Sexual Assault Awareness Month: Let’s have a conversation.
Hiking My Feelings started as a mountaintop idea in 2018, and quickly became my ultimate container for processing complex emotions and the trauma I have survived in my life. By healing from trauma through nature-based activities like hiking and backpacking, I was able to connect the dots between the sexual assault I survived in college and how the unresolved trauma from what would forever be dubbed The Worst Day of My Life had manifested in my mind and body. Spending time outside is what helped me heal, and the activities, techniques, tips, and programs I’ve developed over the past four years are a collection of the things that helped me process what had happened to me and learn how to move through it.
Throughout April, I’m going to be sharing some thoughts and messages I wish I had earlier on in my healing journey. Below is the first installment of this series. I hope you’ll join the conversation. Whether you’re commenting on Instagram, in our private social network, here on this blog post, or if you prefer a less public way to share your story and send us an email, we hope this helps you figure out how to move through this in a way that feels good to you.
Please share this post with a friend who might need to hear these words.
Journal Prompts:
Journaling is a huge part of my process and is one of the reasons I’m still here to share this story. No matter what is happening in the world around me, I know that I can always come home to myself by finding a cozy place to settle in, making a cup of tea, putting on some great music, and making time to reflect on whatever is happening in my life at the time. Here are some journal prompts to help you start reflecting on your own experiences. If you’d like to dig in deep on this, please consider joining us for the Trail of Life Maps workshop on Saturday!
How did watching this video make me feel?
Where did I feel those feelings in my body?
Have I felt this way before? If so, what caused these feelings last time?
Video Transcript:
For the past four years, I've been building this community and this organization (Hiking My Feelings). And every April, I've wanted to contribute something to the conversation around Sexual Assault Awareness Month, but I didn't realize how much that would take out of me. And I didn't realize how much work I still had to do.
I thought when I discovered that the sexual assault and the trauma that followed was the impetus for so many things that were just uncharacteristic in my life, that I was good, and that it was solved. And I knew that that wasn't the case. I know that that's not possible, but I felt like maybe it was.
And if there's one thing I've learned over the last four years traveling around the country, hearing your stories, hiking with you - it's that it's never just one thing. Right? In fact, I watch a show called A Million Little Things and they nailed it on that.
It's a million little things.
So this month - I'm not making any promises - I don't know if I'll have the courage to do this every day. I don't know if I'll have the wherewithal to do it every day. (I certainly don't have the wardrobe to do it every day. This is probably what I'm gonna be wearing every day. I'm in Maine, at least until the 13th.)
But I want to try to share some messages that I wish I had earlier in my journey and try to help connect the dots between mind and body, trauma and feelings, feelings and behaviors. And I hope you'll come along with me.
So to all the survivors out there:
I see you.
I hear you.
I believe you.
I love you.
And we got this.
If you're a survivor, and you identify as that, be gentle with yourself this month.
And if you've got that thing in the back of your head where you're wondering whether or not it was assault, chances are it probably was. One of the things I'm hoping to do here through my work is to expand the definition of both what is assault and what is trauma. Not to pull in things that aren't those things and call them as such. But to let us know that that thing that we think is assault probably is.
Somebody had said to me once "Well, if that's assault, then everyone I know has been assaulted."
And that's the point.
Everyone you know has probably been assaulted. Everyone you know has probably experienced trauma.
And so I'm just hoping that we can kind of have a conversation around that. Expand that definition and see what is possible. When we come together. And when we don't compare. There's big T trauma and little T trauma but at the end of the day, it's all trauma. And while the worst day of my life and the worst day of your life may be radically different. The thing we share in common is that we're both still here to talk about it.
So I hope this finds you if you need it. I hope that you'll join me in this conversation.
I don't like saying Happy Sexual Assault Awareness Month, but on the other side of the awareness that what I survived *was* assault, was happiness.
So maybe it is something worth celebrating.
