#312

The easiest way I describe it is it was a friendship gone bad. A therapist described it as the beginnings of a DV situation. The internet unfortunately only pulls up stories of "toxic" friends and I cannot find anything for me who had been physically, emotionally, and sexually abused by a friend. I'm non-binary, in my 30s, and my perpetrator wasn't a man either to add in another complicated layer. I cobble together emotional validation from several sources: reading testimonies from men who have been abused by women, reading about DV in the LGBT community, going over regular checklists of what counts as abuse to remind myself just how bad it was. Ultimately I feel completely alone as a survivor most times. We met in college and I really wanted to be her friend, so... we started hanging out more. She wanted to hang out with me a LOT in the beginning and demanded I was online frequently, messaging me if she saw me posting on social media without actually being accessible to her. It felt like a privilege to be liked by her because she hated most other people and had no qualms talking about how stupid others could be sometimes. And, how it typically can happen in abusive relationships, things escalated gradually. She violated my boundaries by really wanting me awake much later than I wanted to be (guilt tripping), introducing topics and activities that for the sake of anonymity I need to keep secret--but I will say that after talking with other survivors this was an aspect of the sexual abuse. It was akin to coercion and sexting. Out of impulsive boredom once she shoved me onto a hard wood floor. She sexually assaulted me more than once (groping), I believe three times total of which the final and worst one was almost 10 years ago. I couldn't stop shaking for almost three days after it happened, and a large portion of my early 20s is just gone. There were other trauma factors unrelated to her that had been going on around this time, but it's taken me this long to realize that maybe the reason I don't remember a lot is in large part due to her. At the time of me writing this, it has been about seven years since I ghosted her. Whenever people talk about how horrible ghosting someone is, I want to scream that it was the only way I felt it was appropriate to separate myself from her. Whenever transphobes insist sexual violence is solely male violence, it's not long before I start doubting my own experience. When I try to find resources for people abused by friends and find only article after article about friends who are catty and gossipy it makes me want to give up talking about it completely. Trans survivor spaces are sparse. I don't know how to reconcile my dysphoria with what she did because can it really count if it involved parts of my body I didn't even want in the first place? Can it count if a large portion of how I was groomed by her was completely online? Even now writing this I'm afraid somehow she'll know, she'll try to contact me after all these years, and then convince me that none of this happened. It happened. I KNOW it did. I rarely talk about it at this level.