Risky business
The sixth episode in my formative sex & relationship series.
Trying to keep up with the party culture around me, I throw myself right into the chaos unsure of what I want or who I am. Precarious situations become normalized with hangovers & regrets abound.
*Heads up* I describe an act of violence, detail multiple sexual acts and discuss alcohol & drug use.
In this series:
Ep 14 :: Seeding disenchantment
Ep 16 :: Petroleum engineering smart
Ep 17 :: Sex and the city
Ep 18 :: Part of the job
Ep 19 :: Hawaiian breeze era
Ep 20 :: Time out
Pre-drinking in my first apartment. Bunny curtains, low rise jeans and likely a Sean Paul remix in the background 🐇👖🥂
A night out could include 2-3 Long Island iced teas, 4 double rum & cokes, 4+ beers & a sequence of ridiculously named shots.
🍹🥃🍷🍾🥂🍻
*I would like to acknowledge the ignorance behind the outfit & makeup choices in the above photo & apologize for the blatant cultural appropriation. At the time I believed I was celebrating a culture that I loved, whereas now I find this clearly harmful.
A night of jello shots, cider, Bacardi Breezers & nachos turns into fluorescent, back door vomiting at work 🤢 (And yes, that’s a glow-in-the-dark painting of ET & Michael Jackson on the wall)
My drawings at the time accurately reflect my lifestyle changes… 🥃🥃
2005 in a nutshell
The love of my life at the time-please meet my Volkswagen van, Queen Mable 👑
Channeling an alter ego (“freak magnet vest” makes an appearance again)
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This is Divine Interruption. I'm Sarah Hildreth Rankin. Hi, welcome back.
As you know, from my last episode, I took a bit of a time out. I've been gone for about a month, just processing everything that has come up from exploring all of these stories about my sexual and relationship past. And it was really unexpected.
I had no idea the effect that delving back in was going to have on me. I had a bit of an idea of where I was headed and maybe how it was going to feel, but it's interesting.
Sometimes you just don't know when you're going to trip on a wire or when a thread of one experience actually goes so much deeper than you think it will. So it's been a really important time.
I've done a lot of processing and just stepping back, using all of my tools, talking about all of these things with the right people, that kind of thing, and now I feel clear. I feel calm and just ready to dive back in again.
So I want to pick up again where I left off in episode 19. And just a heads up, I do talk about sex, alcohol, drugs, and an incidence of violence in this episode.
And something I just want to mention again that feels important that I brought up in the first episode of this series, is just where I was coming from, what we've experienced before, how we see the world, all of that really factors into our
experience. And so a lot of what I was around or witnessing really felt like a big deal. It wasn't that I was ignorant to these things. It was that I hadn't had a lot of lived experience in these types of situations, seeing certain things happen.
And then you put together the fact that I was a very sensitive person. So those things all factor into what I took away from this and how it made me feel. So yeah, let's dive back in.
So following up on my last episode, I had kind of finally experienced a positive relationship. And by relationship, I mean two months, right? I had been seeing this guy for two months and it was nice.
It felt good, but he ended up leaving. After he left, I still found myself in Jasper. I was living there on my own in my own basement apartment.
I had many health struggles, but kind of found myself in a new season. It was springtime, as far as I remember, which always feels like a fresh start in some way. And one of my friends had just broken up with her boyfriend.
And she said, can I just stay with you until I figure something out? I said, no problem. You know, we can share a bed.
It's not a big deal. It's a super tiny apartment, but I'm okay with that. And that evening, she called me and she was at her old apartment, and she was like, hey, I just need some help getting some of my things.
So I went there and I witnessed something really scary. It was something that I'd never witnessed before. When I got there, I walk up to the apartment and I realized that she's not there alone.
Like he had shown up and he was different. He was different than I'd ever seen him. He looked almost like crazy in his eyes.
He was aggressive. He was intimidating. And the energy was so palpable.
And it was clear that he had shown up to kind of ambush her. And I'm kind of standing at the door, you know, trying to figure out, okay, what are we doing? We need to get her things.
How do we get her out of here? And he starts opening up all the doors in the kitchen, opening up all the cabinets, and he's slamming them one after another. He's being really loud and it is scary.
