Today is my birthday. I am 39 years old. I haven't celebrated my birthday for the past twenty-two years and that has nothing to do with a fear of getting older.
Twenty-two years ago, on the night of the celebration of my seventeenth birthday, I was raped. This means that this week is both a celebration of the day of my birth and the anniversary of the night that my life was changed forever.
For years I've been asked why I don't make a big deal about my birthday. It's fairly easy as an introvert to deflect those questions by saying that I don't want attention on myself. The truth isn't one that comes out easily in polite conversation.
Over the past year as I wrote my memoir, I realized just how many things were taken from me the night of my rape-- my own feelings of safety, my self-confidence, the ability to listen to songs or watch movies from that time(as it brings back memories) and so many more things. In many ways, I buried my seventeen year old self that night and had to start over as a new person.
This year, I am reclaiming my birthday. I am celebrating my life and all of the accomplishments in it, unabashedly. I am also determined to reclaim some of the other things that the rape and the PTSD that followed it has stolen from me. And, with each and every reclamation and celebration, I'll been sending a big fuck you out into the Universe to the man who tried to take everything from me.
Happy Birthday to me!
