Student and Nobel Peace Prize Hopeful, Joel Davis, Reflects on The Mental/Sexual Abuse He Endured And The Effects of His Possible MK Ultra/Grooming On His Psychological State, in the Columbia Spectator (University of Columbia Student Newspaper).
https://www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2017/01/18/when-love-catch-22/
Looking back, it's easy for me to recognize how this must have been what provoked my boyfriend to feel like he had to be there for me all the time, why he chose to carry my weight. He had known about my rapes since before we started dating and about the possibility of my getting worse shortly thereafter. But I had started seeing a therapist at school and he was determined to help me through this dark period of my life.
I would stop trying to commit suicide, start playing the piano again, and finally tell my parents about what had happened to me as a child. I would pursue a job in human rights, transfer to Columbia—things would matter to me again.
There is some grandeur in feeling everything unravel at once. We broke up almost as soon as I moved to New York. Alone and in a new city, I still felt so dependent on him. We kept in contact for a few weeks but he recoiled, explaining that he couldn't bear to watch me suffer anymore, and I haven't heard from him since.
[The author is a political science major in the School of General Studies, a nominee for the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize, and the author of the upcoming novel "Benevolence," which talks about the effects of trauma on a relationship.
Love, Actualized is a weekly series that runs every Thursday.]
https://www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2017/09/22/hidden-figures/
[REPEAT]
“I spent my own gap year working at the United Nations, and for the FORMER OBAMA ADMINISTRATION. When news broke that I was being considered for a Nobel Prize, I had a psychological breakdown—tormented by the recollection of my childhood sex abuse—and withdrew from Columbia. It was another year before I attended my first class.”
[Not mentioned in his article, but according to a May 14, 2015 article in Port Charles, Fl (his home town), Joel was an AMERICAN UNIVERSITY student at the time, that frequently traveled from Washington, D.C. to New York to work with the United Nations.]
“In spite of no clear belonging—even those of us in GS don’t fit neatly into one clique—we’ve taken to supporting those like us, extending a hand and building an ethic where former sex slaves and cult escapees can take intellectual responsibility for one another.”
https://www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2017/11/02/healing-and-its-discontents/
I learned about grief quite early, from men who weren’t my father but insisted I call them daddy. Whenever they touched me, I would close my eyes and try to burrow deep and far away from the present, but if I had left them open, perhaps I would be better equipped to understand what happened to me.
There are years I can’t account for but days I can think back to and count the individual minutes I spent walking into the bedroom, wondering what my friends—now home from school—were doing at that very moment.
What I really craved was amnesia: a blackness that would allow me to forget all the things that were done to me.
“Be patient,” my psychologist warned, “it may take years.”
Memory was the enemy, so I threw myself into the present. I re-enrolled at Columbia, started going on runs through the park with my dog, and began compulsively hanging out with new friends. For a while, it felt like I had been replaced by another, stronger person.
Every kiss or fuck was at risk of being undermined by the thoughts of men breathing cigarette smoke into my mouth or cutting notches on my thighs.
Joel Davis is an ancient studies major in the School of General Studies, the first U.S. Youth Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, executive director of Youth to End Sexual Violence, a Nobel Prize nominee, and chairman of the International Campaign to Stop Rape: the first-ever global collaboration of Nobel laureates, humanitarian experts, and NGOs to end rape in war. Love, Actualized is a weekly op-ed series on love, sex, and dating at Columbia.