Still Room for Hope

by Alisa Kaplan

  The funny thing is that, working there, I’ve begun to learn a little bit about Judaism. I often call my dad with some tidbit or another that I’ve picked up over the course of the day. I’ve been particularly interested to learn how central the concept of forgiveness is in Judaism. So central, in fact, that the daily prayer that every Jew is supposed to say before bed, called the Shema, includes these lines: “Master of the Universe! I hereby forgive anyone who has angered or bothered me, or has sinned against me . . .”

  The whole point of the Jewish high holiday called Yom Kippur—considered to be the holiest in the Jewish calendar—is forgiveness. You ask for forgiveness from God and other people, grant it to those who ask for it, and get closer to God because of this. I was astonished to learn that the faithful prepare for Yom Kippur by spending the ten days leading up to the holiday asking the forgiveness of everyone they feel they’ve harmed over the last year. (Hello, fourth step!) And when you are asked for forgiveness, you must grant it.

  Of course, I’d love for my dad to become a Christian, to be able to attend church with me and my mom every Sunday, and eventually to become baptized. But I plan to keep learning about Judaism and telling him what I’ve learned. I feel that any spiritual practice would make his life more meaningful and grant him some relief, which is what I want for my father—and what he deserves.

  I go to church every Sunday with my mom. Our after-church park-and-chat routine has changed a little over the last year, but for a great reason: We’ve made some church friends. So, after my mom drives over to my house, we wait for our friends Stephanie and Lana to come over, and then we all drive to church together.

  The four of us sit together and pray together. And then, after church, we all head over to a 1950s-themed diner I’ve been going to since I was a kid, where they push together a bunch of tables for us. My dad meets us there, along with my parents’ oldest car-club friends, Pam and Mike. Lana’s husband, Mike, comes, too, along with their grandson Daniel, who has started working for my dad.

  The walls are lined with pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and the 1950s hotrods my parents and their friends love so much. Rosemary Clooney or Frank Sinatra is usually playing on the jukebox. I get the pumpkin pancakes if they have them—they are so good! The French toast combo with eggs and bacon is another favorite. The coffee is hot and delicious, and we love it when the owner comes over to shoot the breeze with us for a bit.

  But the best part is seeing my dad at that table. We’re not always talking about what happened at church, but the morning’s sermon does come up from time to time. When it does, my dad’s face doesn’t close off the way it used to. He listens, and sometimes he argues. For me, the important part is that he’s there and he’s engaged. It means the world to me.

  It might seem ironic that my baptism—the thing I thought would be the cause of so much chaos and conflict between my father and me—has turned out to be a source of a resolution instead.

  Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.

  Then again, maybe the reconciliation that came about as a result of me getting baptized is just another example of why I follow God’s will and not my own.

  Chapter Sixteen

  There Is an “After”

  One night, after speaking at an annual sexual assault awareness event, a woman approached me as I was packing up my things.

  “I’m a victim, too,” she said.

  I looked up in alarm; her word choice had startled me deeply. In support training, we were careful to use the word survivor. The idea is that the word victim is passive—it robs the survivor of her agency and turns her into someone who was acted upon, whereas the word survivor highlights her resourcefulness and strength. It also acknowledges the strength required (often just to get through the day) in the aftermath of a trauma. Hearing the word victim when you’re used to survivor can be jarring.

  “It happened twenty-five years ago, but the rape still affects everything in my life,” the woman, Carla, told me. “I still have nightmares, anxiety attacks. And forget about relationships. I can’t even have friends. In fact, I can barely have a conversation with the guy at the 7-Eleven.”

  That broke my heart. I took a closer look and realized that Carla’s loneliness and hopelessness and lack of confidence were palpable. I asked her if she’d ever thought about seeing a therapist. “It helps to talk, to say what happened to us out loud,” I told her.

  But she immediately shut me down.

  “Please. I’m in my fifties. There isn’t anything that anyone can do for me now.”

  I realized then that her use of the word victim hadn’t been accidental. Victim was the way she felt about herself. I felt myself getting upset. She reminded me of some of the older drug addicts I’d met when I was still using. “I’m not going to rehab,” one longtime user had told me. “I don’t need a crystal ball to know these drugs are what I’m going to die from.”

  Thinking about those drug addicts helped me to get past my momentary flash of upset and allowed me to feel hopeful on Carla’s behalf. During the worst part of my drug use, I had also believed that I’d be an addict for the rest of my life. I’d truly thought the drugs would kill me, too. Still, I’d gotten clean, as bad off as I’d been. Maybe Carla could also get some help down the line and find some relief, see herself as a survivor rather than as a victim.

  I wanted her to know that it’s never too late; there’s always an “after.” I was living proof. It’s hard to imagine a person much more in denial than I was the day Shirley took me down to Skid Row. And yet, as unbelievably resistant as I was, Shirley’s efforts did plant a seed. God had watered that seed, tended it, and made it grow. So I looked at Carla, and thought: Maybe I can plant a seed, too.

