#2 - That Time I Stalked My Stalker (Healing from Sexual Violence)

I froze as I felt a hand brush my back. I didn’t have to turn around to know who it was. It was one of the guys who raped me months earlier. I was 15 years old and I had unknowingly entered a game of cat and mouse that I had no control over.

I should start this story by setting the scene. When I was a freshman in high school, I was gang raped by a group of upper classmen. They were one and two years older than me. An age gap that feels insignificant now, but felt so huge when I was an innocent teenage girl. Before this instance, I viewed the world as a safe place where everyone wanted me to be happy. This was a lie that I wish someone had taught me long before I was forced to learn it for myself.

In the aftermath, I tried to piece together what happened to me. I was confused. I was overwhelmed. I was traumatized. I dissociated during the experience and only remembered bits and pieces of the attack, not a whole narrative to tell. I was experiencing common trauma symptoms, but I wouldn’t have words to express my experience for another decade. Instead, I barely believed myself, so when anyone showed doubt, I caved in and became quiet and filled with shame and self-blame. My mind no longer worked the way it once had. Nothing made sense.

In the days after him and his friends violated me, they pretended I didn’t exist. I was suddenly a ghost. On Friday I was a happy go lucky girl, who thought she had friends, and on Monday I was a social pariah who now lived with the label slut. I was confused, I still believed he was a good guy. Everyone liked him, I was the only one who was afraid of him, how could I be right if my whole world was telling me I was wrong?

On that fateful night when I first met him, I felt chosen. I felt so cool that he was giving me so much attention. As a young teenager, high school was my whole world, and him and his friends ruled the kingdom. I was a pauper who thought she had the chance to become a princess. I was completely naïve that his intentions were far from innocent, and instead would leave me close to dead. He did not choose me that night because he liked me, he chose me because he saw easy prey. He knew the end of the game before I even knew the rules.

One day, after trying to tell the wrong person that I thought something bad happened to me, I was approached by a “friend.” She told me that one of the boys who raped me wanted her to tell me that I needed to stop speaking about what happened. If I continued talking he’d kill me. She smiled and walked away like she hadn’t just shattered my world. I froze. I got tunnel vision. I couldn’t breathe. I managed to make my way to a bathroom where I threw up. This was my first panic attack. I wouldn’t understand this was a panic attack for many years though.

I eventually made my way to class where I was scolded for being late. I began crying in the middle of class. I was yelled at and sent to the vice principal’s office where I couldn’t speak through the tears. I was then passed to a guidance counselor who told me she didn’t have time for me when I walked in with tears streaming down my face. I returned to the floor of the bathroom and wept until I could get myself together. I didn’t speak of this instance again for over a decade.

So, I was surprised when after he had threatened to kill me, he began stalking me. I thought I was overreacting and making it up. Why would the guy who called me a crazy lying slut stalk me? Did he hate me or did he like me?

I began changing my route to class, but he was somehow always there. No matter which way I turned there he was. He never said anything. He wouldn’t even look at me. I would mention the coincidences to people and they’d tell me I was overreacting. He became like a shadow that lived with me long beyond the days where he actually lingered in the stairwells of my high school waiting for me.

I was going insane. I didn’t have anyone to talk to about this. No one where I turned was safe. There’d be weeks I wouldn’t see him, so I would think I was safe and had made the whole thing up, and then suddenly there he would be again, passing me every day. Overtime his stalking escalated. He began to appear when I was alone in a stairwell or I would be in an empty hallway. These were the only moments he acknowledged me. When we were alone. He would stare right at me. He would smile. He would brush his hand along my back. He would give me just enough to know I hadn’t made the whole thing up. He’d send me into a trauma response with a glance, but at the time I didn’t know that’s what was happening.

Was he intentionally trying to drive me insane? Did he like torturing me? Or was it simpler than that? Maybe he found it fun and then would get bored of this game we played? And then start it up again when he felt like it? Or maybe he knew a truth that I didn’t at the time, that I held more power than I realized by knowing the truth of what he’d done.

Eventually, he became all I thought about. When I realized I couldn’t escape him, I thought I could play it cool. I pretended I didn’t notice him, I pretended I wasn’t terrified. When he was around, I would laugh louder, smile bigger, be brighter. If I couldn’t escape him, I’d at least make him believe it didn’t bother me. But I was like a hamster on a wheel. I thought I was moving forward, when I was really just trapped in a cage running in circles.

