chest after tearing my shirt open.

I said NO. I said STOP. I begged him to let me go. I fought as hard as I could against him, and as I realized he was too strong for me to fight, my begging became frantic.

He didn't care. He didn't stop. He pinned me to the wall by wrapping his hand around my throat. He shoved his other hand into my leggings, into my underwear, and began to roughly shove his fingers into my vagina.

Somehow, between my crying and bagging, and his raping of my vagina, I was able to pry his hand off my throat. I ran. I crashed out the front door, stumbled across the lawn, and clawed my way to my car.

I told three people about my rape. The first response? "Well, you shouldn't have been alone with a guy who isn't your boyfriend".

I'm not sure if it was worse that I was slut-shamed while my body still ached from being raped, or that because of that I shamed and blamed myself for months.

I spat hateful accusations at the mirror. I feared my boyfriend would leave me when I told him. I lived with utter disgust for myself. I was told I was "lucky" it wasn't worse.

My rape was not my fault. I am not careless. I am not a whore. I am a victim. I am the victim of a man who believed his desire to violate me mattered more than I did. I am a victim of a society that blames women instead of punishing men.

We need to stop shaming victims. We must raise men and women who value consent and hold themselves responsible for their actions.

We all have the power to prevent sexual assault and to help victims heal. I beg you all, as a rape victim, as a woman, and as a human being, to help me protect and heal anyone who has ever been violated because it is not their fault, but it is ours if we do not help them.

I'm a Bitch But I'm Sorry

Living with anxiety and depression, or any mental illness really, is difficult, to say the least. The tiniest tasks or most routine regularities can be mountainous challenges. Trying to manage your emotions, mood swings, and stress while maintaining a facade of professionalism and normalcy are hard and exhausting.

What a lot of people don't realize though, is that dealing with all of that within a relationship can actually be even more complicated. Yes, an emotional support system is so important, but it can also make it hard to indulge in your anxiety releasing behavior.

We all have the ways we cope with our extra, overwhelming, or negative emotions. I like to watch a sad movie so I can pretend I'm crying about something other than the fact that I think my new friends are actually annoyed by me and secretly hate me (anxiety loves to paint these irrational portraits in my mind). Or I would take a scalding hot shower and sing at the top of my lungs. Or I would maybe win imaginary arguments dramatically in my kitchen.

Basically, when I lived alone I could come home, close out the world, and unleash the swamp monster of emotion. I was confined by four walls, and the world was safe from my irrational anger and irritability. Unfortunately for my husband, this is no longer the case.

We live together like most married people do, so when swamp monster comes out, there is a civilian in danger. Now I would like to give my husband a lot of credit. He is always very supportive of me and does what he can to help me. On more than one occasion he's been awoken from blissful sleep to me sobbing and shaking for no conceivable reason and he rubs my back while I go through the hell of a panic attack.

However, being in a relationship and having a mental illness can be emotionally complicated. One of the biggest issues I had to work through in therapy was accepting that the people around me were not going to abandon me or stop loving me because of my mental illness. Accepting this meant learning to let go of my irrational guilt over my anxious behaviors and my down days.

Here's where it really gets complicated though, because my anxiety often manifests in extreme irritability and anger, I did have to learn to apologize when those behaviors took aim at my husband. I had to find the delicate balance between not feeling guilty for having a mental illness, but being accountable for my actions while dealing with it.

To clarify, when I'm having a bad day or an anxious, irritable day, I don't just lash out at my husband freely, verbally abusing him only to return the next day with a flippant "Sorry babe!" I also had to learn to cope with my anxiety and depression and find new, healthier outlets that allowed me to work through my feelings without going Godzilla and flattening a city.

This was not easy and because of how fatally stubborn I am it was not fun to relearn behaviors I had deemed appropriate. But it was worth it. I do still lose my cool. I'm not perfect. I still get sassy (fine, bitchy) with my husband, but it is less frequent. And when swamp monster does come out and destroy the city, I make a peace offering, and I apologize, and when I apologize I always make a point of saying "I'm sorry for how I treated you. I need to be better about not taking my anxiety out on you" because I want it to be clear that I'm not irrationally sorry for having a 3 a.m. panic attack. I'm sorry for acting like he was murdering puppies and innocent children when in reality he was just existing in proximity to my irritability.

There is a balance out there between apologizing for every quirk out of fear of abandonment and owning up to the moments where we don't handle our shit as well as we could. It's hard, and less than fun, but we can all find that balance and show the world that anxiety, depression, and everything on the spectrum of mental illness doesn't preclude us from functioning.

We are strong. We are messy. We're hot messes, but we're sorry.

Slay. Sparkle. Repeat.

Every morning all the employees at my work gather for a quick meeting. Today the work topics were in short supply, so things quickly drifted to chit chat. The boss thanked a colleague for an outfit she had purchased for the boss' granddaughter, and the woman responded graciously, noting she had followed all the rules the boss had laid out about infant attire. "No sparkles, and no tutus; she's going to be a strong woman."

