People - Broken man - I Was Raped, Does Anyone Care?
What follows is a lengthy, difficult, unreferenced autobiographical writing from an otherwise anonymous poster on reddit. He uses a throw-away alias, that would be difficult, if not largely impossible to track down. He even opens with an admission that he doesn't know what he aims to accomplish by posting this story. I don't know what I intend to accomplish by reposting it.
Only that it is a troubling piece of writing. It's a human piece of writing. It delves into a societal darkness that is problematic for us to analyze too closely. But we need to do a number of things, at least in my reckoning. First, this man needs to know that we do care. That the world is changing, and that we listen, and have empathy as individuals, as a culture, as a society for him. That his story, were it to prove credible is worth listening to. Second, that our world is changing that twenty years ago, ten years ago...men would never have even imagined that this was a problem. He delves a little bit into this in his piece of writing.
We don't live in that world anymore. We're in the midst of transitioning through it, but the world is a-changing through it. We have a lot of hard questions to ask, and a lot of harder answers to find. But we'd never know until stories like this, human stories begin coming to light.
So I share it with you, in the darkness of the internet. In some strange corner of nowhere. Hopefully it moves you to ask questions too. Obviously...trigger warnings galore.
Edit: I added this message when I shared it to Facebook...I feel like it might, but maybe doesn't, explain why I put it into a public blog to share.
This is a piece of writing I read tonight. Once I finished reading it, I had to go for a walk and think about it. When I got back, I transcribed it over the course of half an hour, loaded it into one of my private blogs and left it. I keep repositories of writing for myself everywhere, dark writing, tragic writing. Human writing.
Then I came back five minutes later. I hadn't shared it. Maybe it was because I was ashamed I had read it? Maybe because I was ashamed for the guy, his story that I had read. It was on my mind. It was on my mind because I didn't know how to explain it. I still don't. I don't know why it is important, only that it is. And in an era where we share images of kittens, and what people wear, or what GoT character best represents us...why would I hesitate to share something important?
Truthfully I'm still not sure. But I'd like to talk about it.