  Compassion flooded me, and I got up and gave her a hug.

  “I can hear that it hurts,” I told her. “But it doesn’t have to feel this way. It’s never too late to get help. And, Carla, see if it feels different to think of yourself not as a victim, but as a survivor.”

  On the drive home, I couldn’t get Carla out of my head. I thought about my internal response when I’d heard Carla use the word victim to describe herself. It was then that I realized, with a little surprise, that I no longer considered myself to be a victim.

  For a long time, I had parroted the party line that you hear in rape crisis centers: We’re not victims; we’re survivors. But although I was calling myself a survivor, I felt like a victim. I still blamed myself for what had happened. I still blamed my attackers for ruining my life. I was calling myself a survivor, but I was thinking—and acting—like a victim. But hearing Carla identify herself as a victim made me realize that, somewhere along the way, I’d begun to believe that I was a survivor. I’d been faking it until I felt it—but then I had felt it.

  Sitting behind the wheel of my car, I couldn’t help but wonder what had made the difference.

  The answer I came up with was pretty simple: I’d made the transition from victim to survivor by finding meaning in what had happened to me.

  The Holocaust survivor and psychoanalyst Victor Frankl wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning, which I found on the shelves in rehab. It’s an incredible book; every trauma survivor should read it. Frankl believes that we can—and must—find meaning, even in the most extreme suffering. He says, “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.”

  That is the lesson of Joseph’s story, too. Like Victor Frankl’s book, Joseph’s story carries a lot of important messages for survivors.

  First and foremost, his story speaks to me because it is a story about resilience. Over and over, Joseph endures truly horrible things, but he gets back up, stronger every time. He never allows his traumas, however significant and dreadful they may be, to determine his future. He doesn’t dwell on them and allow them to hold him back. Instead, he determines his future. He fights for what he believes is his calling.

  There is a
very moving lesson here for me and for others who have survived trauma. We have to fight to learn what we are called to do, because doing that work is the best way to heal.

  My calling, I believe—what God wants from me—is to help others who have suffered. It is to share what I now know—that there is an “after”—with Carla and other victims so that they can become survivors, too.

  That’s why the work I do with Project Sister is so important to me. I want every girl I work with to understand that there is always cause for hope. For every one of us, there will be an “after.”

  I’m trying to spread that message elsewhere, too. Last year, a number of high-profile sexual assault cases were in the news. Many of them were reminiscent of my own case. Reading about them, I knew there was more that I could be doing to help. So, in the fall of 2013, I mustered my courage, sat down, and wrote a letter to the Jane Doe in the Steubenville rape case.

  It took me a long time to write that letter. I must have written and rewritten it twenty-five times. I was scared that I would say the wrong thing to her, or that the very act of reaching out would be considered an intrusion. But I had the idea that this was my chance to write the letter I wished I could have received when I was in the worst parts of the aftermath of my own rape—during the abuse of the trials, after the hung jury. What did I wish someone would have said to me?

  Once I thought about it that way, the words poured out of me onto the page. I told the Steubenville Jane Doe about my own story and the similarities I saw between her case and my own. Ultimately, I told her exactly what I wished someone had told me: that what happened wasn’t her fault, no matter what anyone said. I told her that I was proud of her for seeking justice, and that there were thousands of people who believed and supported her. I told her what I now believe to be true (but something I would not have been able to hear at the time), which is that I hope she will eventually be able to find meaning in what had happened to her.

  Mostly, I wanted to give her hope, because for me the hardest part was thinking that the anger and loneliness and shame that consumed me in the aftermath of my rape would be the way I felt forever.

  “You have been through something that no one should ever have to endure,” I wrote. “But I can promise the chaos, hurt, pain, and hopelessness will not last forever. There is a life for you beyond this; a beautiful life that is filled with happiness, hope, trust, and self-confidence.”

  In the very depths of my despair, I would never have been able to predict any of the wonders that the last four years have brought. Never! Who would have thought that I would get into college, let alone excel there? Who would have believed that my relationship with my parents would be closer now than it has ever been—even when I was little? That I would be on my way to forgiving my attackers, to letting go and being free of the anger and hate in my heart? That I would let my walls down and be open to relationships again, both new and old?

  I certainly can’t take the credit for any of these miracles. Indeed, the biggest surprise to the me of four years ago would have been that I live my life following God’s will for me and not my own. I couldn’t have predicted the close and beautiful relationship with God that I now enjoy, or the fact that I spend every day dedicated to living in Jesus’s name and image. My faith has brought me a sense of peace, contentment, and security that I couldn’t have imagined before.

  If you’d shown me what the future held for me when I was sitting, humiliated, in a courtroom or smoking meth in a filthy squat, I would have told you that you were crazy. That’s why I think it’s so important to tell other survivors that there’s an “after,” and why I think it’s even more powerful for them to hear it from me, someone else who didn’t think there would be one.

