If you’re a survivor yourself and reading this, you know that when I write “I had finished being shocked and upset long ago,” I don’t mean it’s done and dusted and put away and now I’m finished with the rape. I remember a male friend to whom I talked less than a year after it happened. “Do you think I’m thinking about it for too long?” I wanted to know. “I still feel scared and upset; do you think I’m making too big a deal out of it?” “Yes,” he said, “you are. You should be over it by now.” That shut me up for quite a while.

It took me a long time to see how clueless he was. You don’t “get over it” so easily. It doesn’t work like that. Rape is no different from any other trauma in that way—you can’t make it unhappen. No matter how much you heal, you can never be unraped, any more than you can be undead. I mean that it is one of the patchwork of events that have made me the person I am. Sometimes it’s upsetting; usually it’s just there. I have made my peace with it—mostly.

So why on earth am I back, writing about it again? Now, more than ever before, people are writing and talking about rape. In the past couple of years, quite a few brave people all over the world have spoken out about their own experiences of being raped. Sexual abuse is all over the Western media. I’m an odd sort of skeptical observer to it all: a brown bisexual middle-aged atheist Muslim survivor immigrant writer without a Shame Gene. Those are my qualifications.

I didn’t die. I told the men who raped me that I would keep their secret. I made up a whole scenario about meeting them again if they let me go. I told them I had a disease. I told them that they were better than this. I told them about my grandmother. I tried every crazy argument I could think of to change their minds about committing murder. I talked nonstop. I talked my way out of oblivion. And I’m still talking.

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