Trigger Warning: This post mentions, but does not describe, sexual assault and rape. This is a rarity for this blog.
If you’ve been following The Pensive Bookworm for any length of time, you’ll recall that when I was last posting regularly, I was in the midst of working my way through the Amazon/Goodreads 100 Must-Read Books, known here as the Lifetime Reading List. I finished 2020 having reviewed 16% of the list, and began 2021 with the intention to complete at least fifteen books. However, as is often the case, life beyond the pages had other plans.
In July of 2020, I reconnected with someone from my past. I try to keep this blog upbeat and trigger-free, so I’ll keep my summary of that person brief. We’ll call him Aaron.
Aaron and I met in the middle of my senior year of high school; he was in my hometown area for college, almost two years older than I was. We clicked instantly, becoming fast friends. In some ways, there were also hints of romance blossoming, though despite our regular flirtation, a few obstacles were in our way of a real relationship. Aaron had no intention of staying in the area after college, and while that was fine with me, he wasn’t in an emotional place where he was able to have the other conversation, the conversation in which we might’ve discussed if I even wanted to stay in my hometown after undergrad. At the same time, I never felt like I had the opportunity to tell him “Hey, I’m fine with leaving here and never looking back. Wherever you wanna go, count me in if you want me there.” We never had a proper date. In fact, despite talking almost daily for the better part of a year and living less than twenty minutes apart, we only spent three nights together, one of which was the night we officially met.
And, as I didn’t wholly acknowledge until last year, part of my ambivalence towards a real romantic connection with him the summer before college came from the fact that it hadn’t quite been a year since I was repeatedly sexually assaulted.
In the middle of the first spring I knew Aaron, something else happened that changed the way I thought of him. While attending another friend’s senior prom, I was sexually assaulted. Again. By a different individual than the one who had repeatedly assaulted me—that had been the previous year. I’ve written more about that prom experience on my other blog, Don’t Ask Liv, so you can read that post for that story. In regard to Aaron, though, the vital piece of information you need is that he is the one who emotionally carried me through that night and my subsequent recovery. Aaron is the one who ultimately started to help me feel safe in my own body again with the two nights we spent together later that summer. Despite the depth of our friendship and how much he meant to me, though, I started to pull away from him after that second night for two reasons. One, I was scared of really falling in love with him because I knew he wasn’t as emotionally available as I wanted (and perhaps needed) him to be, and two, because even though it had been almost a year, we still had never gone anywhere in public together. We met at a house party, then spent two nights together in his apartment. If he wanted anything more from me, I reasoned he should be making more of an effort to let me know. I’d been content with our friends with (limited) benefits situation for a time, but I’d had enough of it.
So near the end of 2014, exactly one month after Aaron and I spent our first night in his apartment, I said “yes” when someone else, Nick, asked me out. Nick and I have been married a little more than five years as of this post.
So what does all of this have to do with books?
Last summer, as I reconnected with Aaron for reasons I’ll explain later, I was re-reading Gone with the Wind—my all-time favorite book. And I realized that, in a lot of ways, I am the Scarlett O’Hara in my story. Not solely because I’m the heroine of my story, but because for much of 2020, I found myself caught between an Ashley Wilkes and Rhett Butler all of my own.
At the end of Gone with the Wind (spoiler alert), Margaret Mitchell writes of Scarlett: “She had never understood either of the men she had loved and so she had lost them both. Now, she had a fumbling knowledge that, had she ever understood Ashley, she would never have loved him; had she ever understood Rhett, she would never have lost him.”
Reading that quote last summer hit me differently, because despite the feeling and ambivalence I had about both Aaron and Nick at different times in my life, I finally understood who each of them were in my story. I came to understand that Aaron and Nick each offered different things to my life—and my healing—but only one of them instinctively knew exactly how I needed to be loved and who I truly am.
Last summer, although I felt like I would soon be gone with the wind myself as my trauma ruled my mind, dominated my days, and sent me on an emotional, marital, and social endeavor upon which I never wanted to embark, I took a journey I needed to take. Now, I feel more whole, more healed, and like I know myself and the men in my life better than I ever thought possible.
One of the things I’ve learned about trauma is that anniversaries have a way of bringing up memories. Sometimes, that can be a terrifying experience, especially when those memories come in the form of flashbacks. One minute, we’re in the present, enjoying our life now, and the next, it’s six years prior, and we’re reliving a moment in which we made a decision. Then, back in the present, we find ourselves wondering what we should’ve done differently, and if we had, what might our life look like now? With the anniversary of reconnecting with Aaron approaching, I’ve decided to re-read Gone with the Wind yet again and write a blog series about why I relate to Miss Scarlett and why—above all other love stories—I believe Margaret Mitchell’s great American novel captures the essence of my own.
And, hopefully, I’ll get back to the Lifetime Reading List posts soon as well. 😊
The Pensive Bookworm 