Why I Didn’t Save the World: A Survivor’s Story of Rape, Life, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

On the eve of her twentieth birthday, the author is kidnapped and gang-raped. Afterwards, she faces a sheriff who won’t take the report and a doctor who tells her to get over it. This is a story about sexual trauma, about living through it, and with it. It is not about getting over it, it’s about stumbling on, it is about living anyway. Rape creates an emotional abyss. This is the story of living on the wrong side of that abyss, of living with undiagnosed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the intrusions of the trauma into everyday life, the embarrassment, sometimes humorous, sometimes paralyzing, the fear and the failures. And of the connections that worked, though not many, some held. I share the story hoping it will help those who have been assaulted, those who love them, and those who work to help them heal.