Warning: This article contains content which some readers may find distressing.

During my third year of university I was sexually assaulted by one of my close friends. I wish I’d had the courage to speak out about it then, but I had to prioritise my own health and well-being – and that’s okay. I went through a period of denial after the assault and felt that my experience wasn’t valid as it didn’t resemble the stereotyped images of sexual assault or rape victims.

The night I was attacked, we had all walked from the pub to a friend’s house and were staying up, to chat and drink for a while as usual. The man who assaulted me was a young man, who I’ll call Sam for the purposes of this article, who I’d known for a long time. We’d become very close, but I hadn’t seen him in a while.

On this particular night he was encouraging me to drink as much as he and the others always did, even though I’d been drinking less that year. Retrospect is an unhelpful mirror, but at the time I recall the males in the group had made some pretty inappropriate sex jokes. In the past I might have let them slide but in that past year I’d begun to speak my mind a bit more often. So that night when I called the person who made the joke out, I was unsurprised when Sam shoved a bottle of spirits towards me; a gesture I’m assuming said “lighten up”.

I did drink a lot, as always tended to happen at these particular meetups, but it was an emotionally charged evening for all of us and I’d soon lost count of drinks and was dangerously drunk. That was my mistake, I’ll freely admit, but it’s certainly not an excuse for what happened to me.

As the evening went on, I remember getting emotional about something and tearing up and Sam and I curled up on a sofa in a corner. This was his attempt, I assumed, at consoling me and acting like the big brother figure and best friend he had been to me so many times before. At this point, I was so drunk that I couldn’t stand, and my level of consciousness was swinging between outright black out and utterly incoherent.

When I regained consciousness, Sam had his fingers in my vagina and was pulling my hand onto his crotch with his jeans undone. All I could think was “stop”, and as soon as I could get any words out, I said “stop” coherently enough to be understood. He did then, to his credit. It was an odd sensation in the swirling fog of my head to suddenly hear this immovable, loud “stop”.

However, when I next managed to stand up, intending to remove myself from the situation and go sit with my other friends in the room next door, Sam followed me and kept trying to put his hands on my body. I kept trying to bat him away, desperately trying to get my alcohol-swamped head to figure out what I should do. The second I could walk steadily enough, I hurried three blocks, alone, at 3am to get home and pass out in my bed.

At this point, I just wanted to feel safe as I’d felt with Sam before but now there was so much conflict in how I felt about him. I wish I hadn’t gotten so drunk; I wish I’d spotted the warning signs in him earlier and kept my distance. For several months afterwards I tried to pass it off just as a weird thing that happened, feeling guilty and that it was somehow my fault. I was disturbed at my own visceral reaction and the “stop” I had mumbled that night kept echoing in my head.

Over time, I started showing signs of PTSD and I was in denial until a counsellor I’d been seeing for sleep problems questioned whether my experience had indeed been non-consensual. I’ve only been able to resolve the health problems I’ve faced since the assault by reflecting and admitting to myself that it was definitely not consensual, and definitely not my fault