So, it begins...

Have you ever had a feeling about something, so terrible and deep that it makes your stomach split in two? This is how I feel every time I think about my first year in college.

Here, I am starting a blog for women.  This a list of things that women should know about abuses, whether physical or mental, against other women.  These abuses can occur in the United States, but they can also cover topics such as trafficking, prostitution, and cultural differences between American women and women around the world.

I am very interested in topics that affect women.  I was raped the first week of my freshman year in college.  I went to a college pool party by myself, and a guy put something in my drink.  I passed out within thirty minutes and the last thing I remember was him putting me in his truck.  I woke up paralyzed and face down on a bed to someone raping me.

I come from a fairly small town.  I began my adult life very naive, but after the first week, that all changed.

I didn't tell my parents for seven months.  The night I was kidnapped, the man who took me had purposefully stashed my purse with my phone and keys at his friend's apartment.  When I woke up, all I can remember is asking where my clothes were, where my purse was.  And each time he would answer that we would get them in the morning.  My parents had been calling me all night and I never answered.  There's nothing like a parent's instinct.  Usually I call every day, if even just to say hi.  But I hadn't that Tuesday night.

They called my Residential Advisor (RA), but she said that I wasn't opening my door and that I was probably asleep.  

The next day, when he took me to get my purse, I said nothing.  I really think he believed that I didn't remember any of it.  I called my parents and lied about how I had taken some allergy pills and passed out.  Then I went to French class, only to get up and leave in the middle of it to throw up something bright yellow.

When I went back to my dorm, I told myself I would never speak of it, that I would forget, but I didn't.  I threw myself into work and getting straight A's in all of my classes.  My parents were proud.  I was excelling.  Well, at least that's what they thought.

I finally told them months later, when my managers at work were worried about me.  Just the smell of a certain cologne would send me into chills and sobs.  I would have to leave work because the smell of him sent me back there.

Four years later, I still have nightmares and major scars because of that one night.  I am past it, for the most part though.  Over the last couple of years, it has been my goal to take this experience and try with the best of my ability to stop it from happening to other women.

But it does happen, every day.  Women all around the world are subjects of sexual and physical abuses.  Women are discriminated against, treated as property, drugged, raped, beaten, and even ostracized for their terrible circumstances.   With this blog, I will come up with a list of things women need to know about these abuses, how to escape them, and how to deal with the aftermath.