broken boundaries
- joshlynyjavier
- Mar 17, 2025
- 12 min read
03/14/2025
i’ve held off on writing this for so long, for many different reasons.
at times, i couldn’t even admit to myself that you attempted to assault me in my own house.
and then once i had, it felt too personal, painful, and embarrassing to talk about.
it’s one thing to hold this on my own behind a closed door, another to step out and allow others to bear witness to my knees buckling under the weight of it all.
luckily, i found women like chanel miller, amanda nguyen and countless other women who have spoken up and shared their stories of their trauma and pain, but also of resilience and healing. if reading this can offer literally a single other girl comfort and validation in the fact that she is not responsible for what has happened to her, then writing this all out and forcing myself to re-live it is worthwhile, despite how silly i feel.
i’m not going to share your name, not because i particularly care about you, or your wellbeing for that matter. i simply don’t want to allow others to speculate into that failed friendship, and never want my name to somehow be associated with yours unless it is on my own terms. i won’t go out of my way to protect you or shield your identity in this, so if people happen to read this and find out, i will not defend you.
in all honesty, i befriended you on a whim. i met you at a virtual birthday party of a mutual friend at the height of the pandemic, when we were all grappling with our own feelings of loneliness and isolation. you reached out to me separately after the party, and said that i seemed funny and cool, asking if i wanted to be friends.
it was a bit of a surprise and i found your directness a little awkward, but i also found it endearing and sincere. because i valued your honesty and vulnerability, i did something i wouldn’t have usually done and said yes.
our friendship then began in 2020, and we quickly became close after as a result of a lot of discord calls and talking. i learned a lot about you and discovered that we shared similarities despite lack of proximity or convenience to begin our friendship. we were both really interested in personal growth and development (ironic) and had similar interests in gaming, dancing, and emotional intelligence.
but the one thing i felt that we shared that couldn’t necessarily be categorized or defined was just that we got lucky, opened up emotionally to each other, and formed a mutual respect and care for the other’s feelings. it was nice to gain a new friend in an unlikely way and to be able to open up about so many things for the first time — since we were both pretty removed from each other’s lives and close friends, it almost felt like therapy: more anonymity and less fear of affecting perceptions of people you knew in real life. i was pretty shocked at how quick i was to trust you, against my usual judgement, but constantly reminded myself of your reciprocated vulnerability to reassure myself.
at the time we met, i was in a relationship and you were actively dating and seeing people, and it was a common conversation topic between us two. i knew that “male female” friendships were sometimes considered “taboo” in relationships, so i was careful to always be open and honest about our friendship to my partner at the time. you were seemingly so supportive of my relationship and happiness, even at times where i expressed more doubt or concern when problems arose.
eventually we went back to our respective schools in the fall. with the return to being on campus and college life, we talked a little less. however, given the fact that we went from strangers to close friends virtually in the span of a few months, we still texted and called regularly, to the point where my roommates quickly became acquainted with you due to the number of times they would walk into my room and see the two of us on discord. i got to know your friends and you got to know mine. my trust in you was even further deepened at that point, yet t’s one of the most painful truths that i did trust you and feel safe at one point.
there was; however, one yellow flag that i constantly turned away from, giving you the benefit of the doubt:
you were always very explicit and open regarding your sexual desires, and felt very comfortable talking to me about it.
maybe due to the intimate nature of female friendships and girl talk,i had experience with other friends who were also very open about their sex lives and experiences, so it didn’t bother me at the time. being the cool girl feminist that i thought i was, i allowed your behavior on the basis that gender was irrelevant in this case. i took it as a sign of your deep trust and comfort with me, which made me happy, and i often times swallowed my discomfort or invalidated myself, telling myself that i was making it weird. the discomfort began to creep up when these comments started being directed towards me.
“step on me mommy” as a comment on an instagram story.
“looking respectfully” on a selfie.