If you've ever met me you know I basically took that as hate speech. Another female coworker and I simultaneously piped in, stating, "You can be sparkly and strong," while gesturing the pink, bejeweled headband I was hardcore rocking. There was no response.

I am all about raising strong women. I already daydream about instilling confidence in my daughter with constant compliments, and endless encouragement to dream big, while doing everything in my power to support her as she takes the world by storm. However, you can bet your ass that girl will be covered in glitter head to toe from the moment she starts crowning.

I am very well aware that women are still fighting daily to be taken seriously in the professional world, and to be given the respect they deserve. Hell, we have to fight to be taken seriously in general. I can't tell you how many times I've had to "prove myself" to some cocky, misogynistic male entity who thought he could outsmart, outwit, or out-anything me.

Sometimes it feels like every day is a battle to be deemed worthy and earn our place in the room, and if you're telling me I can't prove my worthiness unless I ditch my sparkles and obnoxiously bright wardrobe, I'm jumping off the roof right now.

Pardon my French, but what the hell kind of bullshit is this? The number of sparkly items on my person is in no way connected to my competence as a professional, or a human being. I am a hustler. I get shit done. I do my job, and given the opportunity to go above and beyond, I take it every time, and I can tell you from experience that glitter has never been an obstacle. Ignorance, however, sure has.

We women have enough hurdles and glass ceilings to overcome without feeling pressured to "tone it down" and keep as quiet in our wardrobe choices as they'd like us to be in the office. We are strong, smart, and utterly badass in every way. We are hustlers, hard workers, and we sure as hell have what it takes to get the job done, while looking utterly fabulous.

So ladies, while you're ignoring the haters and misogynists, ignore the glitter naysayers too. They may not like your crown of jewels, but they're going to be coming to you for help sooner or later, so tell them to kiss your sparkle, and KILL IT!

Week of Hell

This time two weeks ago I was sitting in the library, getting my school work done days early, putting together a blog schedule, and being so efficient that I had time to read EW and Elle in between it all. I was feeling great, in complete control of my life, and then in a matter of days it all went to shit.

Heading into the weekend I wasn't feeling great. I started having panic attacks and went into a full emotional breakdown for no clear reason. In the midst of it all my husband threw out his back and was bedridden for a week. I was trying to care for him, get caught back up on school, hold my emotions together, freaking out that we might not be able to make rent, all while driving around to social and work obligations.

Needless to say the breakdowns continued. I cried in a stranger's kitchen, in my car, and on the ground of a gas station parking lot. Thankfully, my saving grace, my Doctor is an incredibly supportive man and had just refilled my prescription for Xanax.

I'm not ashamed to say I needed xanax to get through these last two weeks. I needed medication to survive and get through my day. I needed meds to stop crying, to sleep, to focus on the little bit of work I could do.

There was once a time when I would have been embarrassed to admit that I needed medication. There was a long stretch of time in college where I was suicidal over the thought of needing medication in order to function, but not anymore.

There is no shame in needing help to get through hard times, or just a normal day. There is no shame in needing xanax, or an antidepressant (which I also take every single day), or adderall, or any type of medication that helps you function and be the best version of yourself.

You are incredible, with or without meds. I am strong, fierce, and a fighter, and sometimes I am those things because of the medications that help balance out my emotions or hormones or body chemistry. Never let anyone, including yourself, make you feel bad, shamed, inferior, or lesser than for taking medication.

In xanax we trust!

Actual LOL

Mistakes, blunders, fumbles. We all make them. We've all burnt dinner and tried to get into the wrong car and lost our cellphones while talking on them. I once had to admit, in front of a room full of coworkers, that I 100% did not know Stormtroopers (the white dudes in Star Wars) were people. Full on thought they were robots. I also once asked a coworker, in front of everyone, "have you always been that color" after he came back from lunch with a spray tan. His hispanic heritage made that little moment extra humiliating.

What I'm trying to say is that we're all human. We do dumb stuff, A LOT. I personally overachieve heavily in filling my "dumb stuff" quota, but guess what? I'm still alive. I haven't died of embarrassment yet, and if I haven't, no one ever will. Trust me, I have done it all.

We all set these high standards for ourselves, and I think sometimes we feel like when we do something stupid (like cockily insisting people in Mexico speak Mexican) we think all the work we've put into ourselves disappears and we have to start over. We have to prove ourselves all over again. We have to regain approval from everyone who saw the dumb thing, everyone who will hear about it, and well just everyone in general because we suck.

Wrong. Doing something silly, or embarrassing, or wrong doesn't put some kind of mark on your soul. There's not an organization somewhere documenting that you peed your pants or fell down the stairs. It's just you. You are the only one giving yourself a hard time. You are the only one judging yourself. You have all the power, so change the situation.

