Dear Friends and Followers on Substack,

It’s been 3 months since I’ve written anything. I don’t apologize for being silent because I needed that silence, that space. And to be honest, I couldn’t help it. But I do appreciate your patience through the quiet.

WHAT HAPPENED IN AFRICA IN THE MONTH OF AUGUST

Last time you heard, I was living my best life in Africa on a trip that was very special to me. I was so grateful to be there finally and the wildlife and landscapes were just breathtaking. I didn’t have a moment of disappointment or regret for all the time and energy and money spent on going to Africa.

Three months to this day though, I was drugged by my tour guides and violently raped for 3 ½ hours.

When I escaped, the only thing I could think of was getting back home. I was terrified they would force me to stay with the tour group and I left on the very next plane out of Namibia. I made it through 4 airports and 3 airplanes dragging my luggage and limping slowly. My boyfriend, David, rescued me in the Atlanta airport and my mom and sister were beyond relieved that I was safe on U.S. soil.

Saying this sounds…crazy. Far-fetched. Like something in a book or a dream that you wake up to and wonder if it was really real until of course no it wasn’t and then you go back to bed. But it happened and I’ve been dealing with the aftermath ever since.

WHY I COULDN’T WRITE (besides the obvious)

1. The first two weeks back were just super busy. I was in two different emergency rooms within three days of one another. I had to spend almost an entire day calling all the pharmacies in the area to see if they had the HIV prophylactic meds that had been subscribed to me. Apparently, there is a 72 hour window after possible contraction that you can take these meds and almost be guaranteed not to develop HIV. One med I finally found and I was at hour 68 when I took it. The other had to be ordered and I didn’t get it until 80 hours after. Worrying about contracting HIV on top of all of my other medical issues was a nightmare in and of itself.
2. I was in some sort of shock/adrenaline state and I spent an enormous amount of energy reaching out to different channels: the U.S. Embassy in Namibia, two different tour companies, the Namibian tourism board, NAMPOL (the Namibian police), CUMBEE and RAINN (sexual assault non-profit organizations), doctors and other medical personnel, my therapist and psychiatrist, the local police, etc. It was all made so complicated because I was an American, my rapist was South African, and the assault took place in Namibia.
3. I felt strange – like the event happened to someone else and yet to me too but I couldn’t feel how terrible it was yet.
4. 
   

   

   
   
   
5. This numbness and separateness enabled me to advocate for myself and get things done at a really crucial time. The adrenaline kept me going and everyone kept on commenting on how well I was doing “despite everything.” And I felt sort of…guilty because my loved ones honestly seemed more upset than I was at what had happened to me. I wondered if something was wrong with me – why wasn’t I being hysterical? Why wasn’t I crying? Why wasn’t I angry?
6. I was sick and hurt. It was very painful to sit, breathe, and walk after the assault, but these dissipated fairly quickly, which was a surprise. I was pretty certain he retore my left hip (which I’ve had surgery on) but on the outside, I looked and felt normal. But then the meds…oh my god. I was put on a heavy cocktail of antivirals, antibiotics, and HIV prophylactic meds and it felt like my insides were at war with one another. I just felt so sick for the two weeks I was on most of them (the HIV stuff I had to take for a month) that all I could really concentrate on was getting my body through the day and making sure I was doing everything I could from this side of the ocean to make sure the tour guides were prevented from harming anyone else. One of the tour companies and myself were both super worried about the 20-something year old female solo traveler who was still on the tour with them.

POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER (PTSD)

During the third week, I came down from my adrenaline high, and I realized very quickly I was not ok. Really not ok. My PTSD symptoms hit me like a bulldozer. I couldn’t go into a fucking grocery store without going into full-fledged panic mode. I had to have people at home babysit me because I was terrified of being alone, but on the other hand I didn’t want to talk to anybody and I wanted to isolate so no one could see me in the state I really felt but didn’t show. I got to where I couldn’t leave my home.

I couldn’t drink alcohol on my meds so I started drinking a whole pot of coffee instead – it was just a comfort thing. I didn’t want to sleep because of the dreams. Flashbacks tortured me, hijacking my brain constantly. I literally jumped at every little thing and my senses felt overloaded to max capacity. My forgetfulness became epic and my boyfriend thought I was getting early onset dementia because of my memory loss. My anxiety was through the roof and I was taking Valium every day. When I was by myself, the tears just wouldn’t stop. Every time I saw an African American male, I froze like a trapped rabbit and my brain freaked out begging me to run. And I’d feel so terribly guilty for thinking that way because obviously it has nothing to do with the color of their skin, but because an African man hurt me, my brain just couldn’t think about it rationally. I felt like I had two separate persons inside of me: the one who looked and talked normally and rationally and the one who was a raving devolving mess.