And then he grabs her, he grabs my friend, and he pushes her up against the wall, and he's got his arm on her throat, like pressing down on her throat. And he turns around, he looks me straight in the eyes. He says, are you scared?
Am I scaring you? He reaches down, he grabs a bunch of her stuff, he throws it out the door, he's like, go get it. And I look down at all this stuff, and as I do that, he slams the door and he locks it.
And I felt so helpless. I didn't know what to do. I'm picking up her things.
I'm like, I can't get into the apartment. I remember running outside thinking, okay, I need to go get a phone. I need to call someone.
I need to call the cops. I need to do something. And then as I'm trying to figure out what to do, she comes running out and she's like, we just need to go.
We just need to go. So that was just something I've never been a part of to see that kind of violence.
And it really just opened my eyes up to more of what many people actually experience, especially in relationships and how scary and how painful that can be. And I had no idea at all. So she stayed at my place that night.
And then the next day after work, we find all of her stuff dumped in the back alley, like outside my building. It's just on the dirty concrete, all of her clothes, all of her things. And it was just so painful.
It was horrifying to see that someone would treat someone else like this. So she ended up moving in with me for a while. Then we actually found our own place and moved in together and became roommates.
And we were both single. And that kind of just started this new chapter of a different kind of lifestyle. Like we were hanging out all the time, and then we're starting to go out and just party more often.
And we had a lot of people over at our place. I feel so sorry to the family that owned this home. They had two young kids.
And I just look back and I'm like, oh my gosh, I just feel so bad. The things that they must have heard and witnessed and just how cringe all of it was. But yeah, this was kind of a new era in a way.
I was just thrown into new situations, hanging out with new people. Even my wardrobe started to change. Like I picked up quickly.
It's like, oh, when you go out, you need to dress up. I remember my friend lending me a thong one night, and it was something I had just never considered before.
I again had had these few experiences with men, but I'd never really been dressing up for them in that very specific way. I'd never thought to change my underwear, like as if that mattered.
And now I was thinking and seeing the world to this new lens. You know what I mean? I was buying low-cut tops, and I was wearing tighter jeans.
I bought a push-up bra, and I was just learning that this was how I was meant to be. This is how you grab the attention of men. This is what it is to be desirable.
And I just felt this need that I had to be better. I had to be more. I had to be more sexual.
Something about me so far hadn't worked, right? I wasn't attracting the right people. I hadn't had many positive experiences.
And now I'm like, oh, this is what I need to be. I need to be what they want. I need to change myself.
This is what it is to be a woman, a desirable woman. So we started drinking quite a bit, drinking at our place, inviting friends over. Then we'd go out to a pub, and then end up going to a nightclub and dancing.
And we're always finding more people that we could do this with. And so there was many different groups of friends and people that I was hanging out with. And these people came from all walks of life.
Everyone was in a different scenario. They were of different age ranges from different places around the world, across the country, different backgrounds, different life experiences.
And a lot of that was really fun and really interesting and also opened me up to so much more. The fun part that I really loved was the part with the friends. I loved drinking with my friends.
I loved getting ready. I loved listening to music. I guess that we called it pre-gaming.
I don't know if it's still called that, you know, when you pre-drink before you go out. And I just loved the company and I loved the hope. There was this moment where it was still early.
There was something about it still being sun light outside, still being daytime or early evening, where there was sunshine, that felt like there was endless possibilities, like, oh, this could go anywhere. We're going to have fun.
Which is interesting too, because as a kid, I really didn't like nighttime. There was fear associated with night that brought up a lot of anxiety in me. And it's interesting that this was reflected back at this time as well.
There was something about safety, being seen in the light, being able to see people's intentions almost, see what was actually going on, still being able to see and feel myself. I wasn't lost. And this all centered around drinking.
I had definitely quite a few experiences at this point. Drinking, it wasn't a big deal. When I still lived in Edmonton, I was going out with friends that I'd known, that were really safe, right?
And we were going out in a large group, and we were all experiencing it for the first time together, so I'd done a lot of that. But this was different. I was on my own, new friends, and I'm in a different place.
And it just became more and more about drinking. So on a typical, even like work day, in the middle of the week, I would have worked a morning shift.
