The Afterlife of Jane Doe

I climbed onto the treatment table in the home office of my new pelvic floor therapist, settling under the worn, floral sheets. Naked from the waist down, except for my socks, I relaxed my hips and exhaled, steadying myself for the appointment.

I’d gone there seeking relief for pain during sex, brought on by menopause, medically induced by adjuvant breast cancer treatments at 37. “The Change” happened practically overnight, bringing with it an onslaught of symptoms: mood swings, fatigue, hot flashes, brain fog, and genitourinary syndrome of menopause (GSM) that caused pain—terrible pain—during intercourse.

After a few minutes, the practitioner, an older, petite woman with a soothing voice and soft hands, knocked on the door. I told her it was okay to enter, and she did. After taking a seat in the chair beside me, she quickly reviewed my medical history. Then, she asked for my consent to perform a physical exam, using a pelvic wand. I closed my eyes and nodded. I watched her move to the end of the table, push the sheet up to my waist, and help my legs into a butterfly pose.

“Hold on,” she said, reaching for two small throw pillows to place on either side of my thighs.

“Is that good support?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, grateful for her concern. “Thank you.”

The space felt different than the countless other exam rooms I’d found myself in over the nine years since my breast cancer diagnosis. I noticed my body softening, letting go of the vigilance I carried into most medical settings.

“I'm going to start by using a small vaginal dilator to stretch the tissue,” she said.

A few moments later, I felt the pain, like shards of glass breaking inside me. I must have let out a sound because she stopped immediately.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Did that hurt?”

“Yes,” I managed to respond.

“OK, we’ll stop there,” she said, slowly removing the dilator. She spent the rest of the appointment gently massaging my lower abdomen and working through trigger points in my pelvis.

Before leaving me alone to get dressed, she turned and said, “Don’t worry. It gets easier over time.”

Her words, meant to reassure, landed like a weight. I thought of all the prior moments in my life I’d been told something similar—to push through my discomfort, endure the pain until it receded or became easier to ignore. Suddenly, panic gripped my chest, and I jolted upright.

Dressing hurriedly, I shoved my bra into my purse. As soon as the practitioner came back, I made up an excuse to leave and ran to my car.

When I got home, the house was empty. I crawled into bed and buried myself under the covers. Everything between my legs felt numb, as if I’d left part of myself behind on the exam table. Beneath the ache, a memory began to surface, one I’d spent decades trying to press down. It was as if my body and my brain were finally connecting the dots, drawing a throughline between a long-buried adolescent trauma and the pain I was experiencing in midlife.

When I was a teenager, I was sexually assaulted at a house party. For many years, I kept the experience monitored, contained, separate from the rest of my life. It never came up during any medical intake, counseling appointment, or even in conversation with my best friend. Up until recently, I hadn’t even told my husband. I’d never told anyone.

And yet, I remember everything about that night. The drive to the party seemed endless. I rode shotgun in my boyfriend’s jeep, drinking two and a half warm Coors Lights, which didn’t seem like too much, but enough to blur everything outside my window. All I could see was the narrow road lit by our high beams, two yellow lines pulling us deeper into the woods.

When we finally pulled up to the lake house, glowing like a giant paper lantern against the shadowy landscape, I felt drunk. I opened the passenger door and fell straight to the ground. Surprisingly, it didn’t hurt. Nothing did. That was the revelation: Alcohol didn’t just soften the hurt; it numbed it. It smoothed over the goosebumps and insecurities. The restlessness that prowled my chest like a caged animal, the new unease I couldn't quite name. That was the summer everything changed. The summer I started to see myself through the male gaze, lost my virginity to my first real boyfriend, watched my childhood disappear in the rearview mirror.

My boyfriend dropped to the ground beside me, laughing, taking my hand in his, tracing constellations overhead. Then he hauled me upright and steered me down the stone path to the front door. Inside, the house was warm and smelled like a campfire. People I didn’t recognize were staring at us, cheering and shouting things from the kitchen.

Upstairs, my boyfriend found an empty bedroom, pulled off my brown leather J.Crew boots, and helped me under the quilt. He stayed for a while, tickling my back and singing me songs until I drifted off, then went back downstairs.

I was half asleep when I heard the door creak open. I thought it might be my boyfriend, coming back to check on me, but then I heard the sound of a belt buckle dropping to the floorboard, and felt a strange body pressed against me. I could tell the boy was naked from the heat and softness of his shape. I tried to push him off, tell him to stop, but he was too big. I went completely still—I was silently screaming, drowning in that bed. When it was over, he got dressed and left without saying a word.

Eventually, I swung myself over the side of the mattress and sat upright. I found my underwear, twisted between the sheets at the foot of the bed, and got dressed. When my boyfriend came back, I told him I felt sick and needed to leave. He looked genuinely concerned, which only made me feel worse.

On the drive home, I stared silently out the passenger window, remembering my mother’s warning to keep watch for leaping deer at night. How she’d taught me to scan the rural roadside for flashing eyes reflecting in the darkness, lithe bodies poised to jump. When we pulled up to my parents’ house, I swung the car door open while the vehicle was still in motion.

I kept my secret for three decades—a hot coal, burning in my chest. My thickened skin kept me protected and functional, or so I thought. Over time, I learned to push down discomfort and carry my burdens without complaint. Telling the truth would mean disturbing Pandora’s box, letting out the ancient feelings of shame, disgust, and unworthiness.

Instead, I treated what happened to me like something survivable. So long as I didn’t disturb the memory, I could triage the symptoms. Work around the wound. Consider myself healed. But in the end, pain doesn’t care how prepared or vigilant you are; it arrives whether you’re watching for it or not.

