In the fall after I graduated from high school, my parents drove me to New Haven and moved me into my dorm on Old Campus, where all freshmen lived. I was in a fifth-floor walk-up in a quad with three other young women. I met my roommates, nice enough girls I would get along well with. My dad bought me a small blue love seat for the common room that he and another father hauled up those five flights. My mom made my bed with brand-new sheets and helped me unpack. We went out to dinner before they headed to Nebraska, where they were moving once again. It all seemed very normal. Before we parted, they wished me luck and encouraged me to work on my problem, my weight of course, and then I was on my own once more.
I have no doubt my parents were afraid to leave me at another school. The last time they did that, I gained a massive amount of weight. I’m sure they were terrified of what would happen in college, of how much bigger I could get. They didn’t worry about drinking or drugs because they already knew my chosen vice. Still, they believed in the importance of education, and I think they hoped that I had some sense of self-preservation, that I would embrace the opportunity I was being given and would want to lose weight so I could be more like other girls, so I could be smaller and therefore better.
Having attended boarding school, living on campus for the first two years, I didn’t have any of the typical growing pains associated with going to college. I knew how to take care of myself on a campus, or at least how to make it seem like I was taking care of myself.
But I struggled, a lot more than I had in high school. I had acquaintances but no one with whom I felt I could be honest about myself. I was unraveling so much more because there was far less supervision. There were far more temptations and ways to spend my time. New Haven, Connecticut, is a very different city from Exeter, New Hampshire, much bigger, urban, with a diverse population. There was so much more food available to me, both on and off campus—I loved going to Atticus, part bookstore, part café, with delicious salads and sandwiches. I rarely went to class, and when I was in class, little made sense. A biology teacher informed us that it was his mission to weed out the wannabes from the students who were destined to become doctors. I was weeded out, quite efficiently, because the workload was outrageously demanding. There were labs and homework and lab reports to be written according to very strict guidelines. In Calculus III, the math was so complex, so esoteric, it was almost amusing. The professor may as well have been speaking another language.
I changed my major three times in two years, from premed and biology to architecture to English. Meanwhile, I spent most of my time doing theater, as I had in high school. I never tired of being responsible for the quiet choices behind the scenes that make the theatrical spectacle work.
My days and nights were spent backstage at the Yale Dramat and in the theaters of the colleges (or dorms, anywhere else) across campus. I built sets and painted flats and ran soundboards and hung lights. One time, I accompanied a faculty adviser to a private school in Massachusetts to procure a chain-link fence that we’d use during the final scenes of West Side Story. I designed the set for a small college production and served as a technical director for a show in the experimental theater. I was able to forget about school, about my family, about my misery, when I worked on shows. When I was backstage or in the set shop or up on the catwalk, there were things that needed to be done and I knew how to do them. Being useful was a balm.
25
That summer when I was nineteen years old marked the beginning of my lost years, and my lost years began with the Internet. When my sophomore year ended, I moved into an apartment above a small specialty grocer with an acquaintance. We weren’t especially close, but at the outset, we were friendly enough to believe we could live together.
When I started college, my parents gave me a computer, a Macintosh LC II and a modem. The computer and modem were, purportedly, to help me with my studies, but really, I used them to chat with strangers all around the world on bulletin boards and in chat rooms and on IRC, an old-school chat program with thousands of channels populated by thousands of lonely people who were mostly interested in talking dirty to one another.
I spent most of my waking hours online, talking to strangers. I didn’t have to be the fat, friendless loser who couldn’t sleep, which is how I saw myself. I became immersed in the anonymity, and in the ability to present myself to others as I saw fit. I lost myself in feeling connected to other people for the first time in seven years. Being online offered a very particular and desperately needed thrill.
Throughout high school, I had no romantic life to speak of. I was too awkward, too shy, too much of a mess to date. I was invisible to the boys at my high school because of my blackness, because of my size, because of my complete indifference toward my appearance. Because I read so much, I was a romantic in my heart of hearts, but my desire to be part of a romantic story was a very intellectual, detached one. I liked the idea of a boy asking me out, taking me on a date, kissing me, but I did not want to actually be alone with a boy, because a boy could hurt me.
The men I talked to online allowed me to enjoy the idea of romance and love and lust and sex while keeping my body safe. I could pretend to be thin and sexy and confident.
I discovered forums for rape and sexual abuse survivors, where, as with when I read The Courage to Heal, I saw that I was not alone. In those online forums, I saw that horrible things happened to so many girls and sometimes boys. I saw that however bad my secret was, many people had far worse secrets.
In IRC chat rooms, I talked to people in the BDSM community, and I learned about safe, sane, and consensual sexual encounters, where power was exchanged, but you could have a safe word to make things stop when you wanted them to stop. I learned that there were people who would take the right kind of no as no, and that was powerful, intoxicating. I wanted to know so much more about safe ways to say no.
I had a more expansive vocabulary, now, for what happened in the woods. At twelve years old, I had no such words. I just knew that these boys had forced me to have sex with them, had used my body in ways I did not know a girl body could be used. Thanks to books and therapy and my new friends online, I knew ever more clearly that there was a thing called rape. I knew that when a woman said no, men were supposed to listen and stop what they were doing. I knew that it wasn’t my fault that I had been raped. There was a quiet thrill to having this new vocabulary, but in many ways, I did not feel like that vocabulary could apply to me. I was too damaged, too weak to deserve absolution. It was not as easy to believe these truths as it was to know them.
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