By Lindsay Stanek ’16 | Pulse copy editor

My time and reputation at South can be summed up in one word: whore. People don’t realize the effect that word can have. We talk about f** and n***** but we never talk about the words that hurt me.

After you hear people call you something enough times, you start to believe them. Consequently, by March of my junior year, I hated myself. I believed that my sexual experiences were what defined me as a person.  

I had always been a “good girl.” I go to church on Sundays and volunteer. I’ve been in pro-life club all of high school, an SA ambassador for three years and on Tower for two. I had good grades and took the hardest classes I could, but the second I started sleeping around, none of that mattered. All the good I had done with my life up until that point was undone by my sexual experiences.

Boys stopped liking me and friends stopped coming around. I felt alone and scared and like I deserved the treatment I was given. I don’t think sleeping around is necessarily a good thing and I went too far, but to a certain extent, it’s perfectly normal and okay; as long as you’re smart about it. But no one told me that.

I eventually met a boy, later I would call him my first love, and he told me that being a slut just meant being a woman who slept around like a man. I couldn’t understand why when guys had lots of sex, they were congratulated, but when I did, I was shunned.

That particular phenomenon is known as slut-shaming. It can take different forms (calling a woman a “good-for-nothing whore” because she likes sex, a boy telling you that you aren’t allowed to say no anymore because you say yes to everyone else, treating someone like less of a human being for nothing more than sex) and the effect is always the same: it makes her hate herself.

A little over half a year later, the boy who had built me up had disappeared from my life. I met someone else following our breakup and that relationship came to a close soon after, as well. A few short months after that, the first boy left this world completely. It was the first hard, unexpected loss I ever had to experience, and it shook me to my core. The boy who loved me when I couldn’t love myself, my lighthouse in a storm, was gone. Following his death, I again started sleeping around.

For me, sex was enjoyable, but what was so addicting about it was the way it functioned as a crutch. Whenever something bad happened, I would have sex and for a few hours, the pain would disappear. I think what people don’t realize it is a vice just like any other: something people in pain use to cope.  It was a band-aid holding my fragile mental health together. Unfortunately, that meant I was never actually dealing with what was going on. By the time I realized I had a problem, there was so much suffering that I couldn’t handle ripping all the band-aids off. His death sent me back into that vicious, self-destructive cycle. I was numb and betrayed, and sex was the only time I felt anything.

As the leaves turned, my depression started to fade as I came to terms with his death, but I didn’t stop my sexual habits. The shaming from peers didn’t stop either. People putting me down and abandoning me was the exact opposite of what I needed. Time helps, but it’s useless to hear in those moments where you feel beaten and broken down, like there’s nowhere left to turn.

But I promise you, time makes it all better. It has been 10 months since the boy’s passing. I found support in groups I was involved in, things that functioned as a constant in an ever-changing time.

The Tower, student association and my church’s youth ministry became a second home, and we were like little families within our organizations. They got me through it, as did the friends who stayed by my side. Everything I went through has made me who I am and for that, I would never take it back. I may never understand why some people must endure such undeserved suffering, but I’ve learned to accept that. Time and love heal all wounds and though the scars will remain, they just show how strong I am.