Spring Quarter: "Express Yourself"- N.W.A.

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It’s a weird thing having no control. There’s both a fear and a peace that comes with it. Fear in the inevitability that it’s out of your hands, but also an internal conflict for peace in that there really is nothing you could do. Could’ve done. On April 22, 2022, some time before 6am, I woke up in Harbor View Emergency Room. My head was blank and swollen with anticipations of danger and accumulations of fluid. I remembered a story my cousin used to joke about, how he had woken up handcuffed to a hospital bed somewhere in France with his name listed as “Mexico” and a chunk of his hair missing. Ripped out. My hand shot to my head, then to my teeth. I almost felt safer for a second, knowing I hadn’t followed in his footsteps, but then that security was gone. As tears streaked down my cheeks and thoughts teared through my mind, I wasn’t alone anymore. Not in the physical sense anyway. A man named Greg was talking to me.

In and out of understanding, I got, “You were out for a really long time. You had people worried. That was a lot, you know.” Me. Whatever had happened seemed to be my fault. I had people worried. My eyes searched the room for my mom, for my family, but all I found was the president of my house, slumped in the hospital chair, haphazardly holding her phone, with the soft smile of eyes that could not comprehend. Greg was now missing in the contorted and out of focus scene. I kept looking at my hands, kept trying to hold them still.

“May I use the restroom please? Where is it?”

“I can take you there,” Greg answered, reappearing in the room. This giant of a man walked me around two corners. That’s when I asked him his name, how he was, and thanked him. I was concentrating so hard on thanking him, on holding my body up when it felt like it might collapse, and on getting my feet (slipping in their socks) one in front of the other to that safe haven. The bathroom. This was the place I could breathe, I could let out my sobs much harder, and then I looked in the mirror. My eyes were swollen, largely from tears I assumed, but my nose. My nose was raw (missing a chunk of skin), unproportionate with my face (swollen so large it almost looked comical), and then the pain. It was as if the extremity had been separated from my face until my brain remembered, upon being confronted with proof, “Oh! That’s why the buzzing feeling is. That feeling is pain.” 

I entered a realm of uncovering. 

Uncovering I had been unconscious for over 5 hours.

Uncovering I had been slung over the shoulders of two girls who didn’t know they were saving my life.

Uncovering I had fallen when they were trying to get me to safety.

Uncovering that my comatose body was rescued home by two boys whose names I never knew.

Uncovering “Yea you were like foaming at the mouth and blood was everywhere and like vomit. You weren’t responding.”

I uncovered I had been drugged. I was at the party for an hour and a half. I drank one glass. And someone robbed me of my security– my state of freedom from danger. 

This realm is a scary place to be. It’s the state of no control, no power over yourself. 

I am sorry to any person who has been made to feel unsafe in their own body, who hasn’t had the power to say no, or whose voice was ignored when they did speak. That is a depth I hope no one is unfortunate enough to understand, but that everyone is compassionate enough to try.

I had stayed in to do homework. I was on the phone with my mom when my roommate came to pick me up and we went to a house of friends, of kids we presumably felt safe with. 11:00pm. I found the dance floor, but lost my friends. I was swept away in a crowd to a familiar face. She wanted me to drink with her, but I have a rule: I won’t drink to feel better, only to feel even better. If I am not having a good time, or if my mind is elsewhere, I have to go talk to someone or dance or leave to change that. And most of the time, I just don’t feel the need– I’d rather dance. So I fake it. Truth is, we all do to different degrees, but most are too scared to share that they fake, so others keep pouring alcohol down their throats. We hold cups in our hands so that when someone comes up to us we can hold them up as a defense mechanism. We can’t say no, but our actions can protect us. We spill our drinks, get more before they are empty, hold wine bags and pulls without taking in the intoxication, and you would never know. But we do like to drink. We have a right to and more importantly a right to enjoy it. We don’t do these things because we are “prudes” or “p**sies” or “uptight b*tches.” We do them so we have the safety to enjoy our night, to remember it, and the freedom to say no– to have enough control to save ourselves when the tables shift.

I faked my drink, not because I didn’t want to drink that night, but so that I could drink when I chose to– so that they wouldn’t shove alcohol down my throat from good or bad intentions.

I danced, I found my friends in the house, I got hugs, I chatted, and I found more friends. 20 minutes in and I was having fun. 11:22pm. I found another familiar face, we went and got a drink (one that I wanted), and we talked about skiing. I love that freedom. I love laughing. I refilled my glass to hold something in my hand, to hold my shield, and I walked off a platform into the sea of people. I remember every name, every face, every conversation, every filled cup that I sipped and tossed or dropped in the crowd. Then I bumped into a guy I didn’t know as well. 

