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I'm feeling moody, so some exposition is ultimately required, and it's about time I added something to my journal.

I do not think it is possible to describe to anyone what it feels like to be raped. There is such a sense of violation and helplessness and many other things that even being wordy and expositional about it is impossible. To describe it is to clinicalize it, yet it is a violation of such intimate action that to do so is to ignore it, to put up a wall atound oneself. I do not know what it feels like, but I think I have come close for other reasons.

The first thing that happens is revulsion and fear ... followed not so quickly but swiftly by shock. It's generally the first wall of defense, that to do nothing means you do not have to be there, pay attention, be aware of anything. Better to just not be.

After that, slowly stewing, is hatred and -- almost certainly above all else -- anger. It is the driving force in the life of anyone who has had something like this done to them, be they male or female. It is because the act is so anathematic to life, to freedom, that the easiest way to purge the feeling of the meory of what happened to to strike back, strike out, to just strike.

Even the feeling of comforting is met with a reaction of hatred and anger, and this is because others only see the outward pain, but cannot fathom the inward one. There is a sense of internal being that is destroyed, a fragility and innocence that can no longer be regained.

I have spent almost 15 years like this, and I know it could only be worse for those who have had mworse done to them. To them, to all of you ... this picture (my most emotionally personal piece here) ... this piece is made. I almost destroyed it when I made it, one of the few times I have felt the needf to destroy something. It is rare for me to be emotional in creation of my art, but this piece does exemplify this. This character was raped, and her story is deeper and more painful than I would wish on anyone, and her daggers are her skin of steel. They keep anyone and anything at arm's length, and it is a shell that people cannot conceive of to penetrate, made all the harder by the sense of loneliness it creates, as there is still a portion that desires to be held, to be comforted, to be told "It's all better now," because there's that defensive part of you that says "Then how could that happen?"

So the anger perpetuates itself....