A warning- this post may be triggering to some.

Contains: Details of Rape

No matter how hard I tried, The universe refused to let me hide from myself.

My parents got divorced April 16 2020 after almost 26 years of marriage.

Let’s just say they were not handling it ideally.

Over the years they have found all of the ways to push each other's buttons but still couldn’t learn a way to actually communicate in a healthy and helpful manner.

They were acting like teenagers, immature, dramatic, and hurtful to one another, mentally.

My mom has been living here in St. Louis for the past year. She lived with Austin and I for a little while at first and eventually bought a house of her own. My stepdad has been living with a woman and has still not been able to be honest about who she is to him. It is a whole clusterf*ck of lies and dishonesty and sh*t that will have to be saved for a post entirely devoted to the debacle that is the last year. This post is only slightly about them but more so about me.

I love them both very much and hope for all the happiness in their life.

June 8th.

I texted my mom to see what she was up to. She had told me she was out to eat with my stepdad.

I told her that I was planning on coming over to her house for a little bit and that it would be nice to see my stepdad since it had been quite some time since I had seen him last.

Just so you know, this is the man who raised me since I was 4 years old and I am forever grateful for him no matter what.

I made my way over to her house once I knew they were home from the restaurant. I arrive and there they are, sitting under the gazebo together with their dogs all running around.

You would think this sight would have brought me joy. Honestly I would have thought the same thing. That wasn’t the case. The last year was stressful to say the least.

I sat with my parents for four hours under that gazebo. It is the most honest communication I have had with them in years, if ever. Talking with my stepdad is always interesting. He has this way of smirking that pretty much says “yeahhhhh, okay. You don’t know what you are talking about”, Which is unbelievably frustrating.

I have learned so much about life by unlearning quite a bit of what was taught to me by my parents.

Anyways.

Somehow the conversation turned political. We ended up talking about where taxpayers' dollars actually go. My stepdad then brought up Planned Parenthood and how our money funds abortions. To which I stopped dead in my tracks and told him “That’s weird because the government didn’t pay for mine, I paid for it myself”. He kinda just stopped and looked confused. I knew what he meant but I also knew he was wrong. I had heard this rhetoric numerous times and I had enough. I will admit, probably not the best way to have that conversation with my stepdad but it is what it is.

The subject was quickly changed after that.

My mother, who this whole time my stepdad and I were talking was going through her phone looking at old pictures of “the happier” times in their life, had no clue the conversation my stepdad and I just had.

The time spent there that day with my parents taught me a lot. The more I tried to help them communicate together the more I was learning how to communicate in general.

Fast forward to June 19th

I went to the laundromat and put our (my fiancé and I) clothes in the washer and headed back home to eat breakfast with him before he went to work. When I arrived back at my house, Jenna (my sister) called me and we talked for about 5 minutes. I told her he and I were about to eat and that I would call her back.

I got done eating and went back to the laundromat and switched my clothes to the dryer. I went on a walk to pass the time before I went and picked up my clothes to take home and fold.

After all of my clothes were folded and put away (<-- I am trying to get better about immediately putting my clothes away and not letting them sit out for the remainder of the week) I called my sister back.

We were talking for a few minutes before she stopped and said “You’re never going to guess who just pulled up to my apartment!”.

I knew who it was. It was my stepdad. My parents' lives felt like they were consuming my life.

I could hear him telling her to “call your mom and tell her to give me my stuff back”.

To which Jenna responded with a “Hello, Hi”. (As in da fuq you just spring all this on me and not at least say hello to your daughter)

I could hear him saying “She took my phone and my wallet, so I need you to call her so I can get them back”.

Still on the phone with her I quickly started to grab my belongings and then told her “You handle that, I will go get his stuff from mom’s”.

During the past year my sister and I have found it more and more important to work on our relationship as sisters and let me tell ya, we are a solid team.

I grabbed my keys and fanny pack and headed out the door only to realize my car was not there.

My fiancé's car was in the shop so he had been using mine. This tidbit of information seemed to have slipped my mind. I, at this time, was on the phone with my mother, who was crying and upset. “F*ck it”, I thought. I’ll walk.

It is only 1.4 miles from my house to my mothers so I knew I could do it, easy peasy.

So there I was walking in the 91 degrees hot June sun to be there for her.

(I am still learning to be there for people but also create boundaries.)

Finnnnnally, I got to her house. My step dad's belongings on her porch. Petty.

I asked her what had happened and told her she can’t take someone's belongings like that.

She filled me in on why she was upset and we talked about it for probably 25-30 minutes before she randomly asked me “Did you have an abortion?”

I remember thinking well that is a weird segway but ooookay.

“Yes”. I told her.

Then she responded with something that made my heart drop to my stomach.

“Was it K***e’s?”

This name, I have removed from my vocabulary because attached to it is a memory that for years I tried to forget.

