Hi

I was googling for “can i write myself out of rape” and I found this article. Your article.

It’s been almost four years since I was running, almost four years since I heard myself say “I was dying”. He asked me, after, after you know what, that which I have not admitted to myself for years, he asked: “Where have you been?”. He asked it, because he saw me dissociate, a thousand yard stare, and I had no idea where my answer came from, because really, I wasn’t there. Four years of losing sanity, questioning the truth. I had tears running down my cheeks when I read your story, because it was almost a carbon copy of what I started putting on paper recently. Because I’m lost for a way out, and I keep hoping that by the time my notebook is filled, something will have changed in me.

It’s as if your experience, its outcome, validates mine, that what is happening is a real consequence of a real event, that it is not my “creative interpretation” as he said to me. Because for a long time, I wasn’t sure of my own existence. There were stickers on the bottom of the stairs in Berlin that said J’EXISTE, and I kept looking at them, transfixed on them, asking “Do I really?”, because those were the only things proving my existence.

Thank you for publishing this.