“😳😳” comments on my workout posts.
i invalidated my discomfort over and over again, wanting to avoid making you feel bad for trying, in what i thought was your own misguided and quirky way, to make me feel less insecure about my appearance. i tried to see past my own discomfort, to see you as a friend trying to hype me up.
but in the aftermath of what happened, you can’t imagine the amount of times i’ve gone back and blamed myself for what happened. maybe if i had said something. maybe if i had expressed my discomfort. maybe if you had the common sense to not say things like that to other people’s girlfriends….
in retrospect, while you have single - handedly destroyed my ability to extend this same benefit of the doubt to strangers or new friends, i’m choosing to honor and love this version of me that did. i’ve gone through so many therapy sessions or late nights blaming this girl for her naivety and trust, but i’m forgiving her at this moment and setting her free.
we remained friends throughout the rest of college. any time i came home for a holiday or break, i made it a priority to try to get at least a meal or boba with you. i’m going to emphasize this point again, because it feels necessary. up until that point, almost all of our hangouts were dinners, dessert runs, or walks around some asian plaza(s) in the city.
fast forward to the one of the bigbad things that happened to me: my breakup in may of 2023. a breakup of a relationship that had spanned 6.5 years, beginning way before i had even met you. a breakup not only from a romantic partner, but also from one of the first true friends i had made when i moved to texas back in 2015. dealing with this change while trying to navigate my new job, reading legal contracts to see if i could break my lease, and missing my parents and siblings, who had all moved states (or entire continents) away within that summer was a lot. i felt so lost and helpless, the isolation unbearable at times when i knew my closest friends and support systems all lived cities or states away.
you were one of the few people i felt like i could rely on, and i did actively rely on you frequently. you knew everything about me up until that point, and i didn’t feel the need to lie or sugarcoat how dark and alone everything felt.
even if it was just to have another voice echoing off the walls of my room, i’d call you and you always kept me company. sometimes we’d talk about the breakup, other times we would talk about random shit like we used to.
but within those conversations, here are some of the things that i do remember admitting to:
how depressed and alone i felt
how i wasn’t eating or sleeping
how i was treating my body like shit: going out every night, driving to dallas, drinking on work nights
and here’s something that i remember you sharing:
your girlfriend giving you “the open relationship pass”
and the immediate follow up question of, “do you think friends can have sex without making it weird?”
and here’s what i remember explicitly stating as my response :
“no”
if only i had known at the time how little that word meant to you.
flash forward to september.
from the months of june - august, i’d be amazed if a camera could capture an image of me that wasn’t blurry or in motion. i was allergic to standing still, and austin international airport and my car became my second homes. i drove countless miles between the major texas cities, and somehow managed to visit new york, chicago, seattle, and arizona.
despite my own pessimistic outlook, a believer in the classic “i will literally never experience romantic love again” that every person going through a breakup tells you, i happened to meet someone i really liked and cared about in that chaos.
and for the first time in what felt like forever, i could say i was excited. hope felt like too strong of a high after feeling numb for so long, but the school crush feelings i got from the idea of seriously dating someone that i liked so much was simply refreshing.
of course, i was eager to share with you. if i had truly no self restraint left, i would’ve literally told anyone who would listen or let me talk their ear off about this boy. that’s how happy i felt.
in between one of my trips, i was in dallas for a night before driving back to austin. despite being exhausted from flying and knowing i had a 4 hour drive ahead of me the next day on top of a full work day, i reached out to you to catch up.
i remembered finding it so bizarre that you assumed we would hang out at my place, despite never having stepped foot in my house before. was it because my parents had moved and the house was effectively empty?
i also remembered finding it even more bizarre that you didn’t want to eat katsu curry with me, claiming you were “watching your diet”, despite accepting invitations to get dessert and hang out “at my place” after.
but the weirdest thing was the casual “btw u down to drink?” from someone who had
a) never asked me to drink before
b) was practically allergic to alcohol
c) rarely drank
but my silly naive self believed that you were actually doing me a favor, and trying to meet me in the middle and compromise to meet my current lifestyle. so i accepted it at face value, and after coming home to eat my katsu curry that i had picked up, you showed up at my place with some soju. somewhere between you telling me you didn’t eat dinner (strange because you knew i was picking up food), and then taking soju shots at my kitchen table, i felt like something was off.
as i ate my dinner and you sipped, we caught up and i told you all about my most recent trips, and blabbed about the details of my date. i told you, to your face, how happy i was. that i had serious of intentions of seeing where things went with this guy, and that i really really liked him.
in my mind, i was innocently sharing my joy with a friend.
but in your mind, i wonder if all you heard was the clock ticking, the window of opportunity slowly closing.
as it got later and i got more tired, i told you i was probably going to call it a night soon. you looked at me with your flushed face and accused me of not drinking as much as you, urging me to take shots of the heavier alcohol at home because you knew i was a heavier drinker. out of guilt, since i felt that you were only drinking in an attempt to spend time with me, and an inability to enforce my boundaries at times, i obliged and took a few.
shortly after that, my jokes were suddenly funnier to you. and even weirder, the skin of my thighs and knees was more magnetic to the force of your hand.
