the aftermath
trigger warnings: heavy themes of mental health, sexual assault, and suicidal ideation this post may also contain much stronger words than I am typically comfortable using to avoid ambiguity
fall 2022
A week after ending things with him, I flew back to the Bay Area and moved into Berkeley. I had decided to move into a ministry house with sisters that I didn’t know too well. The day I first moved into this ministry house, he showed up to the door unannounced with a couple other friends while I was home alone. Immediately, “home” became a place that was not safe for me and I got an implicit message that this would not be my place, this would not be my people. Seeing him triggered me to have a panic attack.
As school started, although he had already graduated the semester before, he continued to show up on campus multiple times a week for large chunks of the day. I would run into him at campus fellowship events, at the student center on-campus, at cafes off-campus, and even randomly on the streets at Berkeley. I quickly developed a fear of going outside because I was terrified that I would run into him. I would stay at home unless there was a ministry event that I had to be at, and even when I was in my room, I was continuously worried that he would show up at our ministry house.
The sisters I was living with noticed this, and they showed me so much love by doing what they could to make the house a safe place for me. They told him that he was not welcome at our house, and asked him to not come by.
That semester, I started serving in a college ministry where everybody already knew him as a popular alumni and the respected student leader that had served in many different positions. I didn’t have any close friends in this ministry (yet) and was afraid to ruin his reputation by sharing my side of what happened. So I ran away from processing anything that happened with him. There were many brothers and sisters that had heard of what had happened, but they had all heard from him so it felt like they were more his friends rather than my friends, and my relationship with them hadn’t ever been vulnerable enough to share how I was feeling about it.
Near the end of the semester however, God began to convict me to about unforgiveness in my heart. Initially, I didn’t really understand what God was trying to say. I knew that there was an issue relating to forgiveness, but I didn’t really know how to address it because I hadn’t even allowed myself to acknowledge any of the hurt.
Ultimately, I came to realize that God wanted me to confront and address the entire issue instead of running away from it, and although I had no idea what the journey would look like, I came to a place of complete surrender to whatever God wanted to do.
2023
With that new commitment to God, I opened up to a staff member about what happened, who advised me to reach out to an older sister to walk with me through this journey. Although I was hesitant at first, I invited them into this journey because I knew I would need wiser counsel. Although I was attending church, I didn’t really know the sisters there and the college ministry at that church was entirely male with the exception of one other college student, so I got connected with a sister from another church and we started meeting on a weekly basis so that she could walk with me.
One of the things that she suggested when I began to meet with her was to reach out to a pastor that had been a mentor figure for the brother in his life before so that the pastor could reach out to him and walk with him. The end goal was to follow the Matthew 18 example of pursuing reconciliation.
A lot of my journey during 2023 was continually surrendering to God and allowing Him to guide me in the process of healing and learning to forgive. I met with my mentor weekly and spent a lot of time in solitude with God, reading the Word, journaling, and crying at times as my way of wrestling with God. During this time, there were people reaching out to the brother as well, both the pastor and another one of his friends that knew the entire situation.
In August, I ended up going to Korea for three months and this issue was placed on the backburner as I didn’t have people to remind me or keep me accountable to continue pursuing it. I realized after I got back to the bay in November that I hadn’t thought about it in a long while, and how freeing it was to have run away from it. However, I knew that it was unfinished work that God would continue.
In December, I learned that a staff from the ministry had been asking around about what had happened with me and that brother, and I also learned that the brother had been banned from all of this college ministry’s events. The staff had asked previous staff and other students if they knew what happened, but she had never reached out to me. During a retreat, I approached her to ask if I could share my story because I was deeply uncomfortable with the fact that she was listening to what other people had to say about a very sensitive area of my life, and yet didn’t have my perspective of what had happened. I told her my side of what happened,