This is a tough blog to write, maybe a tough one to read--my first appt with the SA specialist.

 So for the most part, my new life in Arizona is pretty cool. For sure I am a little lonely and I'm a little bored. I have pretty much gotten all of our boxes unpacked though I am still finding out where everything fits and even getting rid of some stuff that we no longer have room for. Our house back in Texas is a 2400ish square foot late 70s two story, while our house here is not quite 1800 square feet. So needless to say, some stuff has got to go. I've also started setting up the baby's room which has been really fun. But in that time, I've also painted my nails abut 20 different colors, I spend a ridiculous amount of time on Facetime with my sister watching old episodes of Making the Team and I don't know what I would do without my nap every day before I go pick up the kids from school. I'm also that annoying wife who texts her husband 30 times a day complaining about how hungry she is. What I'm also doing is stalling because I don't know how much of today's therapy appointment I want or should talk about. I guess I want to talk about all if it because...well just because. 

At Christmas I saw my best friend from high school and learned that she had been a victim of SA when she was in college and was still dealing with it. Through our conversation, I told her about what happened in Mexico and she recommended a therapist who specializes in SA recovery. I reached out immediately and the therapist said she was happy to see me remotely. I had that first appointment today. 

As I was signing to the therapy version of zoom, it really hit me how much time and money I've invested into my mental health this year and how incredibly lucky that makes that I can afford both. So many people can't. Here's a short list of all the things we have done to fix my broken brain: 

--I was seeing my therapist all last spring, that was mostly to come up with strategies to deal with what I thought was my fault our marriage was floundering and stress at work. Very sweet lady but I don't know how much she actually helped. I told her wanted to take the summer off and never went back. 

--In July Bubs and I started seeing our marriage counselor--probably the best decision we have made together, maybe ever. We have had to pay cash for her services but it's been so worth it. 

-- I met with the psychiatrist in San Antonio who was recommended by the marriage counselor. She had a "medication after we've tried..." philosophy which really resonated with me. She said I probably have some degree of bi-polar as well as anxiety and she would medicate me but prefers not to while I'm pregnant. 

-- The psychiatrist  had me meet with a dietician who told me that I have to get nutrients in my body and can't live on exclusively coffee and caramels before I have dinner. This was also so valuable and next to the marriage counselor, fixing or at least improving my diet has had the most profound impact on my mental health. 

-- The psychiatrist also recommended a therapist who I only saw 2 or 3 times because we just didn't click. She was supposed to refer to me someone else but I was doing so good, I never really followed up. 

And now on to today, yet another person focused on Dani's broken brain. The good news is, I think she's just who I need be seeing. The great news is this is going to be really hard. Good things come from things that take work.

So pure trigger warning ahead. I'm going to describe what happened to me in Mexico in probably more detail than I have so far. I'm doing this not to be salacious  or to make me appear more sympathetic, rather I don't know if the record I keep in this blog will make any sense to me or anyone else reading if the details aren't on the table. Through the course of therapy, I want to be able to refer to this again. 

The prologue most of you guys know. This summer, I took my first ever adult vacation without my husband or kids. I was a last minute invite by two women I'm semi close with, probably because I had a major falling out with one of them earlier and I think she was inviting me as an olive branch. When we got there, all they wanted to do was sleep. I wanted to have fun on the vacation. On the first night a man in his 60s came up to us and said his friends had ditched him and we looked like fun. He bought us all drinks and after about 30 minutes my friends decided to go to bed. He invited me to stay up and eat chips and salsa with him. He was nice,  I felt bad for his friends ditching him and we both were having troubles in our respective marriages. He seemed like a very nice person to talk to who wouldn't judge or gossip to people back home. We stayed up until about 1 in the morning just talking. There wasn't a hint of attraction or sexual energy and I made it very clear that no matter how annoyed I was with my husband, that I loved him with my whole heart. The next day, this man offered to take the three of us parasailing which we did. It was fun but that was all we saw of him that day--maybe he and I did dinner. I don't actually recall. The next morning he invited us to go on an guided ATV trip, my two friends declined and I agreed to go. The trip was OK but a little dirty, hot and repetitive. They also said they forgot the food they were supposed to bring us and that we were running behind so we didn't get to do the beach/swim stop they promised. I was starving by the time we got back. When we got back to the resort he said he was hungry too and offered to buy me dinner to which I agreed and without showering or cleaning up at all, we went to a restaurant on the resort. At dinner, he showed me pics of his car collection and I feigned interest because he had be very nice up that point. I probably did have too much to drink but again there wasn't a hint of spark, attraction, innuendo, etc... on his part or mine. We sat there for a few hours when he asked me to go to his room because he had more pictures of his cars he wanted to show me on his Ipad. He seemed so harmless that it didn't even occur to me that I shouldn't go.

