For over a year, I haven’t had the guts to ask my boyfriend to role play raping me.

I know.  It’s fucked up, as a rape victim, to want that.  Your potential judgments against me pale in comparison to the judgments I make against myself because of this desire.

Most days, I still blame myself for my sexual assaults—even for the one that happened when I was about eleven.  I remember their hands on me, and I remember their manipulations and my hesitations and screams, but I still can’t forgive myself.

I shouldn’t have allowed myself to be in such vulnerable situations.  I should have known what those men were.

Logic says, I was trained to be a victim and I was manipulated by those purring lions.

Logic has nothing to do with trauma.

I’m a sick woman.  I know that, and I fight it every day by being constantly self-aware.  Yet, I let a stranger give me a ride the other day, and I don’t know why.  I was stuck at a train station.  Sam was at work, I don’t have a car, and the taxi company wanted to charge me $35.  Then, a man I had been talking to for ten minutes, a friend of a man I had been talking to for fifteen minutes, offered me a ride for $10.  I liked the price and accepted.  It wasn’t smart.  It wasn’t me.  I don’t know what got into me.  Those men could have done to me horrible things I have yet to experience, and I thought of that before I accepted the ride.  But I was numb to the possibility of danger.

It had been so many years since I had done something so reckless, I didn’t think I was capable of it anymore.  But something in me felt no fear.  I was completely trusting, when I shouldn’t have been.

Is that part of the mania or some other aspect of my mental illness?  It seems probable, but I refuse to let the label of mental illness excuse my behavior.  Why did I get into that car?

Why am I horny all the time lately?  Why do I continue to have sex after it starts to hurt?  Why do I hurt myself with sex when it doesn’t turn me on?  Why was I excited when my boyfriend asked me if I wanted to role play rape?  What about forced objectification appeals to me?

It makes absolute sense.  My first sexual experience was violent, and my father is a violent man, too.  And this culture prizes the violent man, adores him, tells women, “he’s just sick.”  The result is what I call the Lost Puppy Syndrome.  Women pick up these sad or broken men.  We try to repair them, love them, give them the attention no one has ever given them, the attention and love that will fix them.  We think, I’m the only one who can help him.

Except it doesn’t work that way.  The slew of psychological explanations for this behavior ranges from projection to masochism.

I’m afraid to think the latter might be right about me.  What if the answer to all this is an intense self-loathing that leads to self-imposed punishments?  Do I hate myself that much?  Am I that repulsed by myself?

I want answers.  I’m smart enough to know I’m the only one who has them, but I think, amidst the other ironies of my mental illness, they’re trapped in my head.  Ugly memories too sick to fully fathom guard the way to them.