I was attacked when I was 18
It took me over 20 years to get passed it.
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When I was 18, I was attacked in the street.
On a Sunday.
In broad daylight.
A man hit me with a rock on the head, but I pushed him hard enough and managed to escape and run to my friends who I had just left and could see 200 metres away down the road.
I was walking down the street back to my dad’s car. My friends were still standing on the corner chatting.
We were in the ‘office zone’ of the city so, despite there being many parked cars, there was no one else on the street except me and a man walking towards me.
As he approached, my intuition told me to turn around and go back to my friends.
My brain told me that I needed to not be so suspicious of random people on the street.
He stopped and moved to the side of the footpath and lite a cigarette.
I can still see his face.
Still remember what he was wearing…
I walked past him.
I was not carrying anything besides my car keys and sunglasses.
I did not have a handbag, I was wearing a dress that covered my shoulders and went below my knees.
Essentially, I did nothing.
Held nothing.
And looked like nothing that should have provoked him.
I was about 50 metres ahead when I heard footsteps running up fast behind me.
I turned and he was there.
He said nothing.
I darted towards the fence as he raised his hand and went to hit me with a rock (that I did not see in his hand when he passed me).
As he connected with my skull, I pushed him off balance and was able to escape as he was wrong footed. I ran screaming towards my friends, whom I could still see.
Someone in a nearby office who was working that day, came out and we all went into his office while he called the police. There were no mobile phones in those days!
I had to go to hospital, had the cut on my head repaired and had concussion for the next two weeks.
It turns out that he had used the rock to break into about a dozen cars up the street (including my dad’s) and I guess he thought I might discover it and he would be caught.
Of course, after my escape, he ran off and never did get caught, despite my being called into Police Headquarters to look at identity sketches of potential assailants a week later.
I downplayed the incident in my mind and to my family and friends.
‘I’m fine, it could have been much worse’ I’d say to them.
And while that was true, diminishing what happened to me in this way, wasn’t helpful either.
It was still awful.
It was still traumatic.
It was still frightening.
Nothing like this had ever happened to anyone in our family before.
And the result from it?
I wasn’t able to stay comfortably home by myself for the next 20 years.
And if the situation arose when I was home alone, well lets just say, it wasn’t pretty for my mental state.
I was anxious the whole time, on edge wondering how long before my parents came back.
If they went away, I had a friend come stay with me, because sleeping in the house on my own was out of the question!
So despite my outwardly optimistic it was ‘not so bad’, it traumatised me for a very, very long time.
I won’t bore you with the details but I eventually got some counselling and becoming a mother helped because sometimes I had to be the ‘adult’ in the room because I as home with a baby alone when my husband worked.
Almost 40 years later, I still have trouble if I hear someone running and coming up fast behind me.
I step aside and stop walking.
Pretend I’m looking in my bag for something.
But not all the time.
Just sometimes.
I think that as women we tend to push down things that happen to us because we don’t want to appear whinny or to be over dramatising the situation.
This is why I downplayed it to everyone I knew.
Comparison is often the thief of joy.
Comparing how badly injured or not I was, to someone else’s trauma is not fair to me or them.
There is no ‘scale’ to measure how traumatic an event will be for you.
It will just be what it is and that’s ok.
Afterwards though, I trusted my intuition a lot more.
Now I really question what’s going on when my intuition gives me a ‘feeling’, good or bad.
I was mad with myself for a long time for ignoring it.
I don’t now and that’s definitely a good thing.
As we seek excellence in all we do, I want to share with you what I’m up to each week. It will keep me accountable to you, my readers and it will also help me to reflect on what I’ve done over the previous week.
➡️ This Week’s Progress
Progressing with my website (slower than I had hoped) and finishing up some client work.
➡️ This Week’s Reading
We are entering the garden growing season here in the UK, so I have been reading up on how to get my vegetable plot and greenhouse prepared for the burst of activity to come.
➡️ This Week’s Viewing
Back to the Cold War series on Netflix, in preparation for my son’s history exam coming up in three weeks.
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Michelle is a Writer, Marketer, Content Entrepreneur, Historian (Mst Oxon) and mother of 3 boys.
After 25 years in business and as the ‘Content Marketing Queen’ for over 13 years, she has helped countless small businesses understand and develop their content strategies and focus on a customer first approach.
On International Women’s Day in March 2024, Michelle hung up her crown so that she could be a Queen Maker to inspire and assist women over 40, rise up to be the Queens they were born to be.
At Excellence Takes Courage we will navigate together what it takes to achieve excellence, with courage.
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