It took me eight years, three therapists, and hundreds of poems. I am finally ready to share my story. I was raped.
I will not recount the event. Instead, I look at the aftermath:
The check-up at the Sexual Health clinic; the learned helplessness; and the shame and guilt that destroyed my self-worth.
This piece is accompanied by excerpts from poems, which I utilised asa primary tools to process the trauma.
The Following Day
After the sexual assault, I returned home, went to my room and cried for no more than five minutes. Right away, I was ashamed. I had to hide.
Having previously suffered from a severe two-year-long depression in my teenage years, I knew it was best to mask all suffering. I woke up early the next day, I went back to my summer job and for the following months, my day-to-day continued as if nothing happened.
But the worst part was not when it happened. It’s the months that came after.
The First 30 Days
I had clearly changed. My close friends knew that. I had panic attacks. I burst into tears almost every day. They were a safe space, but not the adequate one.
Months after, I took two actions that helped me heal:
- I started therapy with Victim Support Malta
- I started writing about my trauma in poems
And those two coincided. At the early therapy sessions, I was unable to express any anger. My therapist leaned on my creativity and had me read her some of my poems, which aided the therapy process.
The most sensitive piece is called 30 Days After The Rape, published in Ghost City Press.
In the poem, I describe my appointment at the Sexual Health Clinic:
I went in with health anxiety, I was at a higher risk of infection. As uncomfortable as it was, I knew it was the responsible thing to go get checked and leave that worry behind.
Instead, I faced a healthcare professional who, in her barrage of routine questions, shifted her tone from professional to judgemental.
For her, it was a typical session. To me, it was a nightmare. Suffering in silence, unable to scream, cry, or even whisper.
It took me four years before I ever got checked out again. And during those four years, I lived with constant anxiety around sexual health.
When it came to relationships, this added a lot of complexity when it came to sexual activity: I was both scarred from trauma and flashbacks, whilst also anxious about any risks that would require me to get checked.
Beyond the Health Risks
Healthcare was only a small part of the aftermath.
I felt damaged, undesirable. Being a person with a male body and androgynous qualities, I found it hard to navigate being understood.
One time, I went on a date with a guy who was very pushy on having sex. I wasn’t comfortable with that, and I felt like I had to justify why. I told him about my rape. His reply?
He was also raped 10 years before and he got over it. So I should just get over it and fuck.
I thought someone who has gone through a similar experience would be more considerate. But he’s not the only one that made me feel wrong.
A few years later, I was in a relationship with a guy for three months. When talking about my non-binary identity, he said it made him feel like a real man. My identity became a source of power for him. This created a dynamic that was uncomfortable for me, yet something I kept exploring.
Whenever I drew a line, 9 out of 10 times, men would jump over that line as if they were competing for the long-jump Olympics. The further they cross my boundaries, the better they feel about themselves.
So I stopped drawing that line.
And that created a vicious cycle. My self-esteem was non-existing at that point. I was a nobody, and I had learned to no longer use my voice. I became a body that has no soul. A body for the world to use.
A body I was no longer living in.
Hopelessness
My favourite verse that I’ve written comes from the poem It Wasn’t Always Cold.
“And I don’t know if happiness
was something I wore,
like a coat I had borrowed,
or if it were my born skin
that was ripped out,
leaving my flesh naked.”
When I look back at my childhood, I see a gleeful kid. Today my dad shared with me a home video where, at 4 years old, I was jumping and dancing on a mattress while my mushroom hair bounced in the air.
I missed being that kid. In the last few years, I had lost hope that I could ever be loved or deserving of happiness. I saw myself as the common denominator in all the negative interactions with men.
I had to be doing something wrong. Rather than gaining control of my body, I made myself responsible for being raped.
In time, that continued to grow into a darker feeling of being a lifeless body. I convey this concisely in a micropoem called Seabed:
“An urchin pierced my back
before I realized
I had already sunk”.
This imagery is one that defines my latest collection You Can Still Save My Corpse From Sinking.
Creativity as an Emotional Outlet
In these poems, I expressed myself the best I could with the most intimate emotions that I could not even speak to my therapists about.
Most days, I started writing in the morning and would stop at midnight. Re-reading those same poems. Editing them. Perfecting them. It’s one thing I had control over. I could not stop my panic attacks, but I could manage what I create with that suffering.
At point, there was not much else to write about. I forced myself to write about how it got better, but that did not feel genuine. Yes, I had starting to experience life more positively, yet I was ridden with shame. Despite spending over seven years writing this book, I could not publish it.
In 2024, I masked the shame and published Only Love Can Save Me, which in its essence, is the pursuit of a lover that could heal me. As soon as that was posted, I felt like I had to return to the true source of trauma.
Rather than facing it, I stopped writing altogether. Not only that. I stopped engaging with literature. The poetry world became this big obscure danger zone, where approaching it meant I had to face something I could no longer deny.
Finally, I’m at that stage: eager to let it all go.
With great support of true friends and a loving partner, I have returned to poetry. I’ve written my friends heartfelt poems. I’ve starting exploring writing poems in Spanish to my partner.
And today, I have published You Can Still Save My Corpse From Sinking.
##Letting My Poems Free
With rape being an extremely personal and sensitive topic, there are obviously doubts and questions in my head.
Will my family members and acquaintances learn about it?
How will they react?
Will they ask me questions?
What would I say?
As cloudy as those questions can become, I can see the sunlight piercing through them.
I no longer question myself: Will they think less of me?
That’s perhaps the biggest achievemente. Poetry, for me, was lifesaving. It kept me afloat when the burden of trauma kept anchoring me down.
As I publish You Can Still Save My Corpse From Sinking, the deepest parts of me luring in the depths have now become an anglerfish, holding a light where nobody imagined there could ever be.
This post was first published on Medium .
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