We’re not ready to talk about rape.

But it’s past time we started.

In our current culture, talking about rape is just talking around rape. We talk about the sex trade and lost, stolen women. We talk about child brides. We talk about how to raise children to become conscientious adults, we talk about how to punish criminals. When it’s straightforward and heinous, like the Brock Turner case, there’s always that poor girl, her poor family. There’s this constant weighing of damages; a victim is irreparably harmed, forever. Her family is broken.

And here is the point in the conversation where, as we’re talking about the hypotheticals of how this woman was affected, I have to chime in: “I was raped.”

The conversation changes. It becomes uncomfortable and quiet. It becomes cringey and sunken. People look at their hands and stop looking me in the eyes. In this highly prescriptive moment of #metoo, pussy-grabbing, rapist-outing feminism, declaring my rape makes me, at least momentarily, a pariah. And it is exhausting.

The sexual abuse was awful, but the failed attempts to help were the heavier burden.

I have been doing everyone else’s emotional labor since my rape. In fact, since before my rape when I was sexually assaulted when I was 15. I kept it to myself because for some time because I knew it would be devastating for my incredibly loving, but at times suffocating family. And, of course, it was. My family flinched, and continues to flinch, around topics. In high school, after my parents found out, my hand-wringing mother casually mentioned my father couldn’t sleep. He’d been crying at night. And guess what? As a disabled, honor roll, theater geek, athlete, volunteer, club president kid (that kid), their pain made me have to be the best. I had to be better. And that pressure? That’s what made me fall apart at the seams. The sexual abuse was awful, but the failed attempts to help were the heavier burden.

So, then, when I was actually raped, I told no one. And then it happened again, a world away with a totally new cast of characters. And so on. What’s worse is my experience is the optimistic version of post-rape support. So many are blamed and punished for the violence perpetrated against them. We have to abolish the scarlet letter of victimhood.

Even today, every mistake — every late bill, every missed appointment — I worry someone will blame these normal slippages of adult life on my rape. I worry it amounts to evidence that I never quite made it, that my apple has a few brown spots, that my family will see the person I could have been just at the edges of their vision, if not for my trauma. I live in a world where I have to actively manifest my normalcy.

Imagine that, instead of rape, I was in a car crash. It was a horrible car crash, and it set me back. Years of treatment later, and you’d never know. Sometimes someone talks about car crashes, and I look uncomfortable. When people talk about Toyota recalling a car line for a fault, I have an opinion masked by unvoiced experience. Very occasionally, I have a flashback to that moment, and it hurts, but it’s not happening right now.

It’s for all these reasons that I loathe the term “survivor” when it comes to rape. Fuck you —I thrive.

I am functional and happy; it took years of therapy, medication, and work to be better. In that time, I moved through phases of being deeply depressed, toxic, utterly self-defeating, and fearful. I let other people make decisions for me, and they weren’t always someone who should have been handed the reins.

It’s for all these reasons that I loathe the term “survivor” when it comes to rape. Fuck you —I thrive. I’m funny. I have an amazing partner. Damage is part of life, but “damaged” I’m not. I’m human. I’m maybe not as risk-averse as I should be. I’m a little too honest. In other words, I’m not spotless, but who is?

I live in a renowned, rubber-stamped liberal utopia, and really, we’re not talking about rape. We’re so ready, so close. We can do more that prevent rape; we can help live in a society that moves on.