"When I was 16, I was raped. I didn’t know it then, didn’t have the words for it then, but my body has always known. The way it told me back then was by disconnecting, becoming this far away thing, right in the middle of a time where it was supposed to be coming into itself. I was in the bathtub four or five months after the rape, and as I reached down to touch myself, I found something there. I recoiled. Nothing should be growing on my vagina, that could only happen if you weren’t being careful, and I was only sixteen. This was too soon, this couldn’t be real, I hadn’t been loved yet and if this thing growing was what I thought it was, then no one could ever love me. When I told my mom she took me to the gynecologist, and I wish I could say that it was warm and welcoming, but it was sterile and shaming. I was diagnosed with HPV and had to have the growth on my vagina frozen off by a male doctor who was the Dad of a kid I went to school with. No one told me HPV was normal, no one told me that I would be okay, and no one told me it wasn’t my fault. No would tell me it wasn’t my fault for another decade. The first time I told a partner I had HPV was two years into our relationship, and it came out as an accident. By that time I’d been told my body had healed itself enough for the disease to be dormant, and I didn’t have to worry about passing it on to sexual partners. When I told him, I froze, my sixteen year old self suddenly standing there in front of him. He told me he was so sorry, how scared I must have been, and that he wished that he had been there with him. It was one of the most healing moments I have ever had in my entire life. I can’t believe I thought no one would ever love me. I can’t believe I blamed myself. A couple of years ago I told a warm, female doctor at the gyno that I had HPV and she snorted. “You and everybody else.” I wish, more than anything, I could go back and time and tell my younger self all of this. Today I am so fucking proud of my body and its journey. It is only in seeing your ask for these submissions that I have firmly said to myself that it wasn’t just that I got HPV at sixteen, it was because someone raped me. And while that is devastating information, it is also powerful, because it is my bold truth. It is not my fault, it is no one’s fault, and I am worthy of love. I am worthy of loving my body.”