The stalking was mostly just his presence, with the occasional light touch, until one night when we were at the same concert. I didn’t know he’d be there. As I exited the concert, I got separated from my friends. I knew where the car was so I wasn’t worried. I was in a large crowd moving towards the exit, when two hands grabbed my waist. I knew who it was before he said, “Shhhh” in my ear. He leaned in close, smelled my hair, and rubbed himself on me. His hands slid down the sides of my skirt. They lingered just beneath the hem. I froze. I had no voice. I had no thoughts. As quickly as he was there, he was gone. Lost in the sea of people surrounding me. I exited the crowd and ran to the car. When I got to the car I couldn’t stop crying. What had just happened? Had I made the whole thing up? Was I the problem?

This is the moment a switch flipped inside me and I decided I was going to win this game. I had been caught off guard one too many times. So, I decided to start stalking my stalker.

I didn’t label it as stalking at the time, but I thought if I knew where he was before he knew where I was, then I would never be caught off guard again and he wouldn’t be able to hurt me again. I knew what staircase he took at what time. I knew what his class schedule was. I knew his lunch period. I knew where he worked. If I knew where he was at all times, I’d be safe right? Wrong.

He was a predator and I was his prey, and he was always a few steps ahead of me. He was good at this game, I was not. I was too obvious. I was not clever. I would talk about him, trying to casually figure out his whereabouts. I did not know that I was supposed to hide this game we played. I didn’t know that his royal subjects were reporting back my every word.  It was easy for him to flip the narrative when he learned what I was doing. I had already been labeled a liar by him and his friends. So, when he caught onto my little game, he began telling people that I was stalking him.

Suddenly, I was being approached by people saying they heard I was stalking him. Was this true? I tried to deny it, but the truth was I had memorized his where-abouts. I had become completely obsessed with him. Had I become a stalker?

I stopped talking about him, but I continued to keep tabs on him. Every time I entered a room, a party, the local grocery store, it was his face I searched for. There would be months where he backed off, and I’d think it was finally over, but then it would all begin again.

Sometimes I felt like it was my fault that the cycle would begin again. I would know he’d be at a party and I’d still go. It felt unfair that he was able to walk around unaffected by what happened, and I felt broken and worthless. How could everyone pretend that night in the woods meant nothing when it had changed me on every level? I had not yet accepted the truth that sometimes the world is unfair and unsafe, so instead I chose to make it appear that I was okay.

So, on those occasions I willingly walked into the lion’s den, knowing we would be at the same place and thinking I was smart enough to outwit him, he’d always show me that I was the pawn and he had the power to checkmate me. This happened at more parties than I would like to admit. I’d pretend I was having fun, while trying to keep an eye on him, but as the drinks flowed, I’d lose track of him. This is when he’d find me in a moment when I was alone. I would go from having my guard up to being completely caught off guard. He’d smile at me. Knowing that I was once again a fly caught in his web and he held all the power.  He’d approach me. My breathe would catch. Was I about to be redeemed through him asking for forgiveness or was he about to ruin me in a way I’d never come back from? Instead he’d say my name like we were old friends who knew each others deepest darkest secrets. Maybe offer me a compliment and then walk away the moment someone else approached. He never wanted anyone to know about this game we played.

There were times that my 15 year old self mistook this obsession for romance. I had no experience with boys, was this normal? I would read romance novels, like Twilight, where the lead guy would exhibit possessive and controlling behavior. He would follow the young girl out of town. He knew her whereabouts even when she didn’t tell him. It wasn’t called stalking in those books, it was called love. So, what if this experience was just this guy’s attempt to get my attention? But that was the denial talking, not allowing me to see how bad this situation really was. Because when I’d see him in the hall and feel terror in my gut, deep down inside, I knew I was playing a dangerous game. A truth I couldn’t admit to myself until he went to college and there were multiple state lines between us.

This game continued for the two years we overlapped in high school. My memories of those two years are filled with fear, terror, and shame. While my classmates were discovering themselves and trying new things for the first time, I was stuck in a trauma loop it would take me over 15 years to unravel. When he went to college, I realized how fucked up this game we played was. In reflection, I now see that the mind will make up all kinds of stories in the name of self-preservation. It would take another decade for me to learn about how trauma impacts us on every level, and how this was the only way I knew how to protect myself at the time. No one prepares you for the aftermath of trauma and how the world will expect a child to act logically when you have just lost your mind because you have experienced things that most people only see depicted in horror movies.

We ran into each other a few more times before I left my hometown, but in those moments, I had learned to run when I saw him. I no longer played his game, instead I ran as far and fast as I could.