THE RESULTING DEPRESSION

When my PTSD symptoms escalated, my depression returned in full-force. I was so unbelievably tired, no matter how much sleep I got. I had zilch energy and absolutely no motivation to do anything and I was so angry with myself for not “getting over” things quicker. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t go on walks. I couldn’t do anything that made me me. I felt overwhelmingly sad at what happened and at how my life has ended up. I felt gypped that I was neither able to finish my trip nor think of the wonderful things I saw and experienced without feeling ruined. I had a job and an apartment lined up for when I returned home in September, but I had to give both of those up because I was too afraid to be alone. I quickly began to fall into feeling helpless and hopeless again, and suicidal ideation wasn’t super strong but it was beginning to poke it’s head through, which terrified me. My self-esteem (which has never been high) plummeted again and I just hated, hated myself.

So, I put myself back into PHP (Partial Hospitalization Program), which is a full-time/all-day group therapy program.

It was really rough for a while there I’m not going to lie. I was in and out of PHP for 6 months out of last year and from January to August of this year I finally felt like I had improved and started to create a life again for myself. Only, a full year hadn’t even passed until another traumatic event smashed me into a million broken shards. I didn’t have the energy to piece myself together again, because what was the point? God or the universe hated me for some reason I couldn’t fathom and there was nothing left in me to fight the impossible. I was lost once again in dark, dark thoughts, spiraling dangerously lower and lower.

When you get that low in depression, it’s hard to see any light. It’s hard to breathe, because there’s no oxygen that far down. It’s hard to remember the good or be grateful for the fact that you’ve survived to this point because honestly it would just be so much easier to give up. It would be such a relief to just not hurt anymore, to have to fight anymore. Death feels like a solution, an answer to the pain, and why do people get so much in arms over it? The lower you spiral the more tantalizing death becomes. People who have never experienced depression like this or life-altering trauma cannot understand the despair and desperation of those of us who have. You just have to trust us when we try to explain.

TRYING TO MAKE SENSE OF IT ALL

When I was still in my numb/shock state, I kept on wondering why I wasn’t more emotional (lesson learned: embrace the numbness after trauma for as long as you can – who cares if something is wrong with you). I kind of wondered if it was just because it was “one more thing.” Hell, I’ve already survived so much in my 39 years. The last ten years of my life have been especially fraught with pain and suffering and seemingly one crisis after another, most if not all of them completely out of my control and not a fault of my own.

You might as well add being raped to the list.

While I recognize that this is not…the best way to view what happened and it didn’t end up helping me with my PTSD symptoms anyway, I think a better perspective to have is that because I’ve faced so many things in my life, I am more resilient and quicker to bounce back. Because of all the resulting therapy, I have more tools in my back pocket, and I recognize when I need help.

WHAT BROUGHT ME BACK THIS TIME

My loved ones have been beyond supportive and loving and patient with me. I truly cannot thank them enough. They have made me feel safe and loved, and they remind me that I am worth fighting for. Going to PHP and working with my old therapist Jon (the Kung Fu Panda guy I’ve mentioned in my other posts) has been super helpful and I am so thankful I was able to go to PHP for 6 weeks. I know a lot of people diss therapy, but it has literally saved my life on numerous occasions now. I learn so much, which I’ll share in just a moment.

One of the things that has helped me the most this time around though is that I finally have a service dog. I take her with me everywhere now, and while she is not fully trained yet, we are working with an amazing company and dog trainer to get her (and me!) to where we need to be. She has already passed Phase 1 (of 3)!

Petunia already helps me with my PTSD by settling my anxiety and making me feel safe. She has given me the freedom to go outside of my home again, and function semi-normally. She helps me too with my depression by making me care for something more than myself and how I feel and by making me smile again at her silly antics. Eventually she will also help me with my EDS, like being able to retrieve my phone when I fall and things like that.

WHAT I’M STILL WORKING ON/EXPERIENCING

Just because I’m finally writing about what happened does NOT mean that I am all better. I have a lot of work to do going forward and a lot of painful moments still to come. I think I CAN say that I am safely out of the very real possibility of this event killing me though and for that I am grateful.

