I’m struggling with something that happened to me years ago
I thought I had gotten over what had happened to me a few years ago, but it has recently been bothering me and I’m struggling to cope. Sometimes I feel like what happened to me isn’t even considered sexual assault because of the way I handled it, but most days I understand that I reacted the way I did to get through what was happening. Mostly posting because I need to vent and say what happened because I have no one that I feel I can tell. Warning: I will be giving details.
I was in a phase in my life where I had been through a bad break up and was hooking up a lot. I met a guy on an app and we chatted for a few days and agreed to meet up. I picked him up and brought him to my place (I realize this was stupid, but I had done this before and nothing bad had happened before) When we got to my place I realized that he was pretty drunk. I think about this fact a lot to excuse his behavior. We started having sex and I liked it at first, but he was doing things that I didn’t like and when I voiced this I was ignored. I was honestly really scared and it became painful and I told him multiple time that it was too much and I needed to stop. He told me we couldn’t stop until I came and started fingering me very roughly. So I pretended to come so it would all be over. After it was over he asked if I was on my period because I had bled on his fingers. I told him no. I don’t even remember at what point he finally let everything end. I remember being forced to blow him at some point but there’s gaps in my memory involving the timeline. When it was finally over, he threw a condom at me and told me that since he didn’t want to use it I could use with the next guy since I was obviously a whore.
After, he asked if he could spend the night and I told him no and drove him home. He was upset that I wouldn’t let him stay and stole my underwear as we left my place. He was talking to me about his dreams and aspirations and it was hard to see him as the same person that had just done all of that to me.
I thought I had gotten over this, and haven’t thought about it in a while but I started spiraling about it recently. I can’t help but to rationalize what happened due to my initial agreement to hooking up and bringing him into my home as well as the fact that he had clearly been drinking (I didn’t realize how drunk he was until things really started happening) A year ago, I looked him up to see if maybe he had done something to get himself in trouble and found out he has published a damn self-help book. Is it normal to spiral about this when I thought I had gotten over it? Am I justified in rationalizing what happened? I can’t help but think I’m overreacting because I have read stories from other survivors who have been through far worse and can’t help but think I should feel lucky that what happened to me wasn’t as bad as it could have been.