Sexual assault shattered a decade of my life when I should have been forming healthy attachments.
When I was little and watching Disney princess movies, I so distinctly remember wanting the stories to be entirely conflict-free. I didn’t want a parent to die, an evil stepmother, a tense quest to battle the dragons – I just wanted to watch the day in the life of the princess. Watch her wake up, make pancakes, get a head massage, play with her dogs, ride her horses. Just happiness. Screw adversity.
Beyond my innocent pancake days, as an adult storyteller I felt compelled by the writerly pull to step into the lava – the core of our suffering, and what can become the potential core of our transcendence. But I want to make it clear, sexual violence should never be linked to lofty statements of “things happen for a reason” and “there is a silver lining to everything”. Sexual assault is implicitly wrong, criminal and a heinous act of egregious male entitlement that destroys life.
I wanted the same gender who had so brutally violated my integrity to restore it. This was an agony I lived in for an appalling amount of my youth. What I didn’t realise the night of my West Hollywood epiphany was that acceptance was still an abstract concept. Denial still had its stronghold.became my calling. Jacs had been born and she was going to take me to my knees before I could stand back up again.
Then came the first draft of episode five. And, well, it all just started to come undone. I was in the lava. It scorched my skin and melted my flesh. I couldn’t run or hide. The drafts were due and I was forced to sit there and write through it. A fictionalised version of this life-shattering event. I was forced to face this irrevocable moment when I walked into the path of a male perpetrator. That it really had happened. That it really was horrific.
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