Laugh loudly. Laugh so loudly librarians from a 50 mile radius flock to shush you. Laugh out loud, and do it with pride, cause guess what? You did a dumb thing and the world is still turning. You're still smart, and funny, and cute, and amazing, and brave. If you saw your dumb thing in a GIF of someone else you would laugh, so don't be afraid to laugh when it's you!

Life is full of so many things that are out of our control, but one thing we always have power over is how we react to those things. Let go of the fear, let go of the shame, and replace it with some lighthearted giggles, starting now!

 My husband will probably not giggle if he finds out I shared this!

Embrace Your Elsa

Shit happens. Shocking revelation, I know, but it's true.

Things go wrong all the time, for everyone. I'm a card carrying member of the Murphy's Law Club after all the stones life has thrown at me. Things that shouldn't even logically happen to people, happen to me. I had to replace three tires and two wheels in under a year, on three different occasions. One of those times I had a flat because a bolt punctured my tire. Not a nail, a bolt. Belle Tire had "never seen that before". So yeah, I'm blessed in a very special way.   

My most recent special "blessing" came from one of my grad school professors. She assigned us a paper and y'all I KILLED IT. I cited extra sources, I interviewed Human Resources employees, I went past the length requirement, I mean I literally sent this paper to my parents and my husband I was so proud. Two nights after turning it in, I was accused of plagiarism. The professor called me, asked me if I plagiarized, and when I said no, she said she didn't believe me and was reporting me.  

So needless to say I started crying immediately, because I have absolutely no chill and this was one of the first times in my life I actually allowed myself to be proud of something I did. Just mildly traumatizing, but hey, my insurance covers therapy so that's cool. 

So I cried. I cried out of anger, and sadness, and pain, and then I went and got ice cream, which actually totally helped. That night I stayed up until 3 gathering evidence that I didn't plagiarize (which could get me kicked out of school, so no pressure or anything) and then I laid awake the rest of the night crying and panicking. 

The next day I had a decision to make. I could wallow in my misery and anger and anxiety, or I could shake it off and move on with my life. Worrying wasn't going to get my paper reviewed any sooner. Crying wasn't going to get my other classwork done. So I made a decision. I gave myself one day to pout, lay in bed, be pissed at the world, and hate everything. The next day, I had to adult my hardest and get down to business. 

It was days before I was vindicated and exonerated, and during those seemingly endless days, I got my other homework done, I worked, I showered, I ran my errands, and I lived my life. That's what I had to do, not just because it needed to be done, but because I couldn't let one bad thing put my entire life on hold. If I did that I would probably never leave bed again at the rate my shit hits the fan. I'm basically an HBO Original drama. 

So yes, sometimes life sucks just epically, and no it isn't fair or right or just. But when bolts or bitches come at you and try to knock you down, you just have to take a breath and #LetItGo. Do what you can to fix it or make it better, then move on. Once the power is out of your hands, it is out of the situation's too. Don't let a problem you can't control, control you. You will go crazy. Trust me, I've needed to be pulled back from numerous ledges. 

It is much easier said than done, and it definitely takes practice and patience, but you can do it. Not only can you do it, but you will do it. How do I know? Because the first time you feel the freedom of a moment free from stress, you'll be hooked. Calm is kinda cool (Ha get it? Elsa joke. Damn I'm punny). 

So embrace your inner Elsa, let it go (and go get ice cream), and just be happy. You deserve it.   

Little Lessons

I have been dealt a unique hand in life. Before 16 I was dealing with abuse, undiagnosed depression, undiagnosed anxiety, frequent panic attacks, unhappily married parents, attempted suicide, and my own version of failure to thrive. I struggled in school, I had panic attacks almost every night, and I prayed to God to end my life because I wasn't strong enough.

I also consider myself incredibly blessed. Despite how difficult my life has been, and despite the challenges I've had to face, I've been incredibly lucky. I had support through my struggles. I had people who believed in me, and I had the advantages of being from a family who could afford mental health care, college, and for me to never have to add struggles for food or shelter or love.

Every lesson I have learned in my life, I have learned the hard way. I inherited stubbornness from both of my parents, so some lessons had to be learned more than once. For a long time I was just outright pissed about my situation and these endless life lessons that were being thrown at me, but eventually, the big picture showed up.

By 25 I had learned a lot, and my life was happier because of it. One of the most important things I came to see was that I could use my trauma to help people. I could talk about my life, and hopefully help other people, young or old, learn some lessons the easy way, without pain and heartbreak.

So that's what I'm here to do. I'm here to turn pain into purpose, and hopefully to make life a little better for even one person. Over the next month I'm going to be sharing the ten most important things I've learned about life, and maybe, just maybe, you'll listen.

As an incentive there will be a lot of sass, some hilarious stories, and a sprinkling of smile worthy puns. So let the journey begin...