I told her “No” and asked her “why would you think that?”.

She told me my stepdad had asked about my abortion and had asked her if it was K****’s.

My mind was blown. Only a few people knew who that person was to me, my parents not included.

I sat there and knew that the universe was giving me a choice. A choice to share my story with my mother or to continue keeping this trauma inside.

I took a deep breath and told her the truth.

I told her how the man whose name they brought back into my life after 13 years was the person who raped me when I was 18. [Long before my abortion.]

She asked me where it happened and immediately retracted with “you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to”.

I sat there and told my mother the secret only few knew. Where the 18 yr old me felt I would have been greeted with shame from my mother all those years ago, at 30 I was greeted with love.

I am going to share my story. I am sharing it for the 18 year old Jessie who never got a chance to process this trauma. Who stuffed it down and pretended it never happened because, at the time, she thought that would be easier.

Here I am almost 31. Knowing it was not.

So here we go.

It is about to get personal.

I was pretty tame back in highschool. I didn’t lose my virginity until Thanksgiving break my senior year. Now don’t get me wrong I was exploring other sexual acts. I went to a small school whose sexual ed class was to wheel out the tv and pop in the most outdated video on sexual education and call it a day. I don’t remember my parents ever having a talk with me about sex other than “save yourself until marriage” so had to learn on my own.

Parents- talk to your children about sex. Yes, it might be uncomfortable but it is better to learn from you than by themselves. Trust me.

I partied in high school. I am from a small town in central Illinois, there wasn’t much else to do.

I remember my junior and senior year drinking at a few friends' houses, their parents had the “teenagers are going to drink anyways, I’d rather it be under our roof” mentality. Looking back, that seems like such a strange concept to me. To an extent, they were probably right.

It wasn’t until my senior year that I really partied at Millikin, the local University in Decatur.

When I graduated high school in the May of 2007 my parents moved to Springfield and I got an apartment with a friend from work named Jenna (not my sister).

I went to a lot of parties that summer.

One party in particular this guy seemed to take an interest in me.

We had both gone to Warrensburg. He was in my sister and step brother’s grade. He was four years older than I was but I had known him for years. Him and my step brother played basketball together and he had been to our house a few times. He was someone I thought I could trust.

He asked me if I wanted to go hang out at his house. I, freshly 18 and naive, agreed. He took me to his mom’s house where he had turned her basement into his own living space.

I knew his mom. She had worked at Walmart and was one of the nicest ladies. She knew my sister from being in the same class as her son so she always talked to me and my family whenever we would see her out and about.

For as many years as I have tried to suppress this memory, yet it is still so vivid in my head.

We snuck into his house and went downstairs where he showed me around his “pad”. I remember finding something to watch on tv and then he kissed me.

The following may be triggering for some to skip scroll down until you see the line of asterisks like the ones shown here:

****************************************

We started making out and he was moving really fast. It was like as soon as we started kissing he wanted to f*ck.

I pushed him away and he kept kissing me. I remember him pulling my pants down and me trying to clench my knees together as hard as I could. I remember pushing him away and telling him “no” to which he responded with “c’mon you’re gonna like it you have to trust me” as he pried my knees apart bruising my thighs when he pinned me down.

I turned my head to the side and cried softly until he finished. Luckily for me, it didn’t take him that long. I pretended to be asleep until he passed out and then snuck out of the house.

****************************************

I sat outside for hours waiting until morning. I sat out there, tears down my face, and chain smoked cigarettes.

I knew my roommate would be getting up for work around 5 a.m. She came and got me and I told her what happened on the way home.

I kept thinking of how I let this happen. How ashamed my parents would be if they knew I put myself in this position. I remember thinking no one is going to believe me. He’s this prominent basketball player at Millikin, and I’m this girl who just graduated high school who should have known better. So I kept it hidden from the world.

Years later I told my sister and then finally after 13 years I told my mom and stepdad.

It is interesting how I felt the need to keep that trauma to myself. I didn’t want to tell my family, I didn’t want them to be ashamed of me.

That’s what I, at 18, thought was shameful and thought that it was my cross to bear.

That it was somehow my fault. I should have known better?!

How should I have known better?

HE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER.

When a girl is saying “no” and physically clenching her body and you pry her legs open and force yourself on her, it is rape.

Trust me I have had enough consensual sex to know the difference between consensual sex and rape.

I never really processed this happening to me. I have held it inside as it burned at my core.

Only about 1 month after being raped I met Daniel. The whole situation with Daniel is what you call a worst case scenario. You date someone for 2-3 months and then they do something red flaggish and you leave them, and then now they have unleashed this level of crazy you have never seen before. The “If I can’t have you, nobody can” attitude. Which is terrifying.

