Facing my past

Rick Warren (author) once wrote "we are a product of our past but we don't have to be prisoners of it". I think this is very true.

I know I am who I am today because of my upbringing and experiences and that I have been influenced by those who surround me.

For example I know to buy bigger gussett knickers so my tena lady don't drop off in Tesco (see earlier blog!) and I know that when a date went horribly wrong in my youth and the boy tried to rape me that it's only natural to feel the way I do about it.

Whew, that feels better. It's not something I've shared with anyone really. Just close family. It's only something I've admitted to myself in the last year. I always used to call it "my close shave" or "my lucky escape" - I never EVER used the term attempted rape, NEVER - until now, some 19 years later.

A few years ago I was reading a newspaper article featuring an excerpt from Ulrika Johnsons autobiography, as many thousands of people would have done I suppose. I remember sitting at the dining room table and just shaking. She was describing a certain night in a hotel room and WHAM it hit me. My close shave or lucky escape had similarities to her experience. My husband came through and I think I must have been white as a sheet and asked me what was wrong - and I told him, just like that - the first person to hear about it since it had happened over a decade before. Not in detail, just that I'd had something similar. He hugged me but I'm not sure the full implications of what I'd said sunk in, or perhaps because I'd not told him details it wasn't real, but if felt so much better just to say it out loud.

I had a friend coming to stay as well that weekend, who knew me at the time it happened, and I told her, again no details, just that the date had gone wrong and he'd tried to take what was not freely offered. And I told my mum. Again, sense the theme, no details just a date gone wrong. I was still, in my mind, calling it "my lucky escape" - after all he didn't rape me. I made the excuse nothing really happened. But it had. Something had happened. He frightened me, he threatened me, he used force & when consent was not forthcoming he tried to take what he wanted anyway.

And then came the tv programme Army Wives. I'd sky +'d it and was watching it on my own while hubby was working on the computer. I wasn't expecting it, I wasn't prepared for it but all of a sudden what had happened to me was being played out on the tv screen in almost identical detail. It happened so quickly and looked so violent and most importantly for me, they called it what it was - attempted rape. I was absolutely stunned and felt sick. I called hubby through and asked him to sit with me and watch something, and then I replayed that scene. When it ended I paused the programme and said "that's what happened to me". I asked him whether what he'd seen on the programme was how he'd imagined it. It wasn't. He hadn't realised it was as physical or as violent. And then he hugged me.

I go months and months without thinking about it. But then bam, I see something, I read something and I'm back there in that room, scrabbling about on the floor trying to get him off me.

I am a very positive person. I am a very trusting person and I acknowledge that I am quite naive. I know that and I'm ok with that - I like me!. But that night changed me. Acknowledging what happened to me has changed me. I always, always, ALWAYS trust my instincts now - and I always act on them. That night I knew something wasn't right but I didn't listen and came so close to paying a very hefty price.

I am lucky. I'm certainly not the only one to have ever gone through this. I'm not a victim. I am a product of my past, but I am not a prisoner of it and that's the way it should be.

Now about those wide gussett knickers :0)