: Something that happened to me twice
According to my therapist's definition of the term, I have been sexually assaulted twice. Don't read the rest of this post if you don't want to think about that.
The first time was when I was 17 or 18 (important difference there but I honestly can't remember) by an old lady. In the moment, I felt very afraid and uncomfortable, and had to threaten to call the cops before she backed off. After a few days, I was fine, I guess. I even felt a little bit vindicated because I had spent a long time feeling frustrated at the idea that only women/girls could be the victims of sexual assault, and now I was living proof that that wasn't the case. Just as soon, I felt extreme doubt about whether what I had experienced was "legitimate," whether I could actually compare my experience to the "real" sexual assaults that we were hearing about then, near the peak of the MeToo movement.
Second time was when I was 23, by a sort of colleague-adjacent person (hard to describe the relationship in detail without doxxing myself but it was only the first or second time we'd met), a man maybe a year or two older than me. This time, I knew exactly what had happened and confronted the guy the day after with some trusted friends by my side, said "That was kinda messed up, man," and he gave a weird half apology. I cried in the airport a few hours later and one of my female friends tried to comfort me, but I could tell she was weirded out by the whole thing, that it just didn't compute.
I only told my therapist the second story--too much ground to cover. She helped me see that the experience had affected me more than I thought, that it presented another opportunity for me to practice the thought malpattern that goes like: Nobody cares about my feelings, I am an inanimate object, I deserve to be ignored if not treated like shit outright, I should have been grateful just to be seen.