So, how does running fit in to sexual assault? And why did I choose this project, and all that jazz?

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Not too long over a year ago, when I moved across the country, starting practically a whole new life with everything (happily) changing all at once (dream job, dream school, new apartment, new city) - and then was assaulted by the person I'd become closest to in my short time in New York, it was devastating. I left the school (which I'd applied to for 6 years in a row), where I'd met him.

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It felt like there was an avalanche in my life - just a seemingly never-ending barrage of ways sexual assault affected me - how I felt around men, around people in general (even strangers in public), how I felt about the subject I'd been studying and taking a break from that, how well I could concentrate at work, even how I exercised and how I felt in my own body. It seemed like no part of my life was untouched - and no part of my life remained the same. (Really. Seemingly no part - since I had just moved across the country, leaving everyone and everything that was home 3,000 miles way.) I was pretty darn alone, and my life was in disarray.

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There was one other time when my life felt totally upended. In college, I spent a year in and out of the hospital after finding out I had a congenital heart defect. I had many minor surgeries and ultimately open-heart surgery. Again, that seemingly never-ending year affected everything - my comfortably in my body, my trajectory at school, my finances, and on and on. Part of the way I rebuilt the life I wanted after that was running 52 half marathons in 52 weeks - as a way to almost remember how to use my body again, as a way to keep experiencing new things and new people and getting out of the crushing feelings of what seemed at the time like a humongous, perhaps almost unfixable setback. It worked well for me. I loved that project.

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And now I needed something like that again. When I was looking into stats of sexual assault in America, I came across this terrible - that 882 Americans are sexually assaulted every single day. One more person was assaulted just in the time you've been reading this page. .And I just felt this needed to be the project. So, now here we are.

 

I dream of someday volunteering with survivors of sexual assault. I am not to that point yet. I am still in a therapy program at a local hospital. I am still "triggered" too often (even though I kinda hate that word and how it's treated sometimes). I *know* that I could not be a rock solid steady volunteer that these people need… So, I can’t help one-on-one *yet*, but I can run for sexual assault survivors. I hope it helps others - and also helps me to feel whole and strong again :-)

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Thank you so much for reading!