On Virginity And Me

[WARNING: Some graphic content/possible triggers]
I won't forget the day I lost my virginity. I won't forget that it was taken from me by a younger boy, nor will I forget the pregnancy and miscarriage that followed.
I won't forget the way it made me feel: I didn't recognize myself.
When I was browsing this blog about virginity in the queer/GLBT world, the phrase struck me like a sucker punch in an interview about BDSM.

BDSM and my virginity?! Holy hell. That threw me.

That's what I've been doing for the last ten years- I'm coming right up on the anniversary of the first rape now, it was a few days after Independence Day- trying to recognize myself again.

I was innocent. I won't ever get that back, I suppose. It's taken me almost the full decade to truly understand that some people genuinely go out looking for this sort of thing, which is sickening. I wanted to wait til I got married, if I ever got married. I didn't really want kids, and I wasn't sure I wanted marriage. I was fine being on my own, and I had big dreams. I was a unique kid, creating my own religion, as wrapped up in The Monkees and Shania Twain's early stuff (this was back in the mid- 90's) as I was with the Top 40 stuff on the radio. I was a racial minority as a "white" girl, until 2 years before I was raped.
I had just broken up with my boyfriend, a wonderful half-Puerto Rican boy four years my senior. We had dated for a year without having sex. A year at fourteen years old is a lifetime. I am still close to his family.

What happened after that?

I got into all sorts of things I shouldn't have. If we're being brutally honest, I don't remember half of those years. I remember my mother calling me a whore the moment she realized I was pregnant (the following morning, no less- I'd never seen mother's intuition so strong in that household). I remember the fights over getting an abortion- I refused the thought, she insisted, which wound up in a Mexican standoff in which I would not go anywhere near any medical facility with her, and mostly wouldn't leave the house with her at all. I think she even made me an appointment at one point, I never did go. I miscarried the baby alone one night. I had nightmares for the first time in the 3 or so months I was pregnant, and woke to find the house empty. I crawled into my mother's bed, and woke to find myself in a pool of blood. I cried, and later watched parts of my unborn child pass out of my body on their own. After that, Mom started throwing me out of her house, other times I'd get sick of the fighting, drinking, etc, and leave on my own. I started dating much older men to have a place to live when I was gone. I started drinking. My fear of anything harder than Smirnoff Ice may be the only thing that kept me from losing control completely. The heartburn from a couple six packs of that stuff was cruel. I was hospitalized for something every few months, thanks to good ol' Munchhausen's-by-proxy. I didn't recognize myself, and I only got farther into that problem.

A decade later, I'm sober, honest as I ever was, twice as difficult, and, well, on my way to being as hard-headed about my dealings with the opposite gender as I once was. I'll admit that being alone has not been my strong suit since. My behavior, at times, has reflected, almost eerily, that of Christina Ricci's character in Black Snake Moan. That knowledge is both terrifying and painful. It's interesting to see other folks' initial reactions to that movie. Non-rape-survivors tend to look dumbfounded and rather caught in a web of disbelief at this movie- and they generally do not care for the movie. Most survivors I know, though, can relate.

Maybe the peace I'm finding is simply me starting to recognize myself again.
Maybe I'm finally getting back to those big dreams I started so many years ago.
I will never forget every second I spent in the back of that little red Ford Fiesta-
but that doesn't mean I have to forget who I was before that.

Here's to survival.