1. Know that, to rise to the attention of media gatekeepers, your rape story must clear a bar that love and murder and adventure and dragon stories don’t have to clear and be either horrible (gang rape, deep lacerations) or gilded (see No. 2).
2. Those gatekeepers are much more likely to pay attention if A) your assaulter is someone famous and powerful or B) the rape took place on the grounds of an elite institution.
3. Be aware that you will thereby benefit, in some sense, from the same power structure that enabled your rapist and, possibly, helped him escape retribution.
4. But remember the powerful literary agent who read your first effort to tell this story (this story that lives in your belly and bones) and sighed, saying your characters were great but that “date rape stories are a dime a dozen.”
5. Yours was not a story of date rape. There is no such thing as date rape. There is only rape.
6. But still, if they really are “a dime a dozen,” shouldn’t we be telling them?
7. Don’t complain. You are white/cis/lucky/healthy/have insurance. Or none of these is true. By whatever means, you have the ability to A) tell your story and B) bring it to the attention of others through the marketplace.
8. The marketplace is not a police blotter, after all, and in any case, almost nobody goes to the police. You are a realist. You do not consider yourself special because you were victimized. You probably did not consider yourself special before that, either.
9. Wonder whether this is why you were victimized.
10. Note your internalized complicity with a culture that holds girls and women accountable for male violence. Consider whether there is a legitimate element to this rationalization, in that it might be an attempt to claw back some measure of control from a moment of complete subjugation.
11. Learn to fire a gun. Understand how it feels like punching the sun and how for a frightened man, this is a simulacrum of power. Consider the relationship between this and sexual violence.
12. Memory: A few years after your rape, your dad seeing you in your new denim skirt from the Gap and saying, frightened, “You’re just asking for it in a skirt that short.”
13. Recommit. This is why you’re telling your story. You love your father; he loves you; change is possible.
14. Still, don’t let your parents read it while you’re still writing.
15. Find your grandmother’s notebook, one of a pile left in a box by her sitting chair after she died. Read how your grandfather pressed her down on a log on a sandy beach and broke her hymen without her consent. Read how she married him anyway.
16. Your mother won’t want to talk about this and will be angry and sad if you bring it up. Leave it out of your rape story.
17. Leave out the denim skirt, too.
18. If you are lucky enough to come into possession of official documentation of the crime against you, rejoice and make these papers the spine of your work. Contemporaneous corroboration? Excellent. Police case files? Terrific.
19. Notice how the discourse around sexual assault is shifting. You have a hashtag now, which bespeaks power. But is your story different? How is your story different? If it’s not different, shouldn’t that make it matter more? If a few people contract an illness, we call it an orphan disease. If lots of people do, we call that a pandemic.
20. Follow the news, no matter how brutal. Each time a famous man is exposed as a predator, the world gasps. The unmasking is essential, but recognize the gasping for the theater it is. No one is truly surprised. Still we cultivate the fantasy that one day, there will be an attack so grotesque that we decide to put a stop to this.
21. Admit that you are actually helping to further this fantasy that there will be One Rape Too Far by offering yours, like a log on the fire, knowing it won’t do more than spark a bit and send up its own little puff of smoke. Which is your life.
22. Recognize, truly now, the genius of Tarana Burke, who started #MeToo, harnessing the power of social media to combine our dime-a-dozen voices.
23. Ask a close friend, who was also raped, if she has pictures of you from that time (media wants them). She will send them: Look at how beautiful you were, how young. Know that you are resting in the arms of other survivors.
24. Hope your story — now sold, congratulations! — will help those other survivors.
25. Hold your partner and let your partner hold you.
26. Tell your children your book is about growing up.
27. Tell them, actually … you’ll tell them what it’s about later.
28. Consider whether you’ve made a terrible mistake.
29. Click on the link for the video your publishing house has made of you. Go to the kitchen, burning with something like shame but adjacent — is this self-recrimination, is this survivor’s guilt? — and stab yourself in the leg with a fork.
30. Punctured, return. Read the notes in your inbox from people who somehow saw the video; it has drifted like pollen. These people want you to know: They are proud of you. They remember, they can never forget. You have helped them to feel less alone.
31. When the books arrive, open the box and hold one up to the sky so that your grandmother can see it.
32. Hide the rest. Your children are a new generation. It might be different for them. It won’t. It might.
Lacy Crawford is the author of the forthcoming memoir “Notes on a Silencing.”
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