  I was very pleased to receive a short note back from the Steubenville Jane Doe. That first letter was hard to write, but I’ve written others since. There’s plenty of evidence that she is a smart, strong girl with a lot of support. I follow all the cases in the news that seem similar to mine, and when it seems appropriate, I send a letter through the girl’s lawyer. It’s such a small thing, but it feels very healing for me to do. I can’t know what it means to them to receive it, although the letters I’ve received in return are encouraging. But I know what it means to me to send them.

  Part of the healing process is accepting your path: all of it, all of the things that happened to you, both the good and the bad. It will always be a temptation for me to see the rape as the incident that derailed my life. But the truth is that the trials God put in front of me have helped to build my character and my convictions. I have been tested—as so many of us will be. And I have survived, stronger for my tribulations.

  There’s another Victor Frankl quote that I keep on my wall: “The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”

  Joseph exercises that choice. He could opt to see his years of imprisonment and servitude as the events that derailed his life. Instead, he says to his brothers, “God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God” (Genesis 45:7–8, NIV). Joseph chooses to see all the horrendous things that happened to him as an expression of God’s will. He finds meaning in what happened to him instead of blame.

  In this, and in all things, I try to emulate his example.

  The men who assaulted me were released from prison at the beginning of 2008, after serving about three years each. That means the two trials together lasted longer than the time they spent in prison. This seems unjust to a lot of people, but, with Joseph and Dr. Frankl on my shoulder, I choose to see the outcome differently. First, I got more justice than a lot of victims do. According to RAINN, only 3 percent of rapists ever spend a day in prison—the other 97 percent of rapists go free. The aftershocks of my trials continued to be felt even after the sentences were served. It was the end of a corrupt era in Southern California government, and I choose to believe that it’s an ending that came about because I didn’t back down. I made a difference.

  Today, I choose to find a tremendous amount of healing and meaning in the work that I do to support survivors. On the one hand, it would be very easy to get discouraged by how many sexual assault cases there are and how little seems to change. Read the news, and it can seem depress­­ingly easy to rape a teenaged girl and get away with it. And although they say that justice doesn’t care about what’s in your wallet, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend: The men doing the raping tend to have more money and power than the women they rape, and the more money and power those guys and their families have, the more likely it is that the charges will be dropped or reduced. Still, there’s some evidence that there have been some positive changes on the road to Jericho, and that’s where I choose to dwell.

  The work that matters to me most is the work I do with survivors. I know there are a lot of people out there who are struggling to find meaning in the terrible things that have happened to them. Trust me: I know exactly how hard that can be. And I know that I can’t speak for them, or say how they will find the meaning in their own trauma. Yet, I can and will offer up one observation from my own life, in the hope that it will help.

  In Joseph’s story, as in mine, there is a single alchemical ingredient that transforms a series of horrific circumstances into a beautiful opportunity for grace. That ingredient is the same in Joseph’s story as it is in my own: It is forgiveness.

  Martin Luther King Jr. once said that he was not going to hate the white people of the South, because the burden of hate was too much to bear. The burden of hate can be a heavy one indeed, and I think Dr. King’s example provides very wise counsel for all of us who have been hurt and humiliated.

  I would never say that I was thankful for what happened to me when I was sixteen. I don’t believe that God wanted me to be abused with a lit cigarette; I don’t think He wa
nts that for anyone. But I can say that I am thankful for the changes that have taken place in me along the way. I am a different person than I would have been, that is for sure. And I know I am a better one.

  Conclusion

  Time to Grow

  When I started to write this book, I went up to my parents’ attic to look through some of the boxes I’d stored there. I was looking for old journals, photo albums, or anything else I’d held onto that might jog my memory about what it felt to live through those times.

  Those boxes provided quite a trip down memory lane. I found my perfect attendance certificates from junior high school, my Girl Scout sash with all my badges, ribbons from my cross-country track meets in freshman and sophomore years. I found some more upsetting things, too: my mom’s calendar of our many legal appointments, as well as the meticulous notebooks in which she detailed the dates and times of all the harassment we endured.

  And then, at the very bottom of the stack of boxes, I found one filled with what looked like shredded paper. My first glance at it confused me. What was this box of garbage, and why had I kept it?

  Then I realized that it was the remains of the collage I’d ripped off the wall in my childhood bedroom. All the photographs of me with my high school friends, and all the inspirational quotes and words I’d spent hours pasting onto my wall were in that box.

  My hands were shaking as I began to go through the scraps. Even so many years later, I could see why I’d been unable to sleep underneath it and why I’d ripped it down so viciously. Seeing the faces of those people, people who had hurt me both physically and emotionally, was like getting kicked in the gut.

  But the thing that upset me most were the words and phrases I’d cut out of magazines, hoping that they’d inspire me in what I thought would be the next chapter of my life. Sifting through that box felt like I was sifting through the dreams I’d had for myself.