Content Warning

It started out innocent. A kindergartner watching the NewsHour to a fifth grader on the morning announcements; homemade newspapers, middle school film competitions and a small YouTube channel; a ravenous teenager racking up national awards and speaking at student conferences until I became a broadcast intern on the precipice of burnout.

But when I was raped by a man from a dating app, I pretended like it didn’t happen in favor of sinking deeper into school and work.

Gradually and inevitably, my resolve broke away in small pieces until the totality of the loss could not be ignored. A year after the attack, I ended up in the ER for getting drunk and arguing with the woman on the suicide hotline.

“I can’t go to the hospital, I have to work,” I’d pleaded. But she’d insisted that I was unwell, and so I’d called her a cunt, to the horror of my then-boyfriend who’d never seen me like this before. It wouldn’t be the last time my inner Karen reared her ugly head.

I spent the night in a hospital gown in a cement room pacing around a cot, still drunk.

When the nurse took my vitals and asked how much I weighed, I told her, “I’m 170. I’m gaining a lot of weight.”

“It looks cute on you, you wear it well,” she said. Her words gave me the only relief I felt that night, and later, when I went to pee and faced myself in the bathroom mirror - messy, shoulder-length brown hair, dark circles and red eyes - I felt prettier.

Eventually, I sobered up and asked to go home. I had my first job for the Associated Press the next day. I refused to be a no-show.

The doctors said I wasn’t well enough, until my dad, with the help of his lawyer, arranged an alternative: I could leave the hospital if I agreed to start an intensive outpatient program.

And though I assured my parents that this was all okay, that I was fine, upon returning to the chaos of an unkempt apartment, I broke up with my boyfriend, dropped out of school, and crashed my Camry (well, really, I just chose not to swerve when a careless driver ran a red light resulting in the most underwhelming T-bone of all time). Yet, I made it to my AP gig and did the job well. It was February, 2020. My favorite book was Catch and Kill.

I couldn’t get drunk or high while I was outpatient. I abided by the rule until Lainey came to visit, driving all the way from Florida to South Carolina to see me. I told her no weed in the apartment. But she’d come all this way, and brought so many of her things - colorful decor, groceries, a TV. So I ceded that it would be fine to smoke with her on the pullout couch she was staying on as we watched her cartoons. She was doing all this for me, after all. I was utterly offended by my roommate’s suggestion that she was a “user.”

Reality started to fade away as N95s and Lysol canisters appeared. Eventually, my newsroom told me to stop coming in, though I wouldn’t be officially laid off until its parent company cut intern jobs nationwide due to the pandemic. I got high every day with Lainey until she went back to her parents, leaving her things behind with plans to return.

With Lainey gone, and with her the chemical comforts upon which I was growing dependent, I searched for something else to soothe me. My friend Ben always bought alcohol when I needed it, and when he handed it to me he said, “I’m really worried about you.”

So naturally, I blacked out on sauvignon blanc in the twin bed my grandparents had bought to replace the broken queen where I was raped, only to wake up in my parents’ house 95 miles southeast.

They’d come to deliver the used car they’d helped buy for me with the settlement money from the crash. I don’t know how they got into my apartment, or what it must have felt like when they saw me, passed out. They drove me back to the family home, stopping along I-26 to let me puke on the grass, but I was otherwise silent, wobbling, blacked out. Later, my mother would tell me that she’d held her finger under my nose throughout the night to make sure I was still breathing. She didn’t know if I’d taken anything else with the wine.

I woke up to her, looking at me with gentle eyes, and she said, “Why don’t you stay with us for a while,” so I said, “okay,” even though I had made it my mission in college to avoid my parents at all costs.

My dad chauffeured me to the mental health facility in my college town, 1.5 hours away, every day. But COVID-19 was spreading, and spreading. Finally, group therapy went virtual and I stopped going.

I had flirted with delusion in my life, but it wasn’t until then, in the quiet terror of lockdown and having lost everything for the first time, that we finally fucked.

The world was ending. My despair had caused the pandemic. Revolution was imminent.

First, I had to get back to my old apartment to collect “supplies.” I needed toilet paper and disinfectant spray. It didn’t matter to me that it was 4 a.m., but it mattered to my parents who were awakened by my clumsy attempt at sneaking out. And when my mother told me my plan was not reasonable and I could not go, I told her it wasn’t her choice. So she and my dad tried to block the doors, but I shoved my dad and ducked under his arm, bolting for the new used car.

