The Stories I Tell Myself So I Can Keep Functioning.

I’m going to tell you about one of the worst nights of my life. It happened about thirty years ago. And I still can't tell the story right.

Not because the decades blurred it. My brain remembers every damn bit of it.

It’s my heart’s memory that can’t hold the re-telling.

Fair warning: in a few spots I’ll hand you the Vaseline-on-the-lens version… softening the tougher parts.

And I might need to stop and start again. Because this story isn’t just painful to tell.

It’s painful to type.

Back in the 1990’s I went on a date with a man named Rich who actually was rich. I learned this on the cab ride to dinner, during which he excitedly pointed out four buildings, the way other men show photos of their children. His family owned three of them. The fourth he just liked.

At dinner, Rich was charming. He shared funny stories. Told me I was beautiful. Said he loved that I worked in a creative field, because in real estate development he mostly met boring people.

He also spent a surprising amount of time telling me about his new moisturizer, until I agreed that yes, his skin was remarkable.

He told me I seemed like someone with great taste in music, and asked me to go to Tower Records that week, buy him a bunch of my favorite CDs, then bring them to him on our second date.

I remember feeling oddly trapped by that hundred dollars, because I hadn’t realized a second date was mandatory.

I laughed, like he was kidding, then pushed the bill back toward him.

But he was insistent. He tucked the hundred-dollar bill into my purse, and said he’d see me Saturday, which made me feel like the world’s first music stripper.

I had a bad feeling about Rich. So when I got back home, I called him, asked for his mailing address, put the hundred dollars in an envelope, and mailed it back.

The whole thing cost me a stamp.

After Rich tucked the hundred-dollar bill into my purse, he offered to walk me home.

When we got to my building, he asked to come up. I said no. Clear as day. No.

Rich told me he understood completely… but also that he suddenly, desperately needed to use my bathroom.

I knew the “gotta pee” excuse was exactly that: an excuse. But he sold it like a man with ninety seconds to live, and I'd been raised with manners, so I let him up.

After he used the bathroom, Rich asked me to play some of my favorite music, so he could hear what kind of CDs his hundred dollars would be buying.

I put on a CD by The Smiths. Rich said he liked the song. Then suddenly announced he was in pain.

He then grabbed one of my hands and planted it on his shoulder, before I had ever agreed to a thing, which, fun fact, even my gynecologist knows to ask first.

“Feel that,” he said. “Got a real knot in there. Love you to massage it right there. And also there.”

He then tried to move my hand all around his shoulder. Then started steering it south.

I told him I was tired. Not in the mood. And took my hand back.

“But I’m injured,” he pleaded. “I’m in pain.” He looked at me with a sad puppy dog face. (A puppy with a large real estate portfolio, used to getting treats.)

I decided to keep the humor thing going. “Wow,” I said. “A man who’s comfortable admitting there’s something wrong with him. How refreshing.”

Rich took that as a green light to tell me another thing wrong with him.

“You know one of my testicles hangs lower than the other,” he announced, in the casual way you might mention you’re a Sagittarius. “Want to see?” he asked cheerily.

I told him no thanks, I was good. Then walked him to the door. Not a polite, slow walk. The quick kind, where you stay glued to someone’s heels until they’re in the hallway and there’s a locked door between you.

Right before the door closed, Rich asked, "You sure?" Like he'd just handed me the single greatest gift the universe had to offer, himself. And I'd inexplicably given it back, unopened.

***

Rich offered to show me his lopsided testicles. I declined the tour.

I looked Rich directly in his well-moisturized face, and told him in the polite voice we women are all issued at birth, that it was getting late and he should go home, now, please.

Rich did not go home. Instead he shoved me down onto my couch and pinned both my wrists over my head with one hand.

One hand.

From a guy who, five minutes earlier, needed me to massage his shoulder because he’d “torn something playing squash.”

I said it again, louder. “NO.”

Except Rich kissed me while the word was still sitting on my lips, like he was trying to swallow the evidence of the “no” before it finished forming. As if a “no” doesn’t count if you cut it off before the vowel.

I kept repeating the word: No, no, no, no, NOOoooo… while trying to push him off me.

I even tried to kick him in his lopsided testicles.

But he was six foot two and strong, and I’m a petite five foot two.

Quickly I realized it was time to reach for a far stronger voice, the shriller one. Every woman keeps this second shrill voice under the nice one, the voice with no apology in it, the one we’re trained our whole lives not to use because it isn’t ladylike.

I used it. I used ALL of it.

Rich looked me dead in the eye and smiled, with the confidence of a man who’s never been told he’s done anything wrong. (Except for that one nanny in 1971.)

Then Rich announced, “Oh, come on. I can tell you’re loving this!”

Yes, he looked at my face… a face doing the precise opposite of loving anything… and overruled it.

It was now obvious. We were in two different realities. Rich was in his own world, at a party for one, where I was his date and the chemistry was electric, and the lighting was doing him favors.

I was at a different event. Mine had a crime in it.

I’m not going to walk you through everything that happened next. You don’t need the footage, and I am never screening it again.