I am still struggling with:

• Having flashbacks. These are insidious and still bring me to my knees. They always come when I am triggered by something, but they come too at the most inopportune times, weird times, times that they should not. It is disturbing and distressing and I think they make me dissociate (though thank God I haven’t had any dissociative seizures this time around!). I can be having a conversation with my sister about Christmas presents and suddenly I am thrown back into a memory of being dragged back onto the bed. Or I can be talking with my grandmother and I suddenly think about my rapist threatening and choking me. It’s….maddening and uncontrollable. I wear a rubber band now so that when a flashback comes, I snap the rubber band hard against my wrist and it helps ground me and get me out of that moment.
• Taking long walks. I don’t want to go to an empty place because that would be unsafe, but I also don’t like going to a busy place because I feel unsafe, go figure. Petunia helps but I still have to take a Valium just to do something that I miss and really need.
• Being around a lot of people and being in public. I don’t know how to explain why I feel so anxious. Perhaps it’s the chaos and noise and not feeling in control of my environment. Perhaps it’s because I don’t want any attention whatsoever…that I want to be invisible. When people notice me I feel like somehow they know and are judging me (though logically, I don’t know what they’d be judging me for). It’s also hard because I don’t like feeling like I can’t trust anyone now and I hate living in fear. But this is definitely where I am still at.
• Being around African American men. Men in general, but especially black men, will send me into a panic if they get too close to me or sit beside me or speak to me with an African accent. The other day I almost called the cops on the poor guy who serves as our pest control person. He wouldn’t leave the porch and the dogs were going insane and I didn’t see his truck and my peek out the window showed that he was a big African American man and I just about lost my mind. Right when I started to call 911, David called me and gently reminded me that the guy on the porch camera was here to exterminate bugs (and not me) and all he needed to do was walk around the outside of the house. Please don’t let the dogs out to shred him to pieces or call the cops on him because then we’d lose him and we really need him. I felt so embarrassed.
• Existing with my self-esteem. While I am no longer feeling like I deserved what happened to me or that I am not worth saving and I secretly wish I had just died that night and saved everybody the trouble, I do still find it difficult to be patient with myself. To love myself. To not feel tainted and ugly. To believe that I am just as worthy as anyone else to be alive and to thrive and to experience good things in my life. It sounds so stupid for me to say stuff like this out loud, but these are things my brain really thinks.
• Living with new pain in my lower back and pelvis. Unfortunately, I think the man who hurt me also damaged my lower back and pelvis. It was weird because after the initial week of pain and physical recovery, I actually had almost two months where I didn’t struggle as much with my chronic body pain. I think my brain was so focused on the trauma of being raped and surviving that that it couldn’t prioritize my physical pain and so my brain just ignored it. Now that I am feeling better mentally and emotionally though, the pain has come back in force. I’ve always had problems in my mid to upper back but now my low back, hip, and pelvis are also giving me problems. I constantly feel like my legs are just going to give out underneath me and I have fallen five times in the past week and a half.
• The day that I had one of my MRIs, the tech asked me if I felt any pain and I just snorted/laughed ungracefully. While the ticking and the jackhammering of the MRI took pictures I thought I really should be able to describe my pain in ways that people can understand besides for a stupid number scale.
• I came up with being a live fish who has just been caught and cleaned. The knife slides under my left rib (which is when my left rib subluxates and feels like it’s puncturing an organ). Then I am filleted (describing the muscle spasms on both sides of my spine which, at times are so tight that the dry needles my physical therapist uses bend and can’t pierce me). And finally, I feel like my lower spine is punched, and the person filleting me tears my whole spine out of me from the bottom up (representing my lower back/pelvis pain). Lovely, eh? That’s a better picture than saying the number 6.5 or 7, right?

LESSONS I LEARNED AND AM LEARNING

• Living in paradox.
• Understanding locus of control.
• Being intentional.
• Not being defined by my trauma and victim story.
• Having unhealthy vs. healthy vs. false guilt.
• Recognizing you are your own therapist. Understanding yourself.
• Having awareness of why we do what we do.
• Losing attachment.
• Understanding what a Map of Reality, filters and confirmation bias have in common.
• Suffering vs. pain.
• Understanding slow is fast, fast is slow when it comes to healing.
• Focusing on human being vs. human doing.
• Deep breathing.
• Realizing what normal brain and body responses to stress/trauma are.
• Keeping in mind restricted words: but, try, should.
• Understanding content vs. context.
• Understanding where our symptoms come from.
• Navigating relationships.
• Figuring out who am I and where do I want the direction of my life to go?
• Accepting vs. resisting.
• Pinpointing pain and distress levels.
• Doing away with should statements.
• Gathering types of coping skills.
• Finding different types of self-care.

I told you I learned a lot in PHP! I hope these sound like interesting topics because moving forward, these are all things that I am going to write about in the coming months. When I write about them, it helps me to process them fuller, organize them better in my brain, and keep them present and active. But I also write because I am hoping that something will resonate with someone else out there. That the help and the therapy I’ve been given will be accessible to those who can’t get this kind of therapy. We’re all on a journey and life is just hard. The reality is, all of us have faced some sort of trauma in our lives. We all need therapy (just some of us more than others, haha!). Here’s to working hard at supporting each other in this thing called life. ;)

Keep on keeping on, friends.

ps. If you are suffering from PTSD and are in distress, please Call or Text 988. You can also chat online with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. There IS help.