Silenced and Rejuvenated:
A Memoir to Those Who Lost Their Voice
by Aysegul

Content Warning: Sexual Violence

I had it, but then I lost it, and now I don’t have a single thing. Not one damn thing. When I was robbed of my one prized possession, everything else that rested comfortably between my two homey palms were disrupted and vanished instantaneously. I put a lost ad in the local newspaper the following day but it’s been a few weeks now and not one person has decided to reunite me with my dignity.

My innocence, happiness, and self-worth all laid in that ornate box which had my name carved all over its multiple expressionless faces. My mind was anorexic and now that I no longer obtained a substantial amount of mental weight, I found myself constantly on the ground as a result of the influx of angry voices that arise when an innocent soul speaks up about date rape. Up until this stage in my young life, I was unaware that it was a misdemeanor to be the victim of a felony. Little did I know that my right to speak and be heard when something was wrongly done unto me would be stripped from my list of humane freedoms because a minuscule amount of stuck-up, self absorbed bitches were dehydrated from the lack of attention they were receiving. I have this special segment in my blackened heart for the ruthless soul who shared her fable to some small reporter trying to get a big break. Her story made it into the Rolling Stone. For a spread in the Rolling Stone, you basically have to be a female willing to expose her two surgically enlarged fat sacs — yes, I’m talking about breasts — in front of a high definition camera, be the bassist in a decently shitty band, or lie about your encounters with date rape. I guess she found the latter of the choices to be the best ticket to fifteen minutes of fame. I could see this being true if she didn’t have DD knockers and if she failed to enhance herself musically during her overly-privileged adolescence.

Stories such as her transformed me into a walking, breathing joke. I was slut-shamed despite the fact that that unfortunate night marked my first sexual experience. Now, society would shame and punish me for eternity because I made the decision to consume a beverage which I initially thought was harmless, and realized that it was rigged with bad intentions once it was far too late. The sad thing was that no one cared because someone’s false account of a situation that occurs at every sunset and every moonrise now morphed every real moment into a figment of the disgruntled women’s imagination. I was stuck. I was cornered in a dark alley by society’s flawed ideology and I was being squeezed into a crevice that led to a wormhole that rushed me into a downward slope with the destination being an overwhelming amount of Prozac and Xanax on the weekends. Unfortunately, this appeared to be a one-way ticket and the fine print read “no refunds.” Maybe I should have visited a fortune teller prior to attending the party and I may have been able to save myself a monumental amount of trouble by forking over 2 hours worth of my minimum wage earnings.

Months and months passed. They ran into one another and clicked into years. My freshman year of college passed, as did my sophomore and junior year. Alas, my senior year had creeped up on my miserable soul. By this point in my career of advanced education, I had relocated from the unsightly dorms to a flat that was a mere few minutes of walking from the framework of the main campus. I shared my flat with one of my dearly beloved friends who had stuck by me since that unfortunate moment in my life when I lost my unique identity. My current identity was peculiarly foreign to me. I even changed my major to better understand myself. Psychology, they say, leads to the answers for every enigma the mind created, but unfortunately, all it led to was my mental demise.

Senior year had just began and a myriad of parties were underway.

“Let’s go to one! It’s been so long! I’m sure you’ll be fine,” my roommate stated. “Anyways, you’re always so tense … loosen up a little bit! Let your body go with flow!”

My roommate never took no for an answer so I decided to go.

I’m 26 now … that was 5 years ago, and I don’t recall what happened that night. Everything’s a blur. All I know is that now my best friend is just as miserable as I am … I can’t imagine why.