I strapped myself in, turned the keys and threw it in reverse, but my mother flung the passenger door open and tried reaching for me. I kept backing up with the door open wide, and so she leaped inside and forced the gear selector back to park. I don’t remember what I screamed at her, but I do remember her pleading with me not to wake the neighbors, and I remember that I didn’t care because I was being chased and I had to get away. But even in my state - willing to damage the car and offend the southern sensibilities of the neighbors - I wouldn’t hit my dad, who was standing in the driveway and blocking me in with his body. Eventually, somehow, we all went inside and talked until about 7 a.m., and then my mother made coffee and we braced ourselves for another fucking day.

Lainey had a psychotic episode, too. And because we were both crazy, we had an unspeakable falling out, and I called her dad to drive up from Florida and haul her shit out of my old place. My mother thinks our weed was laced. I would believe it, given we’d acquired it from a disreputable seller. Lainey had suckered me into meeting up with a guy from Tinder to buy it, inviting him into her car where he reached around the headrest of the passenger’s seat to massage my shoulders, and it hurt, but if Lainey thought the situation was okay then it must be okay, and he as he touched me, he laughed, “I’m really good, I know.”

My delusions had something to do with Cambridge Analytica, newsroom parent companies and social informatics. And I could help save society by inventing my own journalistic practice - documenting my every thought for 4,000 Facebook friends with eroding coherence as I refused to sleep. At its worst, I was awake for 72 hours.

There were Russian trolls. Pedophiles. Terrorists. Corrupt universities. Evil newsroom parent companies. All of these things were connected, and all of my viewers were totally perplexed.

Soon they were calling my mother. I didn’t hear any of the conversations, but I could imagine them.

“What’s wrong with Ann Elizabeth?”

“She’s acting different.”

“The Facebook posts are alarming.”

“We are here for your family.”

They’d say.

Others tried approaching me directly, but the defensive and incomprehensible messages with which I replied were the impetus for friend break-ups and professional fallings-out.

So when sweet Seroquel sobered me from my ego split and I deleted social media, I knew I couldn’t stay in South Carolina. But it would take me another couple years to recover well enough to leave.

At first, I thought I’d be stuck there forever.

It takes a lot of energy to be a person, so sometimes it’s easier to turn into your grief.

All day, I stayed in the guest bed that used to be mine, surrounded by white walls that used to be yellow. Some days I’d wake up to vomit in the sheets. It was an unfortunate symptom of the heavy drinking I’d do at night when everyone was asleep.

At night, I liked to build fires in the patio pit and watch them as I smoked cigarettes and got drunk. In the beginning, it was just my dad’s beer, maybe some of his rum. I wasn’t a whiskey drinker yet - it would be another two years until she would introduce me to Macallan.

So when my dad noticed the alcohol was disappearing faster than it had before I moved back in, I started using gas station Four Lokos to obliterate myself. I was also watching a lot of Broad City.

I finally understood Tucker, a fellow big name in town folklore. We’d known each other since elementary school. He used to be a nerdy musical prodigy with freckles and shaggy brown hair. Tucker lived with his grandmother and pleaded with amphetamines to ease his anguish. This cemented his reputation in the gossip cycle as damaged goods. I had lost all my friends and would take any company I could get, and so Tucker started coming around at night to sit by the fire with me. Sometimes he’d bring his guitar and we’d sing, and sometimes we’d sneak off to get high, but usually, we drank like fish.

I don’t know if it counts as rape if, despite the fact that earlier that night I’d begged myself not to, I started it right before I blacked out. I didn’t want to, I wasn’t attracted to him, so why would I? Why did I?

I don’t know whether it matters that he was also very drunk.

But I don’t remember having sex with him, even though he asked me the next day if I remembered and told me it was “really good.”

And anyway, I don’t have the mental fortitude to think of myself as having been raped more than once, so I don’t. It doesn’t matter. My one-night-stand with Tucker was one of many sexual gray areas I’d face in the wake of the rape in 2019, and even then I was already familiar with the maddening nuance of such harm, and my consequential promiscuity had led me into situations like this time after time.

But I stopped talking to Tucker, which brought me from one friend to none.

And even though I found a job, re-enrolled at a different college, went sober, started kickboxing and counting calories, cut off my hair and dyed it and pierced my nose, I couldn’t shake the shame.