Rape survivors should reflect on ‘who am I really?’
“Years ago, Oprah had a show about rape survivors, incest survivors, all these tragedies. They talked about how this is just today. Tomorrow is a new day, and there is hope. I remember thinking that way as a child. This is just today. One day I won’t live here. I’ll survive this abuse from my father.
“You have that hope for things being better the next day. And that’s really what helps many people survive and transcend. But I’ve added to that whole thought process.
“One day, for some reason, I thought, who am I really? Am I somebody who is constantly going to look at someone and think he’s the guy who attacked me or the guy who raped me? Am I going to continually encounter people and put up a shield?
“And what I realized was that when something happens in your life — while it can be for just a minute or, unfortunately for some victims, it can last years — it’s still a very short period in God’s time. In reality, you have so much more life to live. So are you going to spoil the rest of your life by carrying that instance when you were victimized?
“Sure, you need to go through the whole process of grieving and acknowledging, then accepting and moving on. But then you should ask yourself, who am I really? Am I a gun-toting mama? Am I going to allow those instances to change the type of person that God made me to be? That’s what it all came back to for me, when I realized that those things don’t have power over me because I’m God’s child.
“So what I would ask others to do is think about who you were before that tragic event. What kind of person were you? How did you feel? Then try to get back to that, enjoying life again without feeling fear or sorrow or all of these different emotions. Deal with what happened. But then be the person that you were meant to be. Don’t carry that trauma with you and let it poison the rest of your life. You can let it go. You can just walk away from it and leave it back there. From my experience, from what I went through, it is very much possible.”
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