So I've been doing kind of well recently, less flashbacks about the sexual assault and my attacker's face. I can hardly believe I've made it through 10 months since it happened. I was having once-weekly sessions with my T and we were talking through things, and he was really helping me to come to terms with what happened and how it's not my fault and such. But recently, I've been slipping up. My T is hired by my college and now school's out, I can't access more therapy from him until late September, when school is back and settled.

I've found myself laying in bed in the morning and curling up into a ball, shaking and crying and ruminating over what happened. I can't let go and don't expect it to be easy. But I keep going over and over what happened, how I felt, how I felt when I told some people, how they felt, and how my T felt and what he said when he found out what happened. And all of that just makes me feel so stupid and helpless like I'm letting down the people who care by not snapping out of this. I've considered going to my GP about the depression, as suggested by my T, but I don't know what to do. Sometimes I just wish the ground would swallow me up, or at least my thoughts.

I struggle to admit what happened. I try to look in the mirror and say "My name is _____ and I'm a sexual assault survivor." I try to make it easier by removing attempted rape from the sentence, but I just can't say any of it. Typing it to a bunch of strangers is easy, but when it comes to me, face to face with myself or the people I love, I struggle. It took my T asking a load of carefully chosen questions, to which I could nod or shake my head, for him to get a picture of what happened. And even then, it took weeks before he knew exactly what went on (and there are still details that I've kept back.) My T suggested it's hard for everyone to have a single attack on them, but perhaps more for me because I'd never been intimate with anyone so to have it forced on me made it all the more unsavoury.

It's so hard. I just see his face over and over again. I remember my tears and my pleas and my disgust and confusion and I feel wrong. I feel like a liar. Like this is a nightmare I've confused with reality. And I hate being in limbo over this, not comprehending that what happened was real and what almost happened was not imagined but endured.