Me in Hat

 

Using Xeroxes of the photograph of me taken a few days after the rape, I made sure that the wiped out image of my face was what people would see. Vandalizing my eyes, one viewer wondered - had I been a musician, would I have done to my ears what I had done to my eyes? 

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Or is this a face that is frightened for her life, who verges on forgetting her name, who feels on the brink of a hell that promises NO return?

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This is a group of many in which I altered or hid parts of my face.  They give me the creeps (no other elegant way to put this). I can never look that long at these images. Making my eyes unnatural colors, I was trying to convey the alien, unnatural feeling of being raped, that something was fundamentally wrong and downright bizarre. 

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I wasn’t who I was anymore. I had to force myself to leave my room and return to work and ‘normal’ life. A man was randomly taking photographs and asked me to smile. I put on the smile, to be polite.  It was a spectacularly sunny day that day, but my insides were not and it actually hurt to pretend.