Cerulean sins--chapter 47. Triggers. Consider yourself warned.

Edit 3/13/2015: Yeah, can we please, really PLEASE STOP DOING THIS? 

Edit 11/10/2014: You know, I really, really, REALLY did not want to revisit this. When it died down I was like yes, now I can get back to normal life. And then it came back up again.

Guys, believe me, I KNOW that she did some really awful shit. I KNOW that she hurt a lot of people. Answering hate with yet more hate is not the way you fix this problem. If she's just trying to evade everything, all you're doing is confirming her bias. If she's genuinely sorry, you're doing the exact same shitty thing that she did to me. 

In her mind, at the time, I deserved what I got. I don't doubt that at all. I also know that I did not deserve it. So by the same extension she does not deserve this.  I am going to keep these posts up because they document a thing that happened that needs to be documented. But my heart goes out to her. I don't want anyone to go through what I went through with her. That includes her. Pain is pain is pain is pain is pain. It doesn't matter who inflicts it or how, and inflicting pain is wrong.

Yes. She needs to be held accountable for her actions. But there's a difference between accountability and being shits to other people.

In other words, my lovelies, knock it the fuck off. 

Edit 10/20/2014: Okay. This post has gotten a lot of attention over the past couple of days. A LOT. And it's stirred up a lot of feelings that I really didn't want to deal with and made me angry and hurt all over again.

Short version: The Unnamed Friend AKA Requires Hate AKA a name I'm not linking up to the rest of it because she doesn't deserve that got outed in her professional writer's persona. And the entire internet collapsed on her because holy shit how do you be an asshole for FIFTEEN YEARS.

I just read her apology post. It's over here. 

My thoughts on the matter are over here.

Forgive me for this opening, guys, but I need to point something out to my darling lovely unnamed friend. Something that they probably ought to know, given that I've talked about this on the blog before. So if you do not know much about my history, This will probably be highly disturbing. I am very sorry if it disturbs most of you. I will probably regret doing this, my wonderful unnamed friend will probably bat it around with her friends for the next several weeks, but you know what? I'm done. I'll play your game, my darling unnamed friend. You finally pushed the button that gets a response out of me.

I would like to have been real friends with you, princess. Before you started showering me with attention, I respected you. I reacted the way I did to our first encounter because I wanted to be a good person in your eyes. And for several months afterwards I thought that I did deserve every awful, soul destroying thing you said about me. Because I thought you were more than a good person. I thought you were the best person. And if the best person thinks I am a piece of worthless white shit, that must mean that I am utterly irredeemable, without value or merit, and that I am so far gone I can't even try to get better without destroying the value and self esteem of millions of other people.

I thought you were all powerful. All knowing. I thought you were actually good.

So I want to thank you.

Thank you for calling me an awful human being because I wrote that rape recovery makes people stronger, and that I find that recovery to be a sublimely beautiful thing. Thank you for believing that means I glorify rape and abuse. Thank you for making assumptions. Thank you for taking your own cause and turning it into something that's all about hatred and not about dialogue, because that sure as shit stinks will make humanity better. Yes, I am sure it will. Answering hate with hate, murder with murder, and violence with violence has always solved all of the worlds problems.

Thank you for deciding that I don't deserve to have a voice.

Thank you for showing me that you really are an inconsiderate, un-self-aware, remorseless piece of shit.

Fuck you for making me talk about this.

I was sexually assaulted three years ago by a man in a black pickup truck who asked for directions to an electronic store, asked for me to get into his car and show him where that place was, drove out into the middle of nowhere and made me give him 100 dollars and a blow job.

 He criticized my performance.

He gave me instructions.

As a courtesy, he didn't even make me swallow.

We got interrupted. He took me home.

I told the police. They told me "Well, that counts as consent, so it sucks to be you," and drove away.

The fact that you think I am a horrible person for believing that recovery can be beautiful just fills me with all the warm fuzzies. Kind of the way the assault did. I guess the only other option I have is to be a broken mess of an individual who rocks quietly in a corner every time something triggers that memory. Somebody says "blow job" and I'm back in the truck. The other day I heard the song that was on the radio during the assault and boom, I was back in the truck.

Having you go "OH MY GOD SHE IS GLORIFYING RAPE YOU CAN'T SAY RECOVERY IS BEAUTIFUL WITHOUT GLORIFYING RAPE"...yep, that puts me back in the truck.

I'm really sick of being back in the truck.

He made me weak. He made me kleenex. He broke me. He turned me into nothing. It was the worst day of my life, and for him, it was just Tuesday. I mattered that little.

