TRIGGER WARNING: Strong references to rape and sexual assault.
There is a version of my story I’ve never been able to say out loud — a version that lived in my bones, in the tremor of my hands, in the way my heartbeat changed for years. And I’m done carrying it in silence.
If you’re wondering why I’m speaking now, after so long, it’s because time didn’t heal anything. Time only pushed the truth into corners I wasn’t strong enough to look at yet. I didn’t have the language then. I didn’t have the clarity. My body shut down so I could survive, and it took years before I could truly hear myself again.
I’m speaking now because I finally can. Because the truth didn’t disappear — it sat inside me, heavy and demanding. This isn’t for you. This is for the version of myself who didn’t know how to speak.
You were someone I trusted. Someone I cared for. Someone I believed would protect me. And instead, you became the reason I no longer felt safe in my own skin.
What happened wasn’t a misunderstanding. It wasn’t something that could be softened with excuses. It was rape — a sexual violation carried out without my consent, without my agreement, without even the smallest acknowledgement of my humanity.
You acted without asking.
Without pausing.
Without checking whether I wanted anything that was happening.
You took silence — my frozen, shocked silence — and treated it as permission.
I didn’t agree.
I didn’t understand what was happening until it had already happened.
I didn’t have a chance to speak or breathe or say no.
And after crossing a boundary you had no right to cross, you walked away like you hadn’t shattered something fundamental inside me.
Then you disappeared. For months.
You said you needed time “for your own peace,” as if leaving the wreckage you caused was self-care.
As if my life wasn’t collapsing while you enjoyed your distance.
What you left behind wasn’t confusion — it was devastation.
My body felt foreign.
My mind became a battlefield.
Sleep turned into nights where my heartbeat wouldn’t settle.
You weren’t there when panic attacks took over my life — full-body collapses, chest tightness, electricity under my skin, my vision narrowing until nothing made sense.
Some nights, the floor was the only place I could breathe.
Then came the neurological fallout — the violent body twitching, the doctors with no answers.
Anti-seizure medications.
Antidepressants.
A nervous system trying to survive what you did.
Then came IBS — my entire gut shutting down under the weight of trauma.
Food became unsafe.
My body rejected everything.
I lost weight, strength, stability.
I grieved the body I once had, the senses I used to trust.
Trauma rewrites you.
And I had to learn to live inside a version of myself I never asked for.
And what makes it worse?
I gave you everything.
Gifts I couldn’t afford, effort I didn’t owe you, care you never returned.
After surgery, the first thing I did was look for you.
You did nothing for me.
Nothing.
And somehow, I still tried.
For months, I couldn’t enter crowds.
Couldn’t stand in queues.
Couldn’t exist in public without my chest tightening.
My world shrank to my room, my bed, my fear.
And where were you?
Not checking in.
Not reaching out.
Not asking if I was alive.
You vanished “for your peace,” leaving me with the consequences of your choices.
Therapists — the ones who stayed when you didn’t — named what you did.
They called it what it was: sexual assault.
Not an accident.
Not confusion.
A violation of trust, boundaries, and consent.
And I’m still in therapy today, rebuilding what you fractured.
You didn’t make a mistake.
You made a choice.
A choice I carried alone for years while you walked away untouched.
You left me to relearn safety.
To calm a nervous system that remembered what you did every single day.
To rebuild a sense of self you broke.
And still — I survived. Not because of you.
But because the people who truly loved me held me together when you abandoned me.
Let me make this clear:
There is nothing you can say, do, or explain that could ever justify what you did. No apology could fix it. No story you tell yourself changes the truth.
The only thing you can do is pray that I find peace — peace I deserved from the start.
And yes… I forgave you. But not for your sake.
For mine.
Forgiveness was the only way to stop burning myself alive with anger.
It wasn’t redemption for you.
It was survival for me.
My brother became the protector you never were.
My best friend held my fear when you pretended it didn’t exist.
The people you dismissed saved me.
You will never understand the damage — because you never stayed long enough to see it.
You ran for your comfort while I stayed fighting for my life.
I’m not writing this for you.
Not for closure.
Not for reaction.
Not for anything.
I’m writing this because my truth deserves space in the world.
Because my silence deserves to break.
Because this story no longer belongs locked inside my body.
Specialists later explained the dysregulation, the panic, the neurological chaos — the kind that happens after sexual trauma.
But of course you weren’t there.
You were resting.
Recovering.
Finding peace.
While I was fighting to stay alive.
I hope, in whatever life you’re living now, you understand that a girl in this world suffered because of you — that she survived through therapy, medication, grounding techniques, panic logs, and sheer will… while you walked away untouched.
I don’t want your guilt.
I don’t want your reflection.
I don’t even want your humanity.
Because the truth is simple:
I don’t care what your version of the story is.
My God knows what happened.
And I know what happened in that room.
Your narrative changes nothing.
You broke me.
You left.
And I rebuilt myself — without you.
You crossed a boundary you never had the right to touch.
You walked away.
And I’m the one who survived the storm you created.
The betrayal followed me into everything.
I stopped trusting.
I questioned everyone.
I doubted myself.
I became a target for people who sensed my vulnerability, including boys who mocked and humiliated me — harm made easier because of the void you left behind.
And after everything, I still asked if you would marry me.
Partly because of the culture we lived in — a society that does not accept a woman who has gone through sexual assault, seeing her as “filth” or “damaged.”
Marriage felt like my last resort, the only way to protect myself from being rejected by the world around me.
I wanted to believe someone who violated me might at least take responsibility.
But you didn’t.
You left.
You offered nothing.
Then you rewrote the story, as if I walked away.
As if you didn’t hand me abandonment wrapped as “peace.”
It was then I realised the truth:
If someone who violated me could walk away from responsibility… who could I ever trust?
This story isn’t for you.
It’s for me.
For my voice.
For my life.
For the truth that finally gets to breathe.