I would get off work at like one o'clock in the afternoon, head home, change, go with my friend to the convenience store, and we'd get a huge slurpee, and we'd have a huge bottle of rum with us, and we'd just dump it in to the slurpee, and then we'd
bike out to the beach. So we were getting day drunk, hanging out in the sun, drinking a lot, biking home, and then we'd get dressed up. We'd invite friends over. There'd be more drinks.
Maybe I'll drink a six pack of Coronas. And then we head out to the bar for happy hour. So it's still daytime.
Then I'm gonna order a Long Island ice tea. Maybe I'm gonna drink three of those. Then I'm gonna start on rum and cokes.
And it's always gonna be double shots, like single shots, like no way. I'm like, no, give me a double. And I could just throw back drink after drink.
And we'd run into all these people from town, because again, the size of this place was small enough that it's like a little microcosm. You're gonna recognize people, and some of them you're gonna know really well.
They're gonna be like regular customers or business owners. There's gonna be RCMP officers and firefighters, ski instructors, raft guides.
There's gonna be these old timers who have worked on the railroad their entire life, or there's gonna be younger guys who are working in the oil rigs. There's just a lot going on.
So you'd run into all these different types of people, and it was really fun. And then we kept drinking. I remember drinking like 12 beers one after another when there was like a hockey game on.
And again, I have nothing to compare this to. I just think of my body today. And 12 beers feels like a lot.
On top of other drinks, is drinking, you know, 12 beers. So it felt like it was just the central piece to this new reality I was living and this new life. And the people who are closest to me were all drinking, and they were drinking all the time.
And so it became really normal. It was just what we did. And I wanted to keep up.
I trained my body to keep up. And it was custom to do things like just buy huge bottles of cheap multi-wine and just stand by the side of the road. And it's like, who's going to pick us up?
So whoever we meet, whoever pulls over, we just meet up with these random people and just go drink on the train tracks and just get wasted. And on top of the alcohol, I noticed there was more weed.
And then I started to notice, like, painkillers were being used in different ways. And then there were, like, trips to the bathroom and people's noses, you know, had, like, white dust. And I remember being like, oh, is there people doing this?
Is this a thing? But I just left it alone. I never asked questions.
I never said anything. And I just didn't really know what I could do. Like, I didn't feel like I was a part of that.
I didn't feel like it was my place. And I just remember kind of observing that there was, like, more going on, possibly more addiction going on than I was aware of.
And our nights often brought us, like, at the end of the night to one of two nightclubs in town, where we'd do more drinking, we'd order more shots, candy apple shots, polar bear shots, shots of tequila. Like, it just kept going.
And then there'd be a lot of dancing. Again, that could be really fun. It just depended on who was there, what the feel of everything was, how drunk I was.
And then after that, there was always, like, getting pizza or getting poutine or nachos, and then, like, a stumbling home. You're either with your friends or with a guy, or you're stumbling home alone. And this was the part that I feared the most.
This is what felt really ic to me. I dreaded it. I didn't like the end of the night.
And I think that that's actually what's happening for a lot of people, not wanting to kind of accept, I don't know, a lot of the reality of your life, right?
Because this partying does take you on a high, regardless if it's alcohol-related, drug-related, but also just emotionally and physically, like, you're kind of on this high, and you're having a good time, but it's not reality in some way.
So I really felt that. And I think back now, I'm like, oh, my God, I was so sensitive. The amount of energy that I was absorbing on a daily basis was insane.
And so no wonder I was always feeling overburdened, and like, I did not have good energetic boundaries. I was around so much at that time, and a lot of what I was feeling too wasn't my own.
Like, I was having deep feelings, but I realized I was also really feeling the energetics of what was going around me, and it was a lot. I felt desperation. I felt panic.
I felt anxiety. I felt this deep pressure. Oh my God, we have to find someone at the end of the night.
Who do you like? Who looks good? We need to keep this party going.
And we'd often find ourselves in just the most random places with the most random people, and that could be really fun.
As long as I wasn't alone, I really never wanted to be alone with a guy when I was really drunk or after a night out or someone I didn't know, like that never felt good to me. And I think that's for good reason, it just didn't feel safe.
So the best nights for me were when our friend group stayed together till the end. And you know, sometimes people would be really out of it. I had to take care of people a lot, and they had to take care of me a lot too.