as the alcohol kicked in for me, i realized it was getting late, far past the curfew i had told you i was going to enforce prior to you showing up. i told you that i would be going upstairs to sleep and that you were welcome to sleep on the couch if you weren’t okay to drive, or sober up for as long as you needed.
while i tried to begin the process of moving you to the couch and cleaning up, you began to ask me to join you. despite my “no”s and obvious lack of desire to be anywhere near you, you insisted on us ending up on the couch together. “it won’t be weird, i promise” you said.
in an attempt to remove myself from the situation, i began to walk up the stairs, but you dragged me to the couch with you.
despite my protesting, i could feel your hands tightening around my wrists as you tried to pull me down on top of you. i had never yelled at anyone in my life, let alone a friend, with so little restraint as i screamed at you to stop. i eventually managed to wiggle myself out of your grip, the force required from me causing the recliner to fall over, a detail that shocked me and served as a reminder of what had happened when i saw it the next morning.
i stumbled up the stairs and entered the darkness of my room, calling my date and telling him about what had happened. while he tried to asses my safety and ensure that i was safe in my house, the alcohol in combination with both the emotional and physical fatigue pulled me under and i fell asleep. the timestamp was around 12:00am.
the next morning, i wake up. nothing about me had changed, and i knew that i had not been physically violated by you. but i felt. so. uncomfortable.
i checked my phone and saw a million texts from you, the first letting me know that you were sobering up and driving home soon (this was sent at 12:30am)
the remaining texts were a series of you apologizing and thanking me for “being the bigger person” and “saving our friendship”.
without even leaving bed, i called one of my best girl friends and explained what happened, using humor as somewhat of a coping mechanism to deal with the confusion and awkwardness of understanding the situation…
“hey, did my friend just try to sexually assault me in my own house?”
i am lucky that she was a voice of reason and a person i could confide in. if i hadn’t talked to her, i am pretty sure it would’ve been much longer until i came to realize and accept what you had done. and because i had trusted you and opened the door to my home to you, i struggled to believe that i could really be a victim.
it’s been more than a year and i don’t know what the most fucked up part of this situation is.
the fact that you texted your apologies to me, so clearly detached from the reality of what you had done to me.
or the fact that you claimed that your actions were drunk actions, but then were able to drive 20 minutes after across town back to your house.
maybe it’s the fact that you expected me to forgive you
or maybe it’s the fact that your girlfriend resorted to “slap on the wrist and stern talk” as a justifiable response to what you did.
maybe the most disturbing part is that your only other female friend reached out after and shared that she had similar experiences with you, and decided to cut you off after hearing you recount what happened to her.. hearing her tell me your version of the memory that night may have been the ultimate nail in the coffin, the disappointment and disgust overwhelming me every single time i had to interrupt and correct your timeline or details.
all of that aside, i hope you know how truly fucked it was that you knew me. at the very least, an assault from a stranger feels so much less personal, they have no obligation to me. but you had sat there, watched me cry, knew about my history with SA, watched me smile when i told you about my date, and then chose to rob me of that anyway.
the most fucked up part honestly is that you have no idea how i am now.
you have no idea that we had living room cameras, and i had to explain to my dad the next morning what had happened. i had to defend myself while i was victim blamed because i allowed you into my home. you’ll never know how much that hurt and how much is still hurts me to this day. you’ll never know how dejected i felt, crying in the hallway of my apartment after that 3 hour drive, defending myself to my dad over the phone while still trying to convince myself that i was justified in my defense.
you don’t know how hard it is to keep this from my mom, who i so seflishly wanted to go to for comfort. but knowing her own life and how hard she’s tried to shield me from any hurt or pain, i know telling her would only devastate her.
you have no idea that i can’t trust new people now, because if someone who cared about me for four years would even try to do this to me, what’s stopping someone i’ve known for four minutes?
you don’t know how much money and time i spent in therapy, working through the aftermath of how disgusting and gross and ashamed i felt.
you don’t know how dumb i felt for trusting you, and how many times i’ve invalidated my own pain because i reached out to hang out in the first place. what if i hadn’t?
you don’t know how embarrassed i felt, wondering if you were just waiting for me to stop talking so you could try to make a move. if my worth to you was only when i was a viable punch on your “open relationship pass”
you don’t know any of this, and you have the privilege of forgetting this even happened while i have to remember this every time i’m in my own home or on my couch.
i don’t want karma and i don’t want revenge, i just want to understand how and why you did what i did, but i know that despite my hardest efforts, i can’t and will never be able to put myself in your disgusting shoes.
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