Living a Nightmare

Anonymous

            “Dude, you won’t believe what Susie is spreading about you!” he said, “It’s real bad, bro, like realllll bad…”

            “Wh…what? Who is spreading what about me? What are you talkin’ about, dude?” I responded in confusion.

            “Susie texted Jimbo and told him that you took advantage of her… like raped her and shit, bro…” he said.

            As I sat on my grandmother’s porch on a pleasant and sunny Saturday afternoon in March 2012, my conversation with my family was interrupted by this phone call from one of my friends. This is the nightmare I was about to live… I went silent. I could not comprehend what my friend had just surprised me with. I had dated Susie for a few months, but nothing serious, and I ended the relationship several weeks before this phone call.

            “I-I’ll call you back,” I pensively replied after some hesitation, then ended the call.

            I took a second to determine an approach on how to tell her, but not a single way seemed even remotely okay. I took a deep breath and told her everything that my friend told me. The expressions on the faces of all of my family members on the porch changed to lifeless expressions. I told them the truth; Susie was lying and that I would never even think about committing such a horrifically vile act. I felt lost and completely empty inside. I thought of how my reputation as a pretty good guy was obliterated in a matter of seconds, and was changed to a rapist. 
               At this point, Susie had confessed to her parents that she had lied about the entire story, but I still felt the depression of being alienated by my childhood friends and their parents, my teachers, and even family friends that watched me grow up. Following the alienation, my parents and I received constant hateful comments and messages from family friends, neighbors, and total strangers, too. 

            For the next several weeks my parents and Susie’s parents tried to resolve the problem and retrieve my lost reputation. After weeks of torture we found a solution. Susie had to apologize to all of the parties included and tell them that she had lied about the whole situation. A few people refused to believe that the story had been a total lie, and unfortunately, those ignorant people continued to have a false perception of me. Yet, for the most part, people realized and accepted that the story was a lie and went back to perceiving me as they had before this entire fiasco occurred.

            Even though my reputation had been restored for the most part, I still did not feel any better. I lost my innocence, the innocence of being too naïve to realize that people can be mean, and because of this loss I lost the ability to trust others. After a long period of searching within myself for some sign of the precious shimmer of my golden ball, I retrieved my ball back. I regained some of my ability to trust in others, but I learned that I would never be able to trust in others as I once had. That is okay because losing that ability was a step of initiation in which I must receive a deep wound of great importance, the realization of my excessive credulity. Because of my naïveté, I never imagined that someone I “knew” would ever harm me with the slander of being a rapist. Through this wound, I was able to recognize the true strength that I possessed. What remains is the psychological scar that shows the knowledge of knowing not to put too much trust in others before I know if they will take advantage of my trust or not. I gained all of this from this one step of initiation.