Worth Living Ambassador Jenna Fournier
Hello, I’m Jenna, a psychology student at Carleton University. I have been diagnosed with many things, most notably Borderline Personality Disorder, PTSD, Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Social Phobia. I strive to connect with others and share my struggles of mental health and trauma.
Warning: These are my experiences alone and I do not speak for all survivors of sexual violence. Please be warned that the following content may be triggering and discusses sexual violence as its topic.
I am just quietly surviving. And at this point in my life it is all I can do. There is no right way to be a victim. But there are better ways to be a victim. A better victim than I was, than I am. The world wasn’t built for people like us. People who float somewhere between victim and whatever it is that I feel that I am. Someone deserving of what happened to them. Someone who asked for it. Someone who wanted it.
I did say stop. I did push his hands away. Sometimes. But there were times when I just lay there still, unsure of how to navigate the trespassing of my body. But you can’t say no to a question that was never asked.
It could have been worse. It could be worse. I could still be stuck in a violent situation. I could have been held at gunpoint, been a victim of sex trafficking. But my story is plain, and it is simple. I was violated by a man who mistook my kindness for willingness, my silence as agreement. He mistook my desperate need for validation as something more than simple teenage confusion that it was. It may not seem that bad, but it was bad enough to leave seething wounds. Bad enough to leave me living life in fear of bad men dressed in good men’s clothing.
Some people ask, “Why are you so angry?”
All I can think of is “How can you possibly not be?”
With other trauma the crime scene belongs to a car or a house or a battlefield
With rape your body is the crime scene
You can’t ever leave it
You must learn to live in the wreckage
The dress I wore I can no longer wear without feeling his hand slide underneath it
I pray for a day my body feels like it belongs to me instead of just property
I pray for a day I stop flinching every time my lover touches me
I feel like a collection of puzzle pieces made up of every man who’s ever hurt me
But the pieces never fit together quite right and the edges are sharp
Each a piece of glass I am now trying to extract
I never threw out the underwear, but I washed the blood stains out
I’m still trying to figure out what kind of bleach works best for the wounds in my heart.
My body has been through so much.
I’ve cut it, I’ve burned it, I’ve starved it.
But no matter what I do, my body is still here. Still standing. Still breathing. Still not giving up.
Quietly surviving.