Savannah

          “After my rape, I felt used, destroyed, broken, and unbelievably lost because I didn’t know that there were forces evil enough in the world to let a 15-year-old get violently raped in a church courtyard. I was always an optimistic person, filled with life and always wearing a smile before my rape, but after, I could no longer sleep without feeling his hands on my body, eat without tasting the dirt in my mouth from having my head shoved against the ground, and others could not touch me without feeling as if his hands were once again slamming me into the ground and breaking me. I retreated into myself--alone in my pain--and contemplated how a life haunted by nightmares was even a life worth living. A simple brush of a hand against my bare skin let to the worst of panic attacks where I would sit and shake for hours at a time, inconsolable.

          When I finally decided to end it all, I saw my best friend’s face, I saw what her life would be like without me, and I couldn’t take away from her what had been ripped away from me. Life wasn’t fair, but it would never get better if I hurt others and hurt myself. So I decided to finally accept the help of a therapist whose office I had sat in and stared at the wall for the previous 9 weeks, the open arms of my parents and friends who desperately wanted the old version of me back, and I began to heal. Day by day, month by month, morphing into the version of myself who is strong, who has the courage to say I was raped, who has helped countless others through her story and her non-profit, and who is just me, scars to my soul and all.

          This blanket was the first thing I touched after I was raped and was given to me as a gift by my mother when I studied abroad so that even when I was 4,000 miles away in Italy, I would feel a piece of home wrapped around me. When I was afraid to come out to the world, I would lay in bed wrapped in the blanket that comes everywhere with me and know that I was safe there, far away from my attacker, and even now, when I have bad days or am sad, I wrap myself in it and know that when I sit and breath, wrapped in the warmth of my blanket, no one can hurt me. The blanket symbolizes comfort and peace of mind and body, which are feelings not easily attained after such a traumatic experience.” –Savannah, 19