I make my recovery beautiful because it denies him any right to it. Any right to my memories. Any right to me. It means that my rapist is not allowed to define me.

And I choose to write about it, and to say "rape recovery is a beautiful thing, and being stronger is a beautiful thing" because I wish to God one person would have said that to me. That just one person could have told me that I could be proud of the days and weeks that followed. That I could be proud of myself for still being alive. That it was even possible to take those hours back and make them be mine again. That I have every right to isolate that hour in that truck like the piece of cancer it is and refuse to let it have any more of my life, time or energy.

What happened to me was wrong. And I'm choosing to grow from that, and grow beauty from that, and grow stronger from that, and to tell other people that it's possible to go through an assault and come out the other side whole. I'm choosing to make recovery praiseworthy.

The alternative is to let rape be about the rapist, rather than about the survivor. The alternative would be to let him have power, and to keep that part of me.

The alternative would make survival a duty, and not a triumph.

Fuck that. And fuck you. Fuck you for not understanding that. Fuck you for deciding that recovery and survival shouldn't be something worthy of praise just because the thing we survive is a nightmare. Fuck you for deciding that I can't take MY OWN ABUSE back and make my recovery be something beautiful. Fuck you for invalidating my recovery. In fact, how about we just go with, "fuck him, and fuck you too"?

Also: Thank you for e-stalking me for six months. Thank you for posting something from my blog that you find problematic every time I post a goddamn page. Thank you for reminding me what a horrible, worthless human being I am. I am sure this accomplishes something in the betterment of the universe.

You triple the traffic my blog gets every time you link to it, and you make up, oh, about 45% of my traffic every time you tweet a direct link to a page. And hiding your tweets only works when all your friends do it too.

You are the ONLY PERSON ON THE INTERNET who is talking about me. Not an exaggeration. I get referral links from spam websites and from you. You are still my primary source of traffic. You latched onto me within twenty-four hours of me posting on LKH_Lashouts, you've continually criticized every single word I say because I happen to be white and live in the states. I am actively anticipating when you finally tackle one of my books because I know that's coming next (yeah, hiding your tweets was the big clue that you were about to move back into my life again. Thanks for the warning) You've called me an illiterate fucktard, which is true given that YOU could afford a college education and I could not. Thank you SO MUCH for lording that privilege over me.

And now you just spent the last day criticizing how a sex-abuse victim--namely, me--handles her own recovery on twitter.

Because it made you feel all happy and superior and it made me look like more of a shit.

You really are the superior person.

 I fucking dare you to link to this post, you insensitive fucking troll.

(But you're right about the spelling. I hate spelling, I always have hated spelling, and not right clicking under every batch of wavy red lines is my way of sticking it to Queen Elizabeth's arbitrary rules about where letters are supposed to go.)

Okay, I feel better now. So where were we?

Oh, right. The wolves show up. Richard is going to pull a power play to try to take his wolves back from Jean Claude. Because undermining the biggest power in your city when he's facing down a rival who is worse than he is, is the absolute smartest thing he can do.

...This book is a piece of trash.

 Richard yanks all the wolves away from everyone who isn't a wolf, including Gregory, who is still comforting Stephen. Then he demands Anita stand with the pack because, technically, she is pack.

Anita says "what the fuck is going on" and the audience says "The writer forgot how to plot." because there is no logic behind this, at all.

Anita and Richard face off, Richard gets all imposing and...fuck me, this happens:

I looked up the length of his body and met his eyes with the knowledge in my eyes that I knew what was under that conservative suit, every inch of it.

I am probably not in the mood to discuss this tonight. Anita raped Richard. And now she's reminding him of their sexual relationship. The one that ended with rape. She's trying to make him do what she wants him to do by reminding him of the sexual power that she once held over him. That she once used to rape him with.

I now actively want to hurl.

Richard gets angry, and of course it's wrong for him to be angry at Anita, because Anita is only the person who violated every promise made and boundary established during their relationship twice, including that all important one of "DON'T HAVE SEX WHEN I SAY NO"

So Musette is amused, and Richard says "Go away, this is pack business," and Musette just laughs until Belle shows up and tells Richard, basically, "Sit, boy, I need to play with Asher right now."

Richard goes "Uh...what?"

And then Asher starts screaming and the chapter ends with Anita thinking about how much she's going to hate Richard in a few days.

This book needs to die in a fire.

Sorry for hijacking the review to vent my ire at a non-related issue, but I'm getting really, REALLY tired of being this person's favorite chew toy. I'll let her sit all over me re: race and GLBT issues because I am an idiot when it comes to that, and I know it. But you don't get to tell me how I feel about MY recovery from MY OWN SEX ASSAULT is invalid.