He was friends with my circles, but he had made me uncomfortable two days earlier– April 20, 2022: I didn’t want to drink with him, I took a sip and faked the rest of the pull, and he called me out on it. He was rude and upset regardless of how good his original intentions may have been and I left. I was making my way back to the dancefloor when we bumped into each other, I didn’t have my shield and he wanted to drink. We raised our glasses and I took a sip and bumped the rest of my drink into the shoving crowd. I took a step into all of those people, trying to go back to the dance floor. I remember thinking I was struggling to keep up with someone, that I was supposed to be following a guy, but I lost him. Then, nothing. 

I went to the party at 11pm, I had my first actual drink (a glass of wine) at 11:22pm, I looked at my phone to text my boyfriend at 11:31 but I felt like I couldn’t control my fingers. I was lost in the crowd and then? I remember nothing past a little after 11:31pm. I was carried home at 12:46am. The ambulance was called at 1:05am. 

From 11:31pm to 12:34am, I was force fed alcohol to the point of 4 times the legal limit. I weigh 113 lbs. My body cannot take that level of poisoning. I don’t know if the people forcing me to drink were my violators or simply kids who didn’t know that I was not physically capable of saying no, of stopping them. My shirt and jeans were drenched in alcohol that was poured on me. My hair reeked of it. And what sucks? You can’t shower. You can’t risk washing away the evidence, evidence that makes you want to gag.

I entered back into the state of uncovering. Taken home home, raced to hospitals and Dove house to test for sexual assault– to get a tox screen because Harborview assumed I had been partying for hours due to my level of alcohol poisoning. I was lectured about my drinking habits by a social worker and I couldn’t understand because out of everyone? I know my limits, I never get anywhere near them, and I am scrupulous about my relationship with drinking. That, and I hadn’t chosen to drink anything other than that glass of wine that night. 

There is currently no policy within my house that someone brought unconscious from a party or hospitalized should automatically get a tox screen, and because of that there is a sound chance I missed that 6 hr and 12 hr window to catch my violators. 

The girls who drove me home, girls of “leadership,” giggled nervously as they explained again how my mouth was foaming, how blood was “just everywhere” from my fractured nose. Some held sympathy behind their best attempt to make me feel better– to make the situation better by downplaying it– and some simply didn’t know how. I don’t hold it against them. They were doing the best they knew, but they just didn’t know. I was left to hold myself up in the alley behind my house, as I stepped from the car to the back door. My body wasn’t mine yet– I couldn’t control it. I spilled my bag of belongings into the doorway, stooped to pick them up like a marionette with dexterity of arms but not of my hands or fingers, and I entered the door. I still didn’t know what happened. I didn’t know I was drugged. I was angry with myself, but mostly I was so confused. I held myself together long enough to talk to my roommate and to shut down conversations of speculation outside of my door. Then I called my mom sobbing. We walked through everything I remembered, she was already on it and had discovered that I was drugged. When she told me, it was that same dilemma of control. I felt this huge breath that I had been holding in, leave me, this weight lift. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault. But then the fear. There wasn’t anything I could do. I couldn’t stop it. 

Then you keep learning. 

You learn that foaming at the mouth does not occur from drinking, alone. 

You learn that you have to change because if you wear shorts to the hospital where you get tested for sexual assualt, that (unconciously) people are less likely to sympathize with you and therefore, less likely to believe you.

You learn that “You are not broken.” I know. 

You learn that your heart rate was so low that it almost stopped.

You learn that Rohypnol and most drugs used for roofies are enhanced by alcohol, that it makes them much more dangerous, that they lower respiration until you stop breathing, that you suffocate from the lack of oxygen and the high levels of carbon dioxide. 

You learn that your breathing almost stopped, that your levels of carbon dioxide were flagged for being so high and your respiration flagged for being so low, even upon discharge from the hospital. 

You learn any drug can be used to roofie someone and that you have to test for that drug specifically or else it most likely will never come up on a tox screen.

You learn that the only reason people drug someone is to sexually assault them, learn that they poisoned you with alcohol so that they wouldn’t have to use all of their roofies in case they didn’t “succeed” with you and had to try with someone else.

You learned that you were groomed, that rejecting someone led to them solidifying this plan in their mind. 