Again--this may be hard to read so you can skip this but I was exhausted when we got into his room. He had two double beds, his ipad was on the night stand in between them. He set it up so I could scroll through the pics and after he handed it to me I just sort of flopped down face first on the bed. At first he was standing next to me describing each car as I flipped through the pics. I honestly don't know how I missed that he had moved behind me because out of the blue I felt his entire weight pressing down through his hands or a forearm on my waist. He was very big man and while I wasn't immobilized, I was pretty well stuck. I could feel him flip up the swim coverup I had on and his fingers pull between my skin and my bikini bottom to expose, for lack of a better term, my anus and the back part of my vulva. Even more suddenly I felt his face in between my butt checks and his tongue. I truly don't know how long that lasted. It seemed like forever and I think one of the big problems when I described it on reddit was I said "five minutes" I think more realistically it  was less than a minute. I was however completely frozen, as in I was so shocked that I felt like I couldn't speak, I couldn't move, I could adjust, I couldn't respond, etc... However long that lasted, he stood up. My right hand had I guess instinctively clutched the fabric of the bedding and the next thing I knew, he was rubbing his exposed penis on the back of my hand.  That is when I really realized what was happening and I jumped up and told him to get his hands off me. It almost seemed like reality set in for him too and he kept apologizing over and over saying he didn't know what had come over him. I told him I didn't care but if he came near me again I was going to scream so loud that I would alert the entire hotel and I would scratch his eyes out. 

I vaguely remember him crying that he was so lonely and he was sorry because I had been so nice to him. I told him whatever friendship we had was over with and I was leaving. He begged me to stay because he was so drunk and he had to sleep with a cpap machine and he was worried about throwing up and choking in his mask and dying. Why I agreed to stay is something I need to work out with the therapist but I did and I remember sitting upright in the same bed he attacked me while he was asleep in the other and the sound of that machine for the entire time. I have a pretty good recollection that I was sitting there completely awake for about 5 hours just watching for any sudden movements. He woke up really early and said that he was ok and that I could leave.  I went back to my room and tried to sleep but was dumbfounded and confused at what had happened. I know I called my best friend Ashley and she volunteered to fly me down and her recommendation was that I call Bubs right away since he would probably want to fly down and help me get home too. Bubs and I were in such a weird spot over the way that we left each other at the airport that even though I know him better than any other person alive, I wasn't sure how he'd react (little did I know he was just about to craft his own version of events on reddit--and his reaction was not good).  That was Thursday and at about 2pm I was able to sleep, I did see my other two friends for breakfast on Friday but I think the rest of the time I sort of aimlessly wandered around the hotel and beach completely not sure of what to think, feeling so guilty, so ashamed, so stupid, unfaithful, naïve, ignorant, etc... I flew home early Saturday. It took a few days for Bubs to reveal what he though he knew and how he came to know it and all that time is truly a blur. 

So that's my sexual assault experience. Although, today my therapist asked me to stop judging myself and my reaction to it, I know that I was incredibly lucky. I am so lucky that I was not fully raped. Although I would like to think I would have fought like hell, with our size difference there was nothing stopping him with how I was laying. I'm also lucky I wasn't killed. Who knows what type of person he could have turned out to be had he had more drinks or felt like he had to save his reputation or worried about what I would say or who I would tell (as some of you remember, I did end up talking to his wife and she claimed he's not a violent man). 

There are some other things that I've never spoken about that still bring me tremendous guilt. For example when I felt him flip up my coverup, I remember thinking "but I'm so dirty." I was in a bikini and a swim shirt, we had been on ATVs all day without the promised swim stop or a shower after we got home. But it pains me, to the point of hysterical tears that when I was being assaulted that I didn't think of my kids, I didn't think of my husband, I didn't think my sisters or my brother or anyone that I loved. My thought was a superficial "I'm physically dirty." I'm humiliated that I froze. I have never in my life been afraid of physical confrontation. I'm not saying that it's a healthy thing but when it really mattered I froze. I'm so utterly humiliated that I know my husband so well but that our relationship was so in the tanks that I couldn't call him and tell him what I'd been through. I'm humiliated that another man has seen those parts of me. Most of all I just can't believe how stupid I was to go into that room. 

So that's what the therapist and I talked about today. She wanted to know what type of event we were dealing with and we spent a huge amount of time talking about my shame and how I judge myself and how we can start to work on these issues.  We are going to start once a week, maybe more often if we start to uncover some issues, maybe a little further between appointments if I'm feeling ok. But her goal is to get me with some coping strategies where I don't relive the event every day and check in my progress after about 10-12 sessions. I really loved that she has an end goal in sight. I am happy to get this started because it's been a long time. No matter all the good things that have and will happen to us this year, being sexually assaulted has colored all of it.