Small Print
If you are a friend that may have worked out who One ‘Crazy’ Cook is, please don’t worry, I’m ok talking about it. I will talk to you about it in person when I’m ready.

I don’t need you to reach out. It was a long long time ago, I was 19, it’s been over 20years. What I need to do now is to come to terms with it, and work through it.

I have experienced a bad few days suffering from my depression. One thing that my depression is very good at is finding old memories hidden away at the back of my mind, coupled with a traumatic experience. This time its brought up a couple of really important events in my life.

When I was studying at university, as part of my course, I worked for a year for a council in the north of England. Nothing scary there. When I found out that where I was placed I reached out to a friend of a ‘friend’ that lived in the area where I would be working. I already knew that he took in lodgers, and this would be the most inexpensive way of living. Things appeared to go well.

I moved in a couple of days before I started work. I found out on the day that his current lodger, the one I was replacing, was still in situ. She had a month before she was moving. He apologised and let me know he’d arranged a second bed in his room in the interim. OK, I could live with that, it was a minor inconvenience. He was doing me a favour, and he reduced the rent to compensate.

I started work on Monday morning, things went well, I settled in quickly, there we several people from the same course at the council, some commuted others had already found alternative accommodation.

But, before the end of the month, something happened, something that has affected me ever since.

One evening, he came home drunk, very drunk, making a lot of noise. I was already in bed and didn’t feel like talking to a drunk guy, and he could be quite loud. I pretended to be asleep. Hopefully, he’d go to bed and suffer for it in the morning.

Thats how I wish the rest of the story proceeded, it didn’t.

He arrived in the room and proceeded to instigate sex with me. He wasn’t bad looking, not my type, but that doesn’t come into the equation. I didn’t feel like having sex with my landlord, hell I just didn’t want to have sex with him.

He wouldn’t take ‘No‘ for an answer, and he was going to do what he wanted.

He would not take ‘No’ for an answer, and he was going to do what he wanted. At one point I found myself tied up and whipped with a thick rope. In his state, no safeword would ever have worked.

Note, Anyone that’s into the kink scene would know that this was not an appropriate tool for flogging.

Eventually, it was over, and I was able to shower and go back to bed. He’d passed out by this time, on his bed, in the corner of the same room.

I’ve always regretted this event. But I have recently come to realise that this was more than just a regrettable incident. My depression dragged it up, and it had lain blocked out at the back of my depressed mind, my consciousness trying to blot it out. Until now I didn’t even consider it assault, it was just an inconvenient, uncomfortable thing that happened to me.

I know that this was a sexual assault, nowhere near as bad as the assault my late partner experienced where a number of men raped him. I knew at the time it was assault, but I just wanted to move on, and my mind has done its best to protect me.

So, soon after this event, when a room came available in a house share, I took up the offer without even seeing the place. It was a bit of a dump, but a pretty decent move. I left and was glad to move on. And, I thought I did move on. I carried on working, and I bought VHS’s of telly I liked to watch. That was pretty much my life.

Looking back I see that something in me changed. At Uni I would go out several nights during the week to see friends, I would attend parties. From the point I was assaulted things changed, I see how much more quiet I have become, over the years this must have been eating away at me. It is adding to the harmful black sludge that has been building up around me for many years.

I don’t know all the ways that this has affected, but I will work this out with my therapist. I am sure it has affected me sexually, and socially. I don’t reach out to people anymore, and maybe this experience is one of the reasons why. Do I blame myself? I think I do, I feel as though I should have realised that this could have happened, and that I should have defended myself, avoided getting into the situation in the first place.

After watching a documentary recently I looked back on my memory of the event and realised that its exactly what what is often termed serious sexual assault! So, I have decided to write about this as a way of expressing it to myself. I think now I need to write it, the word that I’ve been avoiding…

…I think I was raped!