i was raped march 10th 2016. i was a virgin, it was my first time and he stole it from me. for seven months i dealt with the trauma almost completely alone. i tried telling friends but of course none of them could ever understand. quite a few made nasty comments, like "i told you so" or "that's what you get". one of my friends laughed, but she said it was just because it was such an awkward subject that it was "nervous laughter". but it still hurt. my "best" friend called me a slut and a whore. after 3 months i stopped trying to tell people and make them understand and get help, because at 3 months that same best friend saw me crying and asked why i was still so upset even though it happened "3 whole months ago". so from then on the only people who knew were the sexual assault hotline people i would call. i remember calling them time and time again and asking the same questions i already knew the answers to, just so that i could talk to someone about it. because i didn't know how to even process what i was feeling, so i would just focus on asking questions like, "how long do i have to report it" and "will it matter if i wait too long". finally one day i was in the middle of that same routine, calling and asking about those questions, when i couldn't even finish my sentence and i just started sobbing on the phone. that was when i knew for sure that i had to tell someone, so i told my school counselor and she had my mom come in and the next day i went and filed a police report.

of course nothing came out of the report, because i waited 7 months. but even thinking about that time in my life makes me want to cry. i was in such a weak spot and i truly feel like i endured most of it completely isolated and alone. it was definitely the worst time of my life and i can't remember anything during that time other than the absolute depression and confusion i was dealing with, because it consumed me almost entirely.

after that happened, of course it got around school, and people started calling me a "half virgin"... because since i lost my virginity obviously my vagina was stretched out and mangled forever, because that's how vaginas work. but i also didn't have any experience, because, you know, it was rape. i was quick to lose that label and basically slept with the first guy on tinder who asked if i wanted to.

a few months later i stopped seeing that guy, and after going through counseling for a few months i started to see how dangerous that type of risky behavior was. so i decided to start taking sex seriously. i started talking to this new guy i met on tinder. for weeks we would text all day every day, and we would never run out of things to talk about. he was so fun and interesting to talk to and it never got boring with him.
what i liked best about him was that, for the whole month that we were texting he never brought up sex even once. i felt like my struggle was finally over, like maybe i finally found a guy who didn't just want to use me for my body.

we decided to meet, he lived over half an hour away and didn't have a car, so i drove there. the plan was for me to pick him up at his apartment and we'd go get food together somewhere. so i knocked on the door and he answered and told me to come wait inside because he wasn't ready yet. he said he'd show me around too. i was nervous about walking into a near-stranger's house but he was the person he said he was and after talking to him i felt it would probably be fine. so we walked around, he took me to his bedroom, and within five minutes of me being there he was on top of me trying to convince me to have sex with him. 

i was freaking out. usually when i even considered sleeping with guys, i would talk to them about their std testing history and sexual partners beforehand, and hope that they were telling the truth. but this guy i had no idea about anything with, because he never said a word about sex. i was determined not to have sex with him that day, and even on the ride over there i started thinking worst case scenario, and i told myself over and over again that no matter what, i would just keep saying no. so i kept saying no.

but then he started saying things that my rapist said to me, right before he raped me. he would use the same phrases, like, "i'll be gentle" and "you know you want it." once he started saying the things my rapist said to try and coerce me, i completely panicked. when i was raped for my first time, i dissociated. i froze up, my mind felt like it lifted up out of my head, and everything was a complete blur. but i still remember parts of that rape.
with this one, however, the last thing i remember is panicking when i heard him say the same things my rapist said. and all i remembered was that the last time i heard those phrases, i kept saying no, and i ended up raped. so this time, to "save myself" from being raped, i just hastily said yes and waited for it to be over. i truly don't remember any parts of it other than i actually had to tell him to use a condom because he was about to go without one.

after that, however, we went and got food together, and had a great conversation. i told him i was raped and he seemed extremely apologetic for how he coerced me into sex. i think maybe now i should have been bothered by the fact that he didn't think it was wrong until i said i was raped before. but then he told me he was raped as a child, and i felt like i finally had someone i could relate to and who could finally understand me.
i let that conversation at the restaurant skew my initial impression of him and the forced sex and i continued to see him for 4 months. we had sex every time i saw him after that, and after awhile it turned into a thing where i would pay for the gas to drive there, have lousy half-assed sex, and i would pay for the food because he lied and said he lost his job. then i would leave. we stopped hanging out and talking and it turned into just a booty call thing. i wasted about $300 over the time i spent with him.
a few weeks after i stopped seeing him, i did some snooping and found out that he had a girlfriend the entire time i was having sex with him.

obviously even without the forced and coerced sex, it was a shitty situation with him, and i regret it entirely. but for several months now this thought has just been lingering and bothering me, about whether or not that really was rape or not. the thing is, when it happened, it truly didn't affect me to the extent that the first rape did. i talked to another hotline counselor about it and she said something along the lines of maybe when i was raped the first time, it took so much from me and left me in such a dark place that, in a way, i didn't have much to lose when that "2nd rape" happened. so now that i have finished counseling and mostly healed from that first rape, now i'm starting the process the second one.

but the thing is, obviously i don't want to admit i was raped twice. not even to myself. i know that people count coerced sex as rape, because yeah, if he hadn't have pushed me i would have never said yes. there was not any part of me that wanted to have sex with him that day and i wish i didn't. but i said yes.
i just feel like i can't afford to say i was raped twice. people already don't believe that the first one happened, or they do but they blame it on me. obviously even if i do get to a point where i consider this rape, i won't go around telling people. i already learned my lesson with that.

but it's just hard on me, i don't think i can accept it. what bothers me most is the fact that i continued to sleep with him and that i'm just now going back and considering if it's rape. it sounds absolutely stupid of me to do and none of it makes sense. i just need to make sense of this.