Trigger warning: this article discusses rape.
A heart and gut-wrenching story, a beautifully crafted morale, and mostly, a prominent slap in the face are three categories I would associate with Amber Smith’s The Way I Used to Be. Smith has managed to move emotions and understandings of how a rape survivor reacts to her rape. She manages to bring to light an issue that gets lost in the narrative of abuse – the fact that individuals have different reactions to the trauma they face. It is essential that light be shed on this, because this theme is crucial, not only to understand an individual and their reactions to rape and assault, but also to no longer use our one-way understanding of rape to blame the abused, instead of the abuser.
The Way I Used to Be is a book I would very much encourage anyone to read because it brings you one step closer to understanding the complexities of reactions that victims of sexual assault go through. There is no one-size-fits-all characterization in such a sensitive topic, and the fact that this understanding is quite mainstream is not only flabbergasting, but also extremely simplistic and ignorant. The sharp path of “if an individual gets raped, they will immediately speak out” or “when an individual gets assaulted, they should fight back” is very inaccurate and misses the entire point of the fact that there is a psychological contribution to the way an individual reacts to a traumatic situation.
Plot of The Way I Used to Be
The story opens with Eden, the protagonist, who a 13-year-old that will be starting her freshman year of high school, struggling to grapple with the alien act that has just happened to her – her rape. She fails to inform anyone of this – a lot of barriers prevent her from this, like the fact that her rapist is someone she trusted as the best friend of her brother, her thought that no one will believe her, her rocky relationship with her parents, and so many psychological factors like her denial of the incident and silence. This denial leads her to lose herself as she struggles to build her personality while growing up – something that almost becomes impossible considering the different pent-up and unaddressed problems that turn her into someone who is vicious and spiteful. However, the book takes us through her thought process – her deepest, darkest thoughts – and we see how she truly perceives herself to be someone worthless, her incapability of handling the rape and accepting it, and most prominently, her loneliness.
The book spans over four years of Eden’s life, from her freshman year to her senior year, and showcases the way she develops and grows up. We see the way the rape has shaped her and placed so many barriers on how her identity can truly be developed. We see how she tries so hard to build up a steel-hard character that stops at nothing to hurt those around her – a steel hard character that goes through extensive methods to unconsciously sabotage herself and ultimately leave her friendless. Eden’s emotions are all over the place. Her thoughts are all over the place, and this realistic portrayal of a rape survivor is not only a success but crafted in an incredible way.
Individuals React to Trauma in Different Ways
The book makes multiple intense statements, but the one I want to touch on in this article is the reaction to a traumatic situation. Eden’s reaction is just one way of reacting to a rape; her body shut down during the horrifying act, she faced denial, she could not even say the word “rape”, among so many other impacts of the traumatic situation she faced. She stayed silent for four years of her life, and this example is not a universal example of all sexual assault survivors. Some fight the perpetrator, while others speak out immediately. Some suffer various panic and anxiety attacks, while others do not. Some develop a certain mechanism similar to Eden’s while dealing with the trauma, while others may not.
Trauma is a very tricky phenomenon that one can be subjected to. It is impossible to make a list of all the actions an individual exposed to trauma may do because every individual is different and has a different physiological mechanism to deal with trauma.