To my peers who believed him,
It has been almost a year since everything happened and almost nothing has changed the way I feel about it since I decided I was important. While this may have been chalked up to a scandal or an "embarrassing moment" to the public, this was a critical turning point in my personal life.
I spend a lot of time awake at night wishing I had woken up January 25th, 2016 with my respiratory infection and chosen to stay inside and rest up. I wish my last public mistake didn't leave me so vulnerable that I felt the need to surround myself with people despite the fact that I could not breathe. I spend a lot of time wishing I had trusted even my buzzed instinct to move away from him when I got into the trunk of the car because I knew he was trouble. I wish especially that I had not drank so much in effort to impress everyone. I wish when it had become apparent that I was no longer mentally present that my "friends" would have taken me home rather than taken their phones out to record.
But these things happen, people drink too much and get a little too comfortable with the wrong people. Except I did not even know how comfortable I had got with the wrong person until half of the county did first. So realizing the first few parts were really maybe not my fault per say, I begin to wish for new things.
I wish that when I came back to reality with my head on the toilet seat after emptying my toxic insides into it for some time, that my "friends" would have explain to me what happened before letting me tweet things like "Why is everyone texting me? I'm fine." I wish they hadn't waited till we got home to call the person who recorded it screaming to remove it, I wish they had stopped him while he was doing it. I wish they had not told me that what had happened was okay- it wasn't. While I was still using I had quite the ego about myself so though I was told I was laying on the bathroom floor sobbing about wanting to kill myself, I did not want to look weak to the public so I tweeted about how it was okay, and I just got caught on camera doing something everyone does, and especially to fuck off. I wish when my friends walked my still drunken, sobbing self a few blocks away in the freezing cold that I could not feel, to talk to the person who had recorded it that I would not have forgave him to make it feel okay. I wish I did not feel the need to look "strong and unbothered" by going to his house to drink more with him. I wish I had not forced isolation upon myself by being too strong for anyone who spoke to me with any tone of pity.
I wish I had not let the wrong person convince me that it was okay, and hey, if anyone in school was mean to me that he would "be my friend ;)" I wish I did not base my self esteem so heavily on public opinion that I did not try to morph myself into his dream girl so the public would be surprised to see that experience had amounted to more than just a hook up. I wish that I could have seen how foolish that was and not allow myself to push everyone away who wasn't aiding my disillusion thought that if him and I were good together, the public would have to stop talking down about me.
Most of all, I wish I had addressed it properly when it happened and said "I got too drunk in the wrong place with the wrong people and I don't remember a thing that happened there. If you think since I was not unconscious that the blame is on me, then there's nothing I can do to change your thinking- I just find it interesting that you got to experience what my body had been through far, far before I had any chance to." I wish I had pulled closer those that could see this was not right and that I let them carry me through my next vulnerable months.
Unfortunately none of this is the case and all that I get now is to lie awake at regretting and replaying every moment of it and remembering that everyone I have talked to about it that knows how I feel is tired of hearing about it, and the giant number of people who don't probably don't care enough to hear it or have already made up their minds.
I hope if you as my peers ever come across this, you know how to handle it better the next time he does it, because as much as I have tried to stop him with my words or with law, he remains free and continuously gets away with it.
