August 31, 2017
It Is Okay To Be Happy
CW: sexual assault
It’s been nearly a year since I was sexually assaulted and I have been through a full range of emotions. Sadness, anger, anxiety, depression, worry, as well as happiness.
Don’t worry if you haven’t yet experienced emotions after being sexually assaulted. It took me a while to feel any form of emotion after I was assaulted. People heal at different times, don’t worry about how long or short it takes you.
Over the past month I have found that I am being to be myself again. I am getting happier, more smiley and just more content with life in general. However, this is not as easy as it sounds. I have, many times, high jacked myself from being happy. I have prevented myself from being happy as I didn’t know that after I was sexually assaulted it was okay to be happy again. That sounds strange I know, but you don’t know when the right time is to say you’re happy and you’re trying to let that part of your life go.
You think to yourself that if you become happy too early after the event that people would judge, they may think that you were just brushing the sexual assault off as though you were not assaulted or not the victim. There is another side to the spectrum in that if you take “too long” to heal after the assault that people could possibly think that you reacted too dramatically to what happened to you. These are the two different scenarios I had running through my head. Which of them is correct? The answer is neither.
The truth is who cares what time period it takes you to heal. Each person reacts differently to what happened to them. You should not be worried about if you are healing too fast or too slow. It is up to you and how you feel. Peoples’ judgments should not matter to you. You need to focus on yourself and how you feel as if you let other people’s judgements of what happened impact you then the healing process becomes a lot more complicated. You survived and you should be able to heal in whatever way and time period you want to. It is your life, no one else’s. Heal in your own time. Be happy in your own time. You are allowed to be happy again, and you will get there.