I Began to Heal From My Rape When I Stopped Asking Why

The taxi drops me off back in front of my dorm, Kirkland House. Back to where I was raped. People joke that Harvard is like Hogwarts, but they’re not far off. Each of its 12 houses harbors its own culture, its own rituals, even its own specific architecture. Kirkland has a colonial-style dining hall, a quaint library, and a grandiose common room—the kind of ostentatiously pretentious chamber that is exactly what people think of when they conjure up an image of Harvard. Dark, polished mahogany walls are framed by crimson velvet drapes. A grand piano sits adjacent to a sizable fireplace. The Kirkland crest and an oil portrait of a 19th-century house “master” adorn the walls. This place defines prim and proper. Nothing untoward is supposed to happen here.

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Forty short paces separate the gate where I’ve been dropped off from the door to my room, but right now it feels like a chasm. I don’t want to go back.

In movies, they never depict the clean-up after the trauma. Action heroes fight, sh-t happens, and we jump to the next scene. We never see the bandages get changed, the car get repaired, or the laundry get done. But in real life, you don’t get to skip ahead. And at this moment, walking into my room feels like scaling Everest to me—insurmountable.

Someone observing me from the outside might describe me as a person still rendering. I am numb on the outside, rooted to the ground—immobile, dazed, stunned. Thick paperwork still in my hand, the rape crisis counselor’s new underwear still on my body, a hospital band on my wrist.

I find myself grateful that it’s early in the morning. No one is awake for me to run into. No friend to casually say, “Hey! How are you?”

What would I even say? “I’ve just left the hospital. I’ve just been raped.”

But I can’t go in by myself. Who is up this early? More importantly, who would understand the crushing weight of this moment?

Alex.

Alex, my Kirkland housemate, was 14 years old when he survived a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles. In high school, he was in a gang. While at a local burger joint with his brothers, a rival gang spotted them. As he and his friends walked out of the restaurant bullets sprayed out of a white Honda Civic. One of the bullets found its way into Alex’s friend. Alex held his friend in his arms as he took his last breath. After that he quit the gang, rebuilt his life, and eventually found himself at Harvard. Years later he would return to LA to become an educator, working on gang rehabilitation and helping kids just like him.

Alex would understand.

I hear his thuds running down the stairs as fast as he can after receiving my text to meet me in front of my door. Kind eyes. Black hair. Usually a bellowing laugh. His eyes dart to my hand, white-knuckled and shaking with my keys gripped inside.

“We can open the door together,” he offers.

I nod in silence. I place the keys in and twist. He stands next to me and pushes the door. We walk across the creaky, shiny hardwood floors, and I put down the heaps of paperwork and brochures, along with the large orange pill bottles that contain my HIV prophylaxes. Alex stands with me in my room.

“I can’t sleep in this. I can’t. I can’t.” My voice is slightly above a whisper; I can barely muster enough breath for the words to escape my throat. I’m rendering again.

“I’ll wash your sheets with you,” he tells me.

Alex peels off the first corner of the sheet. The other corners bounce together like they can’t come off fast enough. He crumples the blue-and-white sheet into a gray hamper bag. I know he deliberately used the words “with you” to make me feel like we’re doing this together, but truly he’s doing all the work. I am numb, frozen still, and it’s all I can do to whisper “thank you” as he quietly tends to the scene.

I follow behind him in a trance as he walks down to the basement laundry room—blessedly empty at this early hour. He stuffs the sheets in, gently presses the door shut, puts the coins in. One by one the quarters clang. The machine starts tumbling. 

We stand for what seems like an eternity, watching them tumble.

When I think back to this moment, what I remember most is Alex’s kindness. In stereotypical movies, the gallant hero saves the damsel through daring, dramatic action. He slays the dragon. He walks through fire. He beats back the villains at the door. In real life, heroes wash your sheets with you. Heroes hug you. In the dark, damp, gray laundry room, Alex holds me in his arms. I know what his arms have held before. Another friend who could not be saved. But I am going to survive this. 

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For a week I don’t leave my room.

Survivors bear no responsibility for the violence that happens to them—but the world makes every effort to place the burden on us regardless. There is no length societies will not go to, no absurd logical leap people won’t take to recast our simple, human act of survival as something dirty and shameful.

I bled for myself each time a person or institution assumed that I’d been asking for it—either out loud or by quiet implication. And I bled for survivors around the world, whose experience of victim-blaming manifested as honor killings. Families, in a woefully misguided attempt to protect their shared sense of dignity, murdering their own daughters, sisters, or wives who had been raped.

