“You want to claim survivor status to give yourself legitimacy as an activist. But by putting yourself in the same category as me, you are denigrating my experience. You are trivialising it. You are dragging what happened to me down to the level of a drunken university bonk that you later regretted. I won’t let you do that. If they gave marks for rape trauma, mine would get an A-plus and yours would get a D-minus.”

* * *

My therapist stares at me. I have told her about the conference, and what I said to Marion the Pseudo-Rape-Survivor.

This isn’t the first time I’ve felt her disgust. She tries to keep the non-judgemental facade intact, but I keep crumbling it.

L. BASCOMBE: You didn’t really say that, did you?

ME: Okay, no, I didn’t. I wanted to. I wanted to say it, and I’ve fantasised about saying it ever since.

L. BASCOMBE: Well, that’s something at least. A while ago you were obsessed with rape survivors whom you perceived as having a harder time than you. Do you remember? Women who were poor and struggling and had no access to medical or psychiatric care?

ME: I remember.

L. BASCOMBE: Now you seem to be concerned with survivors who have an easier time than you do—women who weren’t violently attacked, or who were raped by only one man, or whatever the case may be. Why do you think you have this need to compare yourself to others? To situate your own experience within a hierarchy of rapes?

ME: I’ve never been a high achiever. I never got the best marks or the highest praise, or the most prestigious scholarships. Why can’t I be allowed to excel at this one thing? Why can’t I be the most tragic rape victim?

L. BASCOMBE: I don’t always know when you are being facetious. Your rape was appalling—you know that. It was in all the newspapers. It was turned into a bestselling book. You’ve said yourself that your friends and family are struck dumb by the awfulness of what happened to you. They don’t have the words to begin to talk to you about it.

ME: Then I should have been the star of that panel. Not Marion Whatshername. She should have deferred to me. The audience should have been more interested in my story than in hers. Instead they fawned on her and ignored me. And she wasn’t even raped. Not really.

L. BASCOMBE: She had her agency taken away from her at a moment when she was in no position to consent meaningfully to sexual intercourse. It is probably the very ambiguity of the situation that troubles her the most—and the fact that there are gaps in her memory.