Date: 16th Feb 2023
Hello dear reader, before we delve into this court case I have dealt with, let me make something really clear: this is my point of view, opinion and experience and I am not trying to speak for anyone else other than myself :)
So, this is not going to be a light topic or light anything really, I'll be discussing sexual assault, mental health and suicide attempts, so if you are not in the mood to read that, perhaps go do something else and come back if/when you are ready to tag along on this journey with me! Self care has to come first.
Lets go back to 2020, before the suicide attempts, before the realisation I am autistic, before all the abuse from RCSSD tutor (still not over what she did to me), before I realised I was asexual and aromantic, to a time where the world was terrified of any cough, sneeze or general human. August 2020 I moved into a flat with 3 people I am no longer in contact with (for a variety of reasons, some of which I'll unpack here in a moment). This flat was close to Dollis Hill in London and was frankly a really unsafe place to live. We had no heating and could not turn it on because we realised the electricity meter had been tampered with and the house was thus unsafe. We had no electrical safety certificate. And our fire escape was in the form of a rickety set of brick stairs, which were busy falling down and wobbled precariously every time you stood on them. Oh and our fire alarms didn't work either. Unsafe flat during COVID times when we were all broke, massively stressed out students. I say all of this because the house was a stressful mess that needed to be fixed and being the one who was studying entirely online, I had the time to take it on. So I did. I phoned the council, chased people, took on all the bills and management of the house and did a damn good job at handling a thousand things at once.
Now the 3 people I was staying with, lets call them James, Poppy and Kath, all had mental health issues of their own, as did I. My mental health was a shit show during 2020. Well was a shit show until 2022 really. My anxiety was really bad (we can blame covid for that!) and I was self harming like nobodys business and because I was living with 3 other stressed out, struggling students, our anxieties and mental health bounced off each other and spiralled like crazy. I was horrific at setting boundaries and took on everyones issues and tried to fix them, make them happy but never managed it - literally not possible to fix people who don't want to help themselves! At the time I thought I had feelings for James but he didn't seem to like me in return - turns out I didn't love him romantically but actually cared about him like a brother and would have done anything to help him but I didn't understand that at the time and got very confused. Poppy had feelings for me and we ended up hooking up a few times but our mental health and trauma histories ended up making our relationship really dangerous for us both, so we called it off and stayed friends.
This is all important context for the court case that happened last month. Because our flat was such a mess, our landlord got builders in to fix our fire escape (yay!). We had issues with one builder being drunk and overly personal with both Poppy and myself (only the 3 women were home at the time, James was at uni I believe). And this guy was creepy towards me asking too many questions about my personal life and not listening when I said no (seems to be theme in my life). Anyway, Poppy, Kath and I retreated upstairs to my room to hang out and escape the weird builder but my lil tea loving butt wanted a cuppa tea, so Poppy went to the kitchen to make me one and long story short, ended up being assaulted in our kitchen by this builder. I blamed myself, she was in pieces and the guy refused to leave the house, instead choosing to follow us upstairs and plead with us from my bedroom doorway. Police came, we reported it. Life carried on, I got sexually assaulted myself shortly after Poppy did and for a while thought I might be pregnant - I wasn't thankfully! I have been sexually assaulted again since 2020 and both time nearly broke me. 2 weeks on from Poppys assault I was in hospital having tried to kill myself.
Shit fell apart so quickly and is such a blur I still don't really remember much of what happened but I lost James and Kaths friendship for life as I had told them a lie about my past - not proud of that but 16 year old me was a vulnerable, traumatised little hurt person and this lie saved my life at college, so I did what I had to. I told them this lie at 18 to keep them around because I was terrified I was not enough. No excuses, lies are never ok but I've apologised for my mistakes about a thousand times and am done apologising for things that are long in the past. So my life fell apart, I lost one of my closest friends, who then dropped out of uni to take care of his mental health (so I blamed myself massively for that). And I thought I would never really see anyone I had lived with during that time again, there was nothing keeping us together and James had made it super clear how much he hated me and how hurt he was. But Poppy stayed around and we tried to patch things up and stay friends. Didn't really work massively well but we got coffee once in a while and unpicked my past and things I said. I never hid anything from her, I never hide anything from anyone anymore - my poor tutors will attest to that statement, they basically know exactly how I am doing at any given moment and know I have 0 filter.
I thought the trauma of what had happened in the flat was in the past and would stay there. But the guy refused to take a guilty plea at his court trial, so Poppy and I were asked to attend court - well actually I was summoned, which is a legal thing that meant I basically HAD to go. REALLY important to note here, I was a witness NOT the victim the in case and would never EVER pretend otherwise. But I knew what it felt like to feel powerless and stood behind her 100%. If she didn't want to do the case, I would support her, if she did it, I would be there and I hoped she knew that I had her back. We didn't get a date for the court case until I started my course at UCL in October 2022 and along with the trauma from an RCSSD tutor being abusive, my life suddenly felt really stressful and scary. I was alone in London again and at the time not too far from where the flat everything happened in was. But we got a date, I looped my poor tutors (who had got an email from me a few days earlier explaining about my trauma and how to help me if they came across me in a panic attack) into what had happened and they were amazing (no surprise there I am sure). Christmas came and went and the date for the court got closer and closer. I fell apart. Poppy fell apart. And I tried to support us both. And failed. She pulled out of things 4 days before we were meant to be starting things. And I was shocked and scared. I had no ability to say no and was put in an impossible situation.
Now I will hold my hands up and say perhaps what I did next was not ok but in my little autistic brain, I thought everyone else would read it in the very literal way I meant it. What did I do? Posted on my Instagram account stating that I was fed up of dealing with everyone else's trauma and being expected to be ok with that.
Like I said, can see now this was probably not the best thing to do and can understand why it might have read wrong. At the time I literally meant what I said. I was expected to deal with someone else trauma because now the weight was on my shoulders to get a guilty plea. And the police took advantage of my good nature and I got asked to do literally too much by everyone involved. But Poppy lost it at me 3 days later. She threw everything from my past back at my face (despite knowing how sorry I was for everything) and said James was right to leave me, I was a shit person and was selfish, manipulative and a bunch of other things. Which was super fun to read after an exhausting court case.
On one hand, yeah kind of understand why she would be mad but also don't. And regardless of what I had said or done, it does not give her the right to throw my mistakes in my face as "proof" for what kind of person I was. And she had known me for 3 years at this point, knew every last little detail about me and knew I was autistic and often said things I meant in a very literal fashion. She had received countless apologies and explanations of what had happened back in 2020 and knew how awful I felt about everything that had happened. Kath also joined in with Poppys rage at me and I just gave up. I threw in the towel with them both and just ran. I knew there was no going back from anything either of them had said and knew in my heart whatever we had salvaged from 2020 was dead. 6 days later news from UCL broke about something equally upsetting and I just broke. My safety net at uni was potentially being torn away, I had traumatically lost an old friend, been through a court case and more. And just cried and grieved for everything I had lost and everyone I was about to lose and more in 2 hours. I was inconsolable and am still really sad about everything that happened. But accept it was partly my fault. I made mistakes but so did she and for the first time in my life I am not taking responsibility for her actions and placing the blame solely on myself.
So we can take the count of people who have vanished from my life due to my actions up to 12 (though arguably relationships involve 2 people being willing to try and communicate, so not necessarily my fault for them all). Admitting you made a mistake is the first step to healing and moving on and I will not shy away from admitting I am a flawed human.
That's all for this update. I shall go back to updating assessment essay for UCL and plotting protest songs with my year group!
Stay strong my friends, you have got this
B xx
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