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Break the silence that surrounds sexual assault, sexual harassment, interpersonal violence, relationship abuse, stalking, hate crimes, and identity-based violence. Share your story here on our anonymous blog.

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Because this blog features stories of interpersonal and sexual violence, we offer this *content warning* as a way of caution. We also ask that you do not reproduce any of the content below, as the authors of these personal stories are anonymous, and cannot give consent for their stories to appear anywhere other than this blog or at a Project Dinah-led SpeakOut event.

Monday, October 10, 2011

So the story goes:

I was sexually assaulted by my best friend when we were both drunk at his fraternity's formal. That is the long and short of it. I didn't include a description of the incident, but instead a stream of consciousness about the feelings that came rushing back to me tonight. I have been debating posting on this blog for a long time, and this just seemed like a good moment for me to add to the conversation.

At first I blamed myself for the whole thing. I led him on, I was really drunk, what did I expect when he invited me to formal, I was silly to let this happen, I could have done more to stop it...

But then I realized that I told him NO. Not once, but multiple times. It was not my fault. And then I was mad. Really mad. I couldn't believe that my best friend had betrayed me like this. Even if I was drunk and he was drunk, there was no reason for him to have behaved like that. I couldn't stand to see him.

Then I ignored it. I pushed everything down. Ignored all the feelings that I had been having and rationalized the entire incident. He didn't mean to hurt me. It was just a mistake. It was nothing. It didn't mean anything. He still loves me. We can still be friends.

What's that quote? The worst lies are the ones that I tell myself...

And this was one of the biggest.

Current man friend doesn't even know this story. I think I'm scared to tell him because of the way he would react. Would he be on best friend's side and suddenly see me as dirty and less than what I was before. Or would he take my side and stand up as my protector, but then he still wouldn't see me the same way. I don't want to tell him.

But tonight. As I was talking to best friend for the first time in months, formal came up... And he apologized for the first real time (I had told him a month or so after the incident that he had really hurt me, I had told him no and what he didn't was not okay. Though I can't really tell you where that strength came from, it was nonetheless one of my better moments). And that apology just brought back rushing feelings of how I felt the days weeks and months after it happened.

This is not the time that I want to be dealing with this, but for the time being I do feel a bit better about myself and about him. I haven't fully forgiven him, and I don't know if I ever will be. I still have issues to work through, but tonight certainly helped.

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