TW: sexual assault, rape, suicide.

I get asked occasionally how I got to this point of who I am – confident, outspoken, resilient, etc. I usually brush it off as, “A lot of therapy and healing.” But it wasn’t until recently that I actually thought about it. What was it that got me to this point? I had always been extremely shy and quiet as a child. So how did I go from that to who I am now?

As I actually turned the question around in my head, I remember that from the moment my sexual assault began to the end of college, I was pretty numb and I don’t remember much of my college experience. My mind/body kind of just shut down once I started being sexually assaulted (as in, it was not a one-time occurrence) and I was on autopilot for most my undergraduate career.

It wasn’t really until I left college and was away from the environment – the toxic people and the house in which the assaults occurred – that my mind started really processing what happened to me. I was assaulted in November 2014, and it wasn’t until 2017-2018 that my mind started reawakening.

It’s pretty uncanny how my mind began realizing and started to process my trauma. It started when I began listening to a podcast called My Favorite Murder, which is hosted by two amazing women named Georgia Hardstark and Karen Kilgariff. As you can kind of tell from the title of the podcast, it’s not a self-help, life coach, meditation, or mental health kind of podcast. It’s a true crime/comedy podcast. And yes – they get the “How can it be true crime and comedy at the same time?” question all the time. It is definitely not making light of any crimes or tragedies. In fact, it’s quite the complete opposite. These two women are one of the proponents of my healing and processing.

One thing that stood out to me with this podcast is that Georgia Hardstark and Karen Kilgariff don’t shy away from their own demons. They openly speak about the hardships, addictions, and traumas they each went through. Hearing them talk about their own troubles was one of the reasons (possibly the only reason) I gained confidence to talk about my own. Another thing that made me love them even more was that during that time, in 2017-2018, there was still a lot of victim-blaming when it came to sexual assault and Georgia & Karen were one of the first women in my experience to be really outspoken and stand up for victims of sexual assault. Episode after episode, they would reiterate various things about how it’s never the victim’s fault – it is the assailant’s fault, it’s never about what you wear or do, you don’t ask for it, and it shouldn’t happen to you.

And that resonated a lot with me because from 2014 to the time I began listening to My Favorite Murder, I victim-blamed myself for being sexually assaulted.

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The premise of my sexual assault was that I cheated on my then-boyfriend at the time (2014). I told my then-boyfriend and my then-boyfriend said that it was okay - that he understood why I did it and I could continue seeing the other guy. I was 18 at the time, fresh out of high school, and out of my parent's house for the first time. Along with these factors, this was also my first relationship outside of high school - the "real world." I didn't know what was normal or not. I trusted him and what he said, thinking I was getting the best of both worlds. 

So, I continued seeing the guy. Lo and behold, my then-boyfriend was not okay with it. He began raping me. It started after a dinner celebration for my 19th birthday and occurred several more times afterwards. During the occurrences, I froze. I couldn't speak. I couldn't fight back. I was afraid of making him more upset and harming me further. Despite being in a home shared with multiple friends, despite having someone just a few feet away - down the hall, despite hearing their laughter and conversations right outside my bedroom door. I was going through the worst moments of my life.

To make matters worse, the "friend" that introduced me to my then-boyfriend back then told me one night, "Well what did you expect him to do?" That really hammered in the victim blaming. 

The rapes stopped when my then-boyfriend took me on a drive through Glendora Mountain Road - a canyon I used to enjoy driving through with him. During the drive back down the mountain, he began yelling at me endlessly. I couldn't take the yelling anymore and I attempted to jump out of the car as it was going down the mountain. He pulled me back in and apologized, ceasing the yelling. When we got to the bottom of the mountain, we got out of the car to talk and he asked me why I did that. I don't remember much of what was said then, but I remember that it was the moment that I realized I just tried to seriously hurt myself and I started crying. That was the moment that I knew something was really wrong. 

He took me back home and as I rushed to get out of his car, away from him, and back home, still crying, he followed me and said he had some of my things that he needed to give back to me. I shouted out, "If you follow me, I'm going to get a restraining order!" He stopped and left. 

To this day, I don't know where that came from. I don't know what specifically triggered me to have the courage to say that. As I mentioned before, my mind is a blur from that period. 

Although I don't remember the details - from that day, I didn't see him again (intentionally. There was one instance in which he unexpectedly showed up at my mother's house to try to give back my things [again] and I happened to be visiting my mother's for the weekend from college. It was traumatizing to say the least).

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I blamed myself for being sexually assaulted because of the circumstances surrounding it (me cheating) and also because I froze when it would happen. I had repeatedly blamed myself for not fighting back, for not shouting, for not doing anything and just “letting” it happen.

And it wasn’t until listening to Georgia and Karen repeatedly that I began believing that it was not my fault that I was raped. Their repeated advocacy for women and victims eventually got through to me – It is no one else’s fault except his. He is the one that did that to me. There could’ve been so many other things less damaging he could’ve done, but he chose to rape me repeatedly. He is the only one at fault. Yes, I cheated on him, but that doesn’t mean I deserve to be raped for it. No one deserves to be raped. No one should ever have to go through that kind of trauma – to lose the ability to control your body, to lose your autonomy, your freedom, and to constantly question yourself, your mind, and your body. No one deserves that. No one deserves to lose themselves like that. No one deserves to be haunted for the rest of their life like that.

And, from what I can recall, Georgia Hardstark and Karen Kilgariff were the women that woke me up and got me through it. They were the reason I started realizing how fucked up everything was.

It was from there that I began seeking other badass women. I read Disrupt-Her by Miki Agrawal, the founder of Tushy and Thinx, and was even more empowered by her experiences of being an Asian-American female entrepreneur in a world dominated by men and having to convince investors (mainly men) to invest in her products like Thinx – period panties. Her book, Disrupt-Her, also introduced me to the world of self-help and therapeutic coping mechanisms. If I’m recalling correctly, one of her “Disrupt-Her” methods in the book was to have a rubber band around your wrist and to snap it whenever you catch yourself in a negative thought about yourself or negative habit.

Though my memory is awful, these women are what I remember when it comes to the question of, “How did you get to be where you are today?” And to them – I hope they know just how amazing and inspiring they are just by being them and sharing their own stories.

Everyone’s story matters; no matter how small you may think yours is.