“Sexual trauma can have lasting effects on how the brain and body respond to perceived threats, even years after the traumatic experience,” says Elizabeth Beverly, PhD, a professor and behavioral health researcher who has studied the neurobiology of sexual assault. “Traumatic experiences affect how memories are processed and stored in the body. These memories may remain outside conscious awareness until a specific sensory trigger unexpectedly brings them to the forefront of the mind. When this happens, survivors may feel as though they are reliving aspects of the traumatic experience.”

During treatment and follow-up care after cancer, I became practiced at compliance: stay still, endure the pain, let someone else decide what should happen to my body. After years of being told what I could and couldn’t do, something long dormant inside me began to awaken. Lying on the exam table at the pelvic floor therapist’s office, the vaginal dilator burning like a torch inside me, I was right back in that room at the top of the stairs, trapped in a moment I couldn’t run from. For the first time, locking the memory away began to feel less like protection and more like being devoured from the inside out.

When I started sharing the truth about my sexual assault with my closest friends and family members, I began to understand how many women were carrying their own version of the same story. The details were different, but the emotional architecture was always familiar: the shame, dissociation, fear, estrangement from the body. The way a traumatic event can rewire a human brain. How even after years of therapy, healthy partnership, and achieving various metrics of success, survivors can still feel broken. How you can close the wound, and still bleed out.

It took me a few months to muster up the courage to tell my husband. Voice shaking, I explained how the assault had braided sex and shame together in my body, how even in good relationships—this one, our marriage—there was still a dark undertow, a sense that sex was dangerous, wrong, or impossible to enjoy without inhibition. My husband listened, and cried. In the end, I felt as if a weighted vest had slipped off my shoulders, due to the simple fact that I no longer had to carry it alone.

I told my doctors, too. For my entire adult life, every medical intake I completed seemed to circle a different piece of me. Not one doctor held my entire story, and I wanted that to change. I spoke to my primary care provider and my oncology nurse practitioner about how my adolescent trauma impacted my experience with GSM, along with my relationship to my sexuality and desire. How GSM triggered the shame I had tried to keep hidden all these years. Saying what happened out loud helped loosen shame’s grip, making the story less powerful. Once it was out in the open, my care changed, too. There was more attention to what my body might be responding to beyond the symptom itself.

It made me wonder if this was true for other women, too. What would a medical intake look like if it included trauma-informed care? If it considered the whole person, our entire lived experience? Not because every detail belongs in every exam room; it doesn’t. But context matters.

I never disclosed what happened to me, in part because I was never asked to during a medical intake. Trauma-informed care is designed to close the gap between patient and provider by building safety, choice, consent, and patient control into the medical encounter—principles that can shape everything from a GSM intake to the pacing of a pelvic exam.

During past pelvic exams, my body often reacted before my mind did, tensing, clenching, as though some old part of me was still keeping watch. This is a common reaction, Beverly says, which is why trauma-informed care is so important: “Health care professionals need to understand how sexual trauma affects the brain and the body, so they can recognize these responses and provide compassionate, supportive care to minimize re-traumatization.”

The reporting around the Cornell Seven has stirred up a rush of memories. It has also created an online movement: I Am Jane Doe. Thousands of survivors are speaking out, sharing their own experiences, and demanding change. These different yet familiar stories have flooded my Instagram feed, touching a part of me I worked hard to keep hidden. Watching women speak out, then watching their words get picked apart, made clear to me how little had progressed, even after the #MeToo movement. In the end, I decided to come forward because I no longer wanted silence to be the price of feeling safe. If we don’t speak out, nothing will ever change.

Women do not owe anyone the gory details of their sexual assaults. Disclosure is not a requirement for healing, nor should a medical appointment become an interrogation. “Many of our patients have a history of sexual trauma, and most won’t tell us at intake,” says Kelly Casperson, MD, a urologist and sexual-medicine and menopause specialist. “So, I don't make disclosure the price of good care. I ask one simple question: 'Is there anything that would make this exam easier for you?’”

Sometimes we choose to keep certain experiences private because solitude is what allows us to survive them. Yet privacy and isolation are not the same thing. Shame isolates us and convinces us to contain what happened, bury it, and keep it separate until we live in verticals.

Sharing my story with other people, absorbing others’ stories—the witnessing, the exchange—is what helped me heal. Shame loses its power when we tell each other the truth. Being honest with myself, speaking openly about my sexual assault offered me a kind of life recalibration. Once illuminated, the shame I carried for years became a pharos, showing me a new way forward.

Eventually, I opened up to my pelvic floor therapist, too. Telling her what happened to me as a teenager informed the way we worked together. There was more conversation before touch, more attention to what made me tense or pull away, more permission to stop.

In our sessions, I learned how to stay present in my body rather than leave it, how to relax instead of going rigid. I learned how to work with my pelvic floor muscles, how to engage them and release them. For most of my life, those parts of me had remained detached, remote, almost unknowable—a place as mysterious as the ocean floor. I began to understand that treating my physical symptoms meant acknowledging everything my body had carried into the room. Forgiveness, I realized, was not only about what had been done to me. It was also about forgiving myself—for the silence, for the shame, for all the years I believed my body was at fault for what happened to me.

It took me a long time to understand that healing was never about “fixing” myself. It was about learning how to return to myself, again and again. My body was never the enemy—it did not betray me. Not even when I buried the traumatic memory deep in my cells. It had only done what bodies do. Survived, endured, and asked—sometimes begged—to be listened to.