And I saw a lot of like things in terms of what people were going through when they drank too much, like to a level of like they are not themselves. And it can be really, really dark.
So I witnessed a lot of that, like full-on personality changes, people becoming extremely abusive, people reverting back to like really childlike states. So I think seeing a lot of that too, I was like, oh, this is like really heavy.
You know what I mean? And this wasn't something that people were willing to talk about the next day, or they had no idea it had even happened. So seeing that a lot night after night was also, I was like, oh, this is really overwhelming.
But again, just push it to the back of my brain, shove it down. This is just what it is. This is my new life.
This is what people do. But yeah, I didn't really like that feeling of like, oh, we need to find someone to go home with. Because unless I knew someone had a connection with them, that wasn't something I wanted to do.
But again, I wanted to keep up. I wanted to be a part of the narrative. I wanted to be a part of the environment I was around.
These were my people. This was my friend group, and this is what everyone was doing. And throughout that experience, there were definitely a few other friend groups, like male friend groups that we'd stumbled into, and they were very incestuous.
So it was almost like over the course of a few weeks, I'd noticed like, oh, different girls would just get passed around from guy to guy. And I did find myself in that situation briefly.
And I always felt kind of left out, like I already knew, I'm like, I can't be a part of this. Or maybe it was like, I always felt like I took things. I pretended like I didn't, but I took things more seriously in some way.
Like I always knew, I was like, oh, I can't just be casual about this. Nothing about exchanging my energy with someone feels casual. And so I really didn't want to lose control.
I didn't want to feel disempowered again, which I'd already experienced so many times.
And inevitably, I would end up actually liking one of these guys in this friend group, and then somehow end up doing something with him sexually one night, and then finding out that he was also doing that with multiple other girls at the same time.
And then I would know the girls, and then I would see them around, and I'd be like, oh my God. It was so much to handle. I didn't deal with that well.
I didn't like that. And the only way that I knew how to manage my feelings around this was to like really not care about the person. Because if I really actually didn't care about that person, then I could engage with them sexually and not feel used.
Because in essence, then I would be the one who's actually using them. So I would hold the power. I would hold the control.
And then I wouldn't really feel discarded or disempowered when the interaction was over. And if you think about that, that's pretty gross. And it didn't feel good.
It just felt like the culture I was a part of at that time, this was like ingrained. This was normal behavior. And it just felt like I needed to find a way to adapt.
But it took its toll. And I don't think that this is a really sustainable way of being. Like, certainly not for me.
But I also question if it truly is for anyone. And I could be wrong. I just didn't feel like the deeper needs of people were being met, especially when it came to heterosexual relationships between men and women.
And I know it's unfair of me to maybe even say that. It may sound like I'm judging. But it was more like just what I felt around me.
And in the end, I only really know how I felt, right? But there was something about just an unequal exchange, and it wasn't always, often just straightforward. Oh, this is so fun.
I like you. Let's do this. No strings attached.
I'm going to leave and I'm fine. That was not what I was witnessing. But I think there was a need to act tough or act strong or make it seem like it was a certain thing, or there was a reason driving that behavior that came from something else.
And it was just pure chaos to me, being amidst all of these different energies and things happening and all the different power dynamics. And I wanted to present that I was just like having the time of my life. You know, a single, I'm empowered.
I'm this fun-loving party girl. You know, I'm just adding notches to my belt, like no big deal. A lot of this, I did have a lot of fun, especially when it came to like with my friends.
But most of the time, underneath that, and you know, what I wanted to believe about myself and what I wanted to feel and what I wanted to present, underneath that was just like this deep lack of safety.
I felt really unsafe underneath what I was doing. I felt unsafe with what I was witnessing and also what I was a part of.
So everything that we would experience on our nights out became this fodder for the next day, so that we would like pour over at brunch, right? And at brunch, there'd often be more alcohol.
It's like, oh, hair of the dog, you know, Caesars, Bloody Marys, Mimosas. We put Kahlua in our coffees and Baileys in our hot chocolates. And it didn't stop.
Like blacking out was a really common occurrence for me and for the people around me. And I couldn't often remember how I'd gotten home. I couldn't remember what had happened.