My mind could not stop replaying the events of the rape over and over. How did this happen? My firsthand knowledge of the truth, my feminist credentials, my basic self-awareness—none of it mattered in those first brutal days. Society and its conditioning won out, and I found myself questioning myself with suspicion. Why me? What did I do wrong? Why can’t I just get over it? When will I stop feeling this way—like my insides are lacerated? Like my spirit is irreparably broken?

Rape is rape is rape is rape. End of story. But even for many of us who live through it, it takes time to get to that understanding and acceptance. Years, for some. Only a week, thankfully, for me. In that one week I do not leave my room. Time blurs. My mind keeps cycling the same questions, to no avail. Why did he rape me? Why me? Why did he rape me? Why?

“Why?”

I cry myself into exhaustion. I don’t drift asleep—I pass out. Wake up crying again. Rendering. I look motionless on the outside, but a war is raging inside my head. 

People think about the physical damage in a rape. The bruises, the tears. But the worst part is inside. In the cages of our mind that society has built for us. Patriarchal conditioning builds a scaffolding around our thoughts toward shame—directing them, framing them, stunting their growth. The war we fight lasts much longer than the physical act of rape.

After 168 hours—10,080 minutes—of asking the same one-word question over and over between lapses of awareness, I arrive at an answer.

The answer shows up like a cloud I have to catch: impossibly distant at first, but slowly rolling in with greater form and clarity. And the answer, of course, is that there is no answer to why?—no acceptable answer, at least. There is no truth to be found in the mind of a rapist; there’s no logic there to be parsed or decoded. There is no world in which rape is OK, in which the question can be asked and answered, in which understanding can be found.

I am not a rapist. Therefore I cannot understand it. I concede that the cycle of why? will bring me nowhere.

The loop breaks.

On the corner of my desk sits a leather notebook gifted by a friend. I rip out a page and make a promise to myself. In black ink I write, “Never never never give up.” I tape it to my computer monitor to remind myself that I will not let him win. I will not let this rape prevent me from graduating.

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Read More: Inside Amanda Nguyen’s Fight to Ensure Survivors’ Stories Are Taken Seriously

How do you tell people the worst news of your life? As a species, we’re well-equipped to celebrate, but we haven’t evolved to gracefully share and receive horrific news. The best among us rarely know what to say, how to look, how to be there for a friend who is enduring something unendurable. We grimace, we frown, we shake our heads. We dare to ask, “Are you OK?” with the best of intentions. But deep down, I think we know that nothing will suffice—there is no truly appropriate response to news this spiritually annihilating.

Mark is the first to get me out of my room. Mark is the best of our class. Incredibly organized. Everything comes easy to him, but being there for a friend who was raped—not even he knows what to do. But still, he tries—he tries to be there for me, and I learn quickly that the trying itself matters. In the absence of answers, it actually is the thought that counts.

“Ice cream makes everyone feel better,” he says. I don’t feel like eating. I just want to be with someone. He brings me to J.P. Licks, a loud, popular ice cream store in Harvard Square. I find a corner to hide in.

“What do you want?”

“You decide. I just want to sit here.”

J.P. Licks is the absolute antithesis of how I feel inside. It is neon bright. A huge sign depicting a smiling, pink cow hangs over the door. Pop music blares. The people around us are happy. It is an absurd place to grapple with desolate feelings. But maybe that’s what I need. 

Mark comes back with a cup of hot chocolate. We sit in silence for some time. He opens his mouth, then closes it. I don’t need him to say anything. I just need a friend to hold space. So we sit there, together.

Eventually I start venturing out again. Brent, a graduate student, is hosting a small dinner party for six people. His home is beautiful—a townhouse with cascading light from an enormous glass window. The guests are other academics in the area. We all lend a hand in preparing the meal. 

“Do you want to help with the salad?” Brent asks while holding up a tomato next to his face, smiling. I chop and slice, then present my work. “What a beautiful salad!” he says. It’s something.

Surviving the aftermath of a rape will be different for everyone. Mine was laundry coming clean. Hot chocolate under the gaze of a bright pink cow. Slicing vegetables. It was friends who held space; it was friends who filled the silences. It was hours coming untangled and questions I learned to let go. Most of all, it was a promise to myself to keep going—a promise I would teach myself to keep.

Excerpted from Saving Five: A Memoir of Hope by Amanda Nguyen, to be published by AUWA, a division of Macmillan. Copyright © 2025 by Amanda Nguyen. Reprinted by permission.

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