TRIGGER WARNINGS: historic sexual assault, anxiety, blisters.

On an otherwise beautiful spring walk this weekend, I overestimated the capability of my sandals and myself.

I’d also underestimated the length of the walk, principle because it was made up of local, familiar places I consider ‘near’.

I might have got away with my good intentions, except a part of the towpath had flooded and we needed to go around. On top of the increasingly painful blisters, my anxiety’s favourite ‘proof’ that something bad is going to happen is that I don’t know how long it will take, don’t have any control over when it ends, or don’t have the power to get myself out of it.

Even more unhelpfully and more relevantly than I realised: this summer will be something like the tenth anniversary of my being sexually assaulted at the bottom of the stairs at Ealing Broadway Station. I was alone in a summer dress, visibly limping up to reach the handrail at the bottom of the stairs. My boyfriend of the time had gone on ahead, faster than I could. What happened was this: a man stood behind me, grabbed my arse and inserted two fingers up my vagina through my dress and underwear before passing me on the stairs and continuing on his way towards the ticket barriers.

What I did next was take off my shoes, run up the stairs after the man, leap the ticket barrier and confront him and his group of smirking friends. I asked why he’d done it. He shrugged. I took photos. He covered his face. I called the police (non-emergency number, because in my shock I thought ‘Car being stolen, 999, car has been stolen, 101’ apparently at some level consider my body an equivalent). As my boyfriend of the time and I left the station for our bus stop, we could see those men climbing all over the horse statue across the road from our bus stop. Luckily, that meant when I got through to the police and told all this, it made him very easy to pick up and arrest. (What also made things easier much later was he didn’t turn up for his court hearing, attempting to leave the country, and received jail time without me having to be summoned.)

A day or two after this and the police station interview that followed it, a well-meaning friend told me what I was ‘going’ to feel. Not what I might feel, or what they’d felt, but the false certainty I now recognise as an expression of not being right (as it can sound to people who think confidence and being right are the same thing) but being in pain. I might think I was feeling okay about it now, they said, but it would all hit me later, and I wouldn’t be okay. I didn’t disagree aloud. But I did privately consider the differences in our situations and responses. Saying The Thing (which I had done, in all the ways I could) had felt extremely different to not doing so for me, in all circumstances of life, and that had been in what made it feel not a choice to run after him, confront and report him. In that friend’s case, not reporting it had contributed to the potential haunting power of what had happened to them – which was, not that these things are a competition, worse than what had happened to me. I was and remain deeply grateful to myself in that moment for chasing him, and giving myself all the peace I could knowing that I hadn’t let it go and by default meant he might go on thinking he could get away with treating girls in my home town — potentially my own LAMDA students — that way.

But my friend was right: it did hit me this Saturday, ten years later, on this towpath, when I had a blister and my partner walked off ahead. And the sexual assault didn’t cross my mind. What upset (racket emotion: angered) me was that I was hurt and scared in a way I hadn’t felt hurt and scared by my ex doing the same thing – just before the assault. What I remembered was limping, being in pain and being alone.

And because I spotted the story I was telling myself, I spotted in time that I had a choice about how I responded.

Now is not then

Unlike my trauma memory, this time I wasn’t alone – literally or otherwise. My partner now is (very) different to the person I was with then, and while he didn’t understand what was going on, I’ve since Said The Thing so he knows for next time and I have the peace of knowing he knows.

Also, I I was with a friend – part of the Writers’ Gym community I’ve created – who knows from their own experience what pain and trauma can mean in the moment — and the importance of listening to what mind and body need. So, while my partner walked far, far ahead of us (literally deaf which is not his fault and living in a different physical world at six foot two to our respective five-foolishness).

In that moment, I could have fed my fear into ‘if he really loved me’ mode. ‘If he really loved me,’ my fear could say, ‘he’d not walk ahead.’ In other words, if he really loved me, he’d see the world exactly as I do, think as I think and not need a translation from my trauma memories to his immediate world. If he really loved me, fear says, he’d be a brilliant psychic.

I could have made my fear and pain my reality.

Instead, I chose communication.

Because now is not then.

And I am more me than I have ever been.

We choose what happens next

I said clearly what I needed, to my partner and to my friend and to the very nice bar staff who got me plasters and antiseptic wipes while we drank cider in full view of spring and Hammersmith Bridge.

Because it is spring, I thought. And it’s okay if the shadows mean we forget that sometimes. We are here now. And now is where we can choose what we learn, the stories we tell ourselves, and what happens next.

So, I was VERY far from being in ‘caption competition’ mode as I crossed Hammersmith Bridge on the way home. But then I saw the guy you see in the picture above. And seeing him meant current me was able to see beyond the pain and trauma response of the moment. So I took a photo of this stranger taking their plant for a walk as an investment in future me, for whom this will have been a spring day, even if I couldn’t feel it right then or there.

I’d love it if you use that picture as a writing prompt. Do let me know who you decide that person is. Or, if that person is you, thank you for being my muse in that moment, just when I needed an amusing muse o bring me back to acknowledging the power of the stories we tell ourselves.

Build creative confidence and explore the power of your stories online, on the podcast or in person at writersgym.com and rachelknightley.com