You learn too much. Learn that if you didn’t lose them in the crowd, or get spotted by someone to take you home, or fell slightly differently, or were left to “sleep it off,” or simply didn’t wake up in the hospital, you would have died. You would have been assaulted, paralyzed from the fall, brain damaged from the alcohol poisoning, or died from suffocation because of a sick individual slipping drugs into your drink, probably one that you barely touched or only sipped. It was the perfect combination of events that meant I got to keep my life. But that was only the beginning.

You take on this journey of absorbing comment after comment, of trying to feel safe in your body, of trying to feel beautiful in it, and trying to reverse the invasion. You absorb fear when people try to touch or hug you or when you’re in a crowded room or when you feel someone's breath (it doesn’t matter who) too close to you. There are the comments you can take, the ones you intrinsically seem to have an answer to.

“Are you feeling better?”

“From being drugged? Um, no… no. Fuck no.”

“When you wear that jacket over your shorts, it like really looks like you're not wearing anything underneath. Like….?”

“Probably why I was drugged.”

“No but you should change.”

“Thanks. Yea, no.”

Then the ones you can’t.

“Yea, there’s nothing we can do.”

Where you could once brush off being asked out or someone wishing to kiss you or staring at your lips or going to hold your hand, you feel angry, feel violated when men are forward– you want to be respected. You need them to respect your voice because someone didn’t. 

That’s the other thing, your voice doesn’t matter anymore. I waited for support from my woman-lead organization after the incident, waited for them to ask for accountability. Upon receiving neither, I reached out. They did nothing. They responded with a coldness that made me feel alone all over again. They still couldn’t comprehend, and I felt a pity for them. There is such sadness in watching a society of women fail to protect their sisters– fail to try– fail to fight for the opportunity to ensure their safety. But what’s more, there is a sadness that they didn’t have the love in their life to care. Love makes you sweeter, softer, kinder, but deeper. You feel more. You feel happiness and sadness so profoundly– every emotion amplified. It’s beautiful. You find yourself capable of things that you had not the opportunity to explore until you find these pockets or oceans of love. I am intensely sorry that these girls of leadership did not have the chance to hold that love, to use its power to work to protect the members of their society of women from drugging, from rape, and from the aftereffects of those violations.

I wasn’t allowed to bring support. I was boxed into having to make confrontations I wasn’t ready to make. The two weeks following the drugging it seemed like every single event we were supposed to attend took place in the house where I was roofied. Night after night. People chose that. As for the confrontation, I had to file a police report. I was hoping the organization would support me, would ask for the house where the violator lived to look into the incident, to do a mandatory workshop about consent specifically in regards to alcohol and drugging, or to at least change our own policies so that tox screens are requested and parents reached when their children are unconscious in the hospital. At the least, I was hoping they might choose to spend a little less time with that house immediately following the incident. None of the above occurred. 

This meant I was left to file a police report. I had to reveal my name, had to hold the consequences of police officers going to that house and asking the boys about the incident, and confronting my suspected violator. Had to face scrutiny and questions about my involvement, suggestions that do hurt, and that place doubt into your mind. Was this my fault? I felt alone. But I had done what they asked. Yet I am still waiting. 

“I cannot get involved beyond member support [I received a link about mental health] and directing you to the proper people… Thank you for understanding.”

I didn’t understand. I didn’t need “heavy involvement,” I needed not to be ostracized for something completely and disgustingly beyond my control. When I requested the contacts of the administration and advisors, it took 3 days to receive. I didn’t feel like I was directed to the proper people. I felt like I was being passed off, like I had to fight all of these issues completely on my own.

“If you decide in the future you would like to share that a police investigation is going on, there are more things I can do… I could ensure our members do not go there.”

I filed that report. Felt the weight of that moment so severely, but I did it. It wasn’t easy. Then I told this society of women I had done what they asked. Even so, they are still planning events with the house. So I told them, “I hope you have the opportunity or fight to create the opportunity to [better] support your sisters in the future.”

I am still in the process of discovering what it means to have no control, what it will leave with me, and what I will work through. I might never catch my violator, but I do know that this wasn’t me. I also never named my suspect because if I’m wrong, that is a scar that he doesn’t deserve. That notion? That is the kind of world I want to grow. I’m fighting with my gratitude for life and my need to cultivate a space of positivity, love, and support, but most importantly, fighting for a world of good faith and generosity, something that my “society of women” was not able to give me.

I am beyond grateful to so many people who saved my life and made me feel safe again, made me feel heard, seen, and believed. You don’t need to have the right thing to say, but you should care enough to want to say the right thing. This is the process of no control.