At the age of 16 I had a 22 year old boyfriend. Bad news and my parents weren’t happy with it, but they knew that forbidding it would just lead to me sneaking out instead. Well they were right, he was bad news. He took me to a party, tried to get me drunk, he was drunk and tried to rape me. I managed to get away again. He was too drunk to hold on to me. I found another ride home, but that was even closer than the 2 young boys.

At the age of 17 I had another boyfriend and you would think I would have learned something, but this was slightly different. He didn’t physically try to rape me, he emotionally raped me. He told me that if I didn’t have sex with him that we would break up and we had just gotten back together. I couldn’t handle the rejection and gave in. I hated him and myself. He ruined our relationship at that point because that was worse than the 2 other attempts. I was not ready to lose my virginity, but felt I had no choice. Blackmail is an ugly thing. I didn’t want to be touched by that point. It disgusted me.

September 11, 2001 – The Twin Towers Tragedy. To this day I am still terrified every time I see and hear a plane and since I live near an airport and the planes are constantly flying over I cringe and wait for the explosion. I didn’t know how it was going to be when we flew to Florida a few years ago. I managed though. It just seems to be watching them and hearing them fly over that does it.