I graduated university last year (somehow despite all else) but I was still a student when this all happened to me. And I must say that if I didn’t write this book I would feel like I deserved everything that was done to me.
I remember I was numb as I walked through the airport. I didn't want to feel my body. I didn't want to feel anything. I felt like there was a monster inside me that made the walls of my sanity shake hard, almost crumbling to pieces. I had a layover in Iceland, where I froze half to death because I didn't listen to my mom when she told me to wear a winter coat. It was the end of the summer and classes were starting up again. It was the last year of my degree - I was almost done! I was studying abroad for the first semester of the year - so off to Slovakia I went! And I swore and swore again that none of this would change no matter what had happened to me that summer; that I would finish my degree on time, that I would complete the exchange, that I would do my Master`s the year after. . . even if I had been raped. I wanted to be a normal 20-year-old again. I partied like crazy. Every. Single. Night. No joke. Up to this point, I had never really drunk much in my life, but here the sting of alcohol down my throat felt good because it made me temporarily forget about the monster inside me. I went to Iceland, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Greece. I met my best friend. I learned Portuguese. I got a tattoo. With the monster inside me who never stopped banging on the walls of my sanity. I wrote this book because I was told too many times that it wasn't true, that it wasn't hurting and it hadn't happened. That I was crazy. I wrote this book in a way a reader can live and feel those days so they see the damage of sexual assault is #REAL.