And at these brunches, you know, the next morning, we would come together and we would need to compare notes because there was such huge gaps in our own stories.
There was one evening where I was sitting at a table at this bar and I just fell under the table. I was just sitting there and I completely blacked out and like fell off my chair, hit my head.
And I know that was a problem because it means I've definitely been over-served, right? But to the level of I'm just having a normal interaction one evening, and then I'm fully blacking out, like that was something that was happening.
I was drinking so much that this was normal. And what became really common, you know, with blacking out and everything was just this, I said chaos, like it was chaos. Often I couldn't feel where I ended and other people began.
So I just felt myself in these situations that felt off or yucky or even dangerous at times, depending on where I was, who I was with, how I ended up there. And yet, I kind of normalized this.
And I continued to drink so that I could push down, honestly, maybe how that had really made me feel. And then by drinking again, I could just move on to the next experience, right? And I could forget about those yucky feelings that I'd had.
One night on the way home after a night out, I climbed up onto some scaffolding around a building, and I tried to do like a skin the cat where you hang from your arms and then you flip your legs through your arms.
And I flipped and completely just fell onto my face. I smashed up my nose and friends took me home. This guy and this girl, they put me into bed with a bag of peas and then proceeded to actually have sex while I was in the bed.
So I was there, I was with them, and they were right next to me. And I don't know. I don't know how I feel about that.
I remember being kind of like, oh, I'm cognizant this is happening. I can't move, right? My body is like stuck.
I have this huge injury on my face and I'm pretty drunk, but oh, okay. Like, are they okay with this? I don't know.
Am I okay with this? Another night, I found a random person's phone number in my pocket. And this is where I just, I can't put two and two together.
I ended up calling this number and this guy just comes over to my house. I must have told him, this is where I live and he must have maybe known who I was because he gave me his number at some point. I didn't know his name.
I didn't know who he was. I didn't recognize him. He came to our house.
He came into my bedroom. He crawled into my bed with me. And sorry if this is graphic, okay?
And proceeded to just masturbate over me. And I just laid there and I just allowed this to happen. And I remember being like, I don't know how this is happening.
And I don't know, again, how I feel about it. At one point, he actually like screamed out, like called out, I love you. And it was just really intense.
I'm like, okay, there's a lot going on here. And then he just fell asleep, woke up at some point and like left, walked out of my room and like left our house. I still didn't know his name.
I'm like, wait, was that even an experience between two people? Like he was in his own experience and I was here having my own experience. I allowed him to come over.
I never said anything. I mean, it was a lot to take in, but I don't know. So like these were the types of things that I was a part of that became kind of normalized, or it's like, oh, then we can talk about it the next day with my friends.
It's like, oh my God, what did you get up to? Well, this happened to me. Oh my gosh, isn't that crazy?
But at some level in those moments when I'm alone and I'm actually having that experience, what am I getting from that? There's like an intense exchange of energy, right?
And there's another experience that I don't actually know if I've shared this with anyone. I don't think so. But I was on a Greyhound bus.
I think it was, I was going home for Christmas, so it's like a four-hour drive home. I was sitting next to this older guy. I fell asleep and woke up.
This was the middle of the night. It was a night bus. And I woke up, and he had this big flannel shirt, and it was half over me and half over him.
And the arm rest was up. And his body was fully touching mine, right? His side, his arm, his leg, we were fully touching.
And I remember the way he smelled. He, I'm pretty sure, worked on the oil rigs. There was just something, you could just start to tell, right, what kind of people's lifestyles were.
He smelled like cigarettes. He smelled like booze. And there was this moment where it was very physical.
Like I'm like, oh, this person is like touching my body, and we're in the dark on this bus, and there's other people here. And there was a moment where I was like, oh, this is like kind of unexpected. Like, is this exciting?
But it was also like disturbing at some level because then I just allowed things to happen. I can't fully tell you what happened. I remember that I let him touch me and do stuff.
I touched him. Like, it was almost like a weird dream. And when the bus stopped, when we got off the bus and then walked into the bright lights of the terminal in the middle of the night, I just felt like, is this what I do now?
Like, what even was that? Was that a good experience for me? Did I want that to happen?
I allowed it to happen. I participated. Did I welcome it?
