A Thanksgiving Letter to the Man Who Raped Me
First, a preface: Nowhere in this letter will I say that I am grateful for you or the act of sheer malice that you inflicted upon me. Your entrance into my life was at the mouth of the depths of hell, and quite honestly, that’s the exact place to which you should return. However, through a daily gratitude practice that I have cultivated with such intentionality, I have discovered a sense of compassion that sometimes makes its way to you but most often is directed to the person for whom I am most grateful: me.
My entire life has been colored with hues of darkness. It took me decades to understand that light is defined by the acceptance and fusion of its counterpart - a lesson I learned after the soulful exhaustion that ensued from trying to outrun darkness. But I have never known darkness to the plummeting depths to which it can exist until my eyes met yours; for a brief collection of moments that felt like lifetimes multiplied by galaxies then again by lightyears, your darkness utterly and completely consumed me. You almost snuffed out the light. My light. Almost.
In this life changing experience, as I disconnected from my body and plunged into a dimension so beneath us, I flattened into two-dimensional despair. In this devil’s exchange, where you were convinced that the only currency at stake was my power, I felt pieces of me break off and disintegrate into the ethers. It was like I was observing the destruction of the feminine right before my eyes. But somewhere deep inside, I found my internal flame, albeit faintly flickering, and I protected it with the minimal hope I had left until I could muster enough energy and strength to recall and reclaim my power.
This path to healing has been both brutal and vibrant, all at the same time.
Every single day is a battle where the only prevailing strategy is counterintuitive - the thickness of my armor is the exact extent to which I lose the war. It turns out… My whole objective is to disarm and destroy the walls that I have built with the darkness you force-fed me. The only way I can heal is to let love shine into the places where you slashed into me: the fault lines. The key to the lock that I have been chained to my entire life is exactly what I have feared all along: vulnerability.
Despite your best efforts to shut me down and fill my heart space with remnants of “unloveable”, I have found the bravery and courage required to let my heart burst open in the presence of others who have earned the right to hear my story. I have reunited with my body and learned to listen to what she has to say as she whispers your secrets and reveals the places in which my memories of you reside. I breathe love and light into the muscles that are so worn from fighting you. I surround myself with loved ones who hold space for me to rest and heal when my bones are tired. I may have broken by the will of your hands, but I am healing from the love in my own.
This Thanksgiving, I am grateful for me. For granting myself the permission I needed to fall apart and for asking others to help in my quest to rebuild. For continuing to love and reveal my depths to others, even (and especially) when it hurts. For accepting the universe’s invitation to ascend and become a channel to light the path for others as they embark on their own journeys to heal what they cannot heal alone. For sharing my experience publicly as a means to send these words to land where they’re needed, to support someone else in understanding that they’re not alone. For extending any ounce of compassion to you, for renaming your title in this letter from “My Rapist” to “the Man Who Raped Me.” Because while you certainly do not own me, I don’t own you either. As I tell my truth, your grip around my throat loosens, and as it does, I release you and the chains you tried to lock around my voice.
My wish for you is that you seek and find the healing that you need - that your darkness is balanced by the light I choose to believe you have somewhere deep inside, beneath the pain you try so hard to overpower.
With gratitude (from a safe distance),
Brandi