I nod again, knowing where she’s going with this. Front-line workers tend to break around the two-year mark, especially in roles where you’re helping victims of sexual violence. I was warned about this by Mike when I first took the extra work on. It’s almost expected that you’ll resign before you get too soured and angry.
‘I don’t want to stop,’ I tell her. ‘I know it triggers me occasionally and makes me angry, but I don’t want to stop.’
‘Why not?’
I don’t answer. I dodge her gaze and look around the cluttered, sweaty mess of our office’s meeting room. A brainstorm from an earlier meeting about new revenue streams droops helplessly from the wall, with the words, ‘become a donkey sanctuary’ scribbled across it as a joke.
‘April?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We’ve discussed before that this may be linked to your own personal experience of rape?’
I wipe the sweat off my legs again and re-cross them. ‘Well of course it’s something to do with that.’
‘You used to say that this role helped you work through what happened to you, but do you feel like maybe that’s changing? That maybe you’ve hit your limit? There’s nothing wrong with that, you know.’
Once more, I don’t reply. My skin feels like it’s erupted into cactus spikes.
‘I have to do something,’ I tell her. ‘I have to feel I’m resisting somehow.’
‘To make up for the fact you weren’t able to resist when you were assaulted?’
Why didn’t I tell him to stop? Why did I let him do that to me? If I ‘let’ him, then surely it wasn’t rape? No no no. You know it was, you know it was.
I dig my fingernail into my thumb, take a breath, and look back up at my sweaty supervisor. ‘Probably.’
‘Are you OK, April?’
‘Yes, I’m fine. Look …’ I pick the skin around my nail bed. ‘What’s the psychological perspective on revenge?’
‘Revenge?’ she asks, writing the word down on her notepad, probably with a red flag symbol.
‘I’m just asking hypothetically,’ I say, in case she blabs to Mike even though these sessions are supposed to be private. ‘Have there ever been any studies into whether revenge is helpful?’
‘Embitterment is a common emotion for victims,’ Carol says, dodging the question. ‘It’s not unusual to desire that someone who hurt us should hurt too.’
‘What if it’s not just one person you’re mad at though?’ I ask. ‘What if it’s a whole group of people?’
She makes another note then puts her pad down. ‘April, we’ve spent many of your supervisions talking about how this job, combined with what happened to you, has given you a negative view of men. And, despite me trying very hard to work through this with you, it only appears to be getting worse.’
‘That’s not my fault, that’s men’s fault.’
‘We’ve spoken many times about how every man is different, every human is different. A few bad apples do not reflect half the human population. You help a lot of alcoholics and drug addicts in your role, and yet you’re not coming here telling me everyone is an addict.’
I resist the urge to roll my eyes. I resist the urge to do a lot of things that I really want to do: scream, swear, force her to read the emails I’m forced to read every day, and then yell ‘Do you blame me? Do you get it now? Do you?! DO YOU?!’ Get her to break. Cave in. Lean forward in her sweaty chair and whisper, ‘Look, I’m a woman too, I get it. Yes, men are awful, fucking broken and awful, but I’m not allowed to say that because then I’ll get struck off, but I promise you I’m secretly agreeing with you’ …
‘… As I’ve said, these feelings only seem to be getting stronger, and it doesn’t seem to be having a good impact on your mental health. Your company understands these things often have a time limit. It’s not like you’ll get fired, you’ll just step into something different. Something less in your face.’
I’m a bit panicked now. I don’t want to stop my shifts. I’d only ever been a project manager before coming to We Are Here, lost and scared and not recovered from Ryan. But, after a year, and after organising the training of so many volunteers, I’d been asked if I was interested in training to do shifts too. It was the first thing that eased the pain a bit. That made me feel worthwhile, rather than a broken pile of