Imagine graduating high school, three months later you are raped by someone you trusted. A month after that, you meet a guy who seems nice. You date for a few months and then when you break up he gets extremely violent and tries to kill you. This is all within 7 months of graduating high school.

When I look back at what I went through it is honestly no wonder why I wanted to get f*cked up so badly.

I didn’t have the mindset at 18 that I have now at almost 31 to heal from those traumas. So I “healed” them my own way.

Drugs, Alcohol, and Sex.

Along with those came the anxiety and depression at a full blown level.

I have done all I could to never confront my demons and yet here we are 13 years later and the universe is making me confront them head on. Which is fine, I have spent too much time avoiding them.

I have lived in my trauma for years without claiming my story as my own.

Hidden secrets about myself that few knew due to shame for something that happened to me that was terrible, awful, traumatizing maybe but definitely not something to feel ashamed about.

When I had the conversation with my fiance about being raped he was quiet afterwards and then said how it seemed almost every woman he knew had a story like mine.

Why in our society is rape so normalized. Why is rape not considered a heinous crime. It is often treated like normal behavior, along with sexual assault and sexual harassment.

Why is that?

Why is it 2020 and we still don’t believe women and side with the rapists. Making every excuse to why/how a woman could have avoided being raped instead of focusing on the real issue of why someone feels that they can rape someone. Probably because they know they have a pretty good chance of never having any repercussions for their actions.

I want to be part of a world who lifts up its survivors not shames its victims.

A world where boys and girls are taught that “no means no” and that it doesn’t mean to keep being persistent until you get your way.

A world where women come forward and are heard, not silenced.

I am sharing my story so that if anyone is feeling the weight of keeping their trauma a secret for only them to carry, that it is okay to talk about it.

Growing up, in my family, we never talked about the hard parts of life and here I am 13 years later sharing mine with you in hopes I can save you some time.

It felt like design the way the universe brought this trauma back into my life. Giving me a choice: Do I stuff it back down and continue down this path or do I use this as an opportunity to own who I am, trauma and all. To not hide any part of me because throughout all the hard times in life I have experienced so much joy.

That day when I told my mom that I was raped I remember her driving me back home and it was like I was in a state of Euphoria. My soul felt cleansed.

I could feel that demon releasing my shoulders, no longer allowed to weigh me down.

I went upstairs to my apartment and started sobbing. I felt like for the first time in my adult life I had been 100% honest about who I am.

I spent so many years pretending it didn’t happen to me.

I spent so many years pretending the trauma in my life didn’t have anything to do with my behavior over the years.

I sometimes wish I could go back to 18 year old Jessie, fresh out of high school and tell her to love herself no matter what.

But then at the same time I understand that everything that has ever happened to me in my life has happened for me to become the person who I am today.

I am proud of who I am, trauma and all. Because despite everything, my soul is still mine and does not belong to the darkness.

I feel like it is important to share my story no matter how uncomfortable it may be for me to tell or for you to read.

These conversations need to happen. We need to create a better and safer world for girls and women.

We need to create a safe space for victims instead of excusing their rapists.

My hope is that if people hear stories from women they know, that they would be more willing to listen and to learn more about what they can do to help.

I hope my story helps someone share theirs, I know how heavy it is to carry on your own.

By not confronting what happened to me when I was 18, I found myself 30 years old working for a man who sexually harassed/assaulted me on a regular basis. I kept going over and over in my head of why I let this be a part of my life. The more I think about it the more it makes sense. The trauma felt familiar. It felt safe. My subconscious could look past what was happening because it wasn't the worst thing I have had to endure in my life. (Link to blog post- Fired, Freed, and Everything in Between)

I am going into this next year of my life owning who I was, who I am now, and who I want to be. and I think that’s a pretty awesome revelation. I am so thankful for each person in my life who has helped keep joy into my life when I didn’t think that was possible.

"Each day I shoved my secrets down

hiding them from the world.

Hiding what one selfish man took

from an 18 year old girl.

I thought I could keep it to myself

I thought it was better no one knew

I stuffed it in, shut it out

I didn't know what else to do

When I didn't know how to cope

Alcohol and drugs helped numb the pain

I drank and drank and popped & snorted

that ecstasy, acid, and cocaine.

Years went by and thankfully,

I stepped away from the drugs.

But alcohol stood beside me

and with drinking there's no one to judge.

It wasn't until years had past

when another man tried to take what wasn't his

I added Four more years that I numbed myself

tricking my mind to believe that my misery was bliss.

When I finally stopped turning to the bottle

I came face to face with my pain

Every excruciating detail

now at the forefront of my brain

To say it has been easy

Would definitely be untrue

But inside myself I found

a strength I never knew

Each day I work to become

a better person in this world

A strong woman built from

all the pain of that 18 year old girl.

I encourage you to find your light

find your inner glow

To hold it tight for always

and to never let it go. "

-Jessie Grissom