Did I give off a vibe? Like, what is happening to me? Why am I doing this?
And like, even when I kind of saw him in the light, I just got instant yucky feelings. And I just say that where it just felt again, I felt, I'm like, I feel like grimy. Like, I don't like this.
I don't think he was well. It didn't feel healthy. I guess that's just the point.
It didn't feel healthy to me, and yet I participated. There was some darkness to it in some way, and it just didn't feel like totally me.
And this lack of safety that I was feeling, which is a lot of these experiences were things that I was now participating in, but not fully wanting, it's just like this lack of safety under that that just became normal.
And in this instance, like, I knew what he wanted. He had already, like, set up this scenario where we were touching, where there's this, almost like this blanket over us, right? And I knew what he wanted.
And it's like, I knew that I could provide this for him. I knew that he didn't care about me. That actually wasn't a part of the equation anymore.
I'd already experienced that. I now knew. I was like, oh, well, this is what men want.
They don't like me. They don't see me. This is this type of interaction.
And so now, this is how I was dealing with those feelings. I almost welcomed it in more. I was embracing this.
I was closing down a part of my heart. I was closing down a part of my brain. And I was playing this game.
And this way, I felt like at least I was now in control. I felt like I could actually be of value in a way. And somehow then that wouldn't allow men to hurt me anymore.
I would just serve up what I knew they wanted from me, what I could feel and sense that they wanted from me, what they had told me in many different ways before, in their own ways, that this is actually what they wanted by doing this.
Now it's like, oh, well, I'm choosing to do this. So now you can't hurt me. I don't actually need anything from you.
So I'll give you this and that's it. Now you can have it. I have pleased you, and I can be like safe because I've closed down any other sort of part of what, like who I actually am.
I'm not letting you see who I am. I'm not letting you feel who I am. My heart is not open to any of this.
That is too scary. Most of my memories of that time are of vomiting, so much vomiting. I would leave the bar and just vomit outside of the grocery store on the way home.
That became super normal, or I'd be riding on the back of my friend's bike, just like puking. I would just vomit and vomit out the back door of the bakery.
You know, the next day at work, I remember this one day, it was just fluorescent green from all the jello shots that I'd had the night before. And I spent hours, just hours of my time on bathroom floors. I was always next to a toilet.
I was always in someone's bathroom, if not my own bathroom. That was where I spent so much of that time. And in a way, underneath that, there's some form of atonement going on there.
There's something about vomiting, which is a rejection of the experiences that I'd had the night before.
It was as if everything that I'd done, everything that I'd witnessed, everything that I'd been a part of, things that maybe didn't sit well or I didn't know how to digest, it was like I was releasing all of it.
And that almost made it feel like it had never happened. And so I compartmentalized a lot, but it just felt like everything was moving so fast and that I couldn't take a breath. I couldn't assess what was for me anymore.
I couldn't feel myself. I was not alone very often where, you know, there was that period where I'd moved out on my own and I was alone and that was really challenging for me because when I was alone, I would feel so much.
So now I had thrown myself into this situation where now I was never alone and there was so much chaos and that prevented me from feeling any of those feelings. But in essence, I was just taking on so much more.
So it's like, hey, let's add more fuel to this emotional dumpster in here and let's keep shoving it all down. Let's have more experiences and not process any of it. And then I cannot feel myself at all.
And it is tricky when the people and the environment around you are fully immersed in what is happening, like in this, it's not an agenda, but like in this way of being, it can feel really impossible to get out and to see clearly.
And I love these people. They were my lifeline. They were what made me feel like I had community, and that was really important.
And I didn't really know how to be living there without that, because at least it gave me something that wasn't me being alone with my feelings. So yeah, this was a very chaotic time.
Even as I'm talking, like I'm right back there, and I'm feeling it, and I'm just overwhelmed with all that I feel like I lived a lot in the span of, I think it was about two years, and a lot of it's really hazy, but there's certain points that stick
out. So I'm just going to leave this here and pick up again with some more specific experiences that I actually had with certain men during this time that kind of followed the nature of what was going on and kind of where I was headed. So thank you.
Thank you for letting me share this. I think I've said some things that I've probably not said out loud ever, but there we go. So I will talk to you again next time.
Thanks. Bye.