But here’s the part nobody mentions about the worst night of your life: the brain, bless it, eventually evacuates. Yes, when your body can’t get out of a room, your mind will try to leave without it. Mine did.

My focus drifted up to the ceiling where I found a long crack in the plaster running toward the window, and I thought to myself: I should really paint over that crack. Maybe get a new color other than white. Perhaps a nice eggshell.

This is a mercy the brain sometimes offers during crisis. It will hand you a small renovation to consider, so you do not have to attend the trauma below.

Some old animal part of you runs the math, decides the body can’t win, and sends your brain upstairs to wait it out.

So that’s where I spent the time. Up by the ceiling, mentally renovating, while a man I’d known for a mere few hours helped himself to the rest of me.

When he finished, he stood up the way you stand up from a steak dinner you enjoyed.

Then he pulled me toward him, and gave me a final kiss goodbye. Not sheepishly. Not guiltily.

A nice kiss. A kiss with a future in it.

Then, finally, I heard it. The click of the door closing behind him.

He was now on the other side.

I looked around me and suddenly the apartment felt enormous. I slid down to the floor, because the floor was something in the room that didn’t want something from me. And I cried until I couldn’t breathe. Then I kept crying anyway, because it turns out the body keeps an extra reserve tank for exactly this.

I fell asleep down there on the floor, under the cracked ceiling that I never did get around to fixing.

The next day I could have called the police. I could have called a lawyer. Instead I called my therapist.

I told him everything. And what I noticed, saying it out loud, was that the part that wrecked me most wasn’t simply what Rich did to me. It was how he strolled out of my apartment practically whistling, like a guy who’d just aced a first date, and was already off to tell his friends about me.

His takeaway from assaulting me in my own apartment was that we’d had a lovely time… and that I still owed him a Smiths album.

Then Rich called the next day, on his lunch break, to say what a great time he’d had. Like a burglar leaving a five-star Yelp review for the restaurant he just robbed.

Yet there Rich was, calling me on the phone, telling me he’d found a great Italian place for our second date. Saturday at 7pm work for me?

I told him there would be no second date. Obviously. No to Saturday, no to the CDs, no to all of it. Forever.

I explained how I had cried myself to sleep. How I had been clear with all my many no’s. How I’d used my shrill voice. Plus a few kicks, aimed strategically at his lopsided testicles.

Rich sounded confused. Not angry. Not defensive. Genuinely, sincerely baffled.

I wondered: Was he faking this?

But no. In Rich's version of the story, I was just some girl rewriting good history, going off her faulty memory, being weird about a wonderful night.

And because he was so sure I’d had a wonderful time, he kept pushing for that second date, pushing back against my many no’s once again, just as he had on the sofa with his entire body weight on top of me.

Except now there was only a phone line between us instead of his hand around my wrists. And with nothing left to physically pin down, my no finally got to do its whole job.

I hung up.

Rich continued to call for a second date for the full upcoming year. I continued to dodge his calls.

And the money? I kept his hundred bucks. Mailing it back would’ve meant talking to Rich to get his address, and I’d sooner have eaten the envelope.

So I logged his hundred dollars as a co-pay on the therapy I needed to recover from the date he thought went so well.

And it took many sessions to heal. I kept rethinking the evening, hunting for the moments I could have changed things. A harder no. A faster door. Some braver version of myself who finally got it right.

Ultimately I realized there was no version of me who could have stopped him. He’d already decided not to hear me.

How the night ended was never up to my no.

It was up to his.

It’s now 2026.

A few months ago, I was at dinner with Howard, the man I’ve built a life with, when some guy crossed the restaurant toward our table, grinning like we were about to have a beautiful reunion.

I didn’t place him at first. Older. Softer in the middle. Expensive watch.

He said, “Hi, Karen. Remember me? Rich?”

The whole thing came back at once. The couch. The wrists. The crack in the ceiling. The phone calls. All of it, in the time it takes a man to say his own name.

Rich looked at me, then at Howard, and smiled the untroubled smile of a man who has never once been the villain in his own story.

Then he looked directly at Howard and announced, “Good luck with this one. She still owes me a hundred bucks from a few decades ago.”

Howard turned to me. “Who was that?”

I’d had thirty years to figure out how to tell this story. Thirty years of versions, ready to go.

But the version I told Howard that night was a new one.

“Oh him?” I said. “He’s just some lopsided-testicle asshole I met once in the ‘90s.”

Then I stopped the story right there.

Because that is the only version I could tell out loud, in a restaurant, with bread on the table, and still be hungry afterward.

Think of it as applause, but quieter.
Here’s my ❤️ back to you for doing that!

→ The world has gotten braver about sharing these “me too” stories. Back in the '90s, I felt completely alone. Curious if any of this resonates with you. If so, share what you feel safe to share below. .

→ There’s a belief in AA that applies to all of life: “You’re only as healthy as your secrets.” When you speak your story, shame softens. I recognize how hard it feels to share a tough truth. So I invite you to just share a single word that comes up for you about a tough time. One word, that’s enough. Share it below. Then hug yourself. For real. Put your arms around yourself and hug yourself.

→ Or just share about whatever came up for you as I was sharing my story. Or just drop a ❤️

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