The Me in "Me, Too."

Can you say "I was a victim" and feel empowered at the same time? I think you can. The victimhood, the part where some guy forced you into a position or a state of mind that poisoned your life for decades, is ameliorated by the confession: here's what I did or did not do to stop him, here's what I did or did not say to change my situation. Here's what happened.  
But the best--often the most excruciating--confessions are the ones you make to yourself. You can confide your experience to the world, and the world should know these confessions, but looking yourself in the face is the part that comes before, the part that often makes you wince. Was I that dumb? Was I that naïve? Was I so scared that I couldn't shove or hit back hard enough? Was this rape/assault/intimidation somehow my fault? Since I know it wasn't, why do I feel that it was? 
In my case, did I want to admire him that much? When I ought to have known better? 
When you still feel like he grabbed you because you were pretty, and "this is the way of the world," confessing your experience won't do much for you.
At twenty-five, I sat in my esteemed professor's office, in a chair right by his desk. He liked to swing his legs up on the desk, lean back in his swivel chair, and cock his head ironically. He'd written a book I thought brilliant at the time. He knew much more than I did, and I believed he knew much more than he actually did know. From my current vantage point of sixty years old, I can see how easy it is to get a twenty-five-year-old person to feel how little she knows and how much you know. Granted, I might as well have been five, in terms of self-awareness. 
 If I sense from any student of my own the kind of admiration I must have broadcast to my professor, I leave my office door wide open and try to indicate that I am only someone who has lived long enough to have read much.
My professor, however, lived and breathed admiration. Looking back, I realize how much he needed it. Napoleonic in height, he looked up, literally, at girls of average height like myself, and his gaze roamed. At the time, I pretended to myself that his gaze wasn't roaming, because I wanted to continue admiring him and I didn't want his gaze to be roaming over my breasts. I wanted him to be interested in me and my ideas, the ones I'd typed and re-typed on my IBM Selectric, the ones on those pages he was now holding in his hand. I practiced the "it's not there" form of problem-solving and went gamely into his office with the thought that I had to get my paper that he'd just graded, and I would learn something from him.
Then there was the nagging fact that I found him very attractive. My blood raced when I saw him. Brilliant and handsome, he made my palms sweat.  
I cringe when I remember how witty I thought him: when I ran into him in the checkout line at the local grocery store, he was buying ice cream and I was buying broccoli. He stared at my broccoli, sniffed, and said, "I win!"  
But he was my teacher, and I never thought of pursuing any personal relationship with him. Had he actually laid a glove on me, I'd probably have felt terror. Even disgust. Not that I'd never been with a man before, but the men I'd been with were boys my age. Here was this revered gray-templed scholar, bookshelves sagging with tomes, desk piled with manila folders filled with his research. Part of my attraction to him lay in my ability to keep him way up there on that very sturdy pedestal on which his big old clay feet continued to be well-hidden.
So I sat by his desk as he looked through my paper--I imagined he was finding my ideas interesting. I assumed he wanted to tell me what he thought of those ideas. Instead:
"Ya know, I'm finding out a lot about all of you from the papers you write!"
"You are?" I was completely startled.
"Yeah!" He winked. "Your personalities."
"What do you mean?"
"Yeah, Ms. __________, you're spread-eagled on the page!"
I remember time stopping. I remember staring straight ahead, rising to my feet without quite knowing what I was doing, heading down the hall to the classroom, for his class was about to start--I'd been one of the last students to see him right before class. I pulled out my chair at the long seminar table and sat down. It seems to me now that I'd actually managed to entirely forget my conversation with him by the time I'd retrieved from my bookbag my notebook, pens, and other materials for the class. Shame and shock flooded through me, and something else I didn't recognize at the time--extreme disappointment. But I was--oh, this is the excruciating part!--determined to feel exactly as I had before about my professor. I wanted to go on admiring him--I would soldier on as his admirer, because how else would I exist? I needed an example of scholarship, and he was it. The understanding that typically comes with age--that here was a pathetically flawed half-drunk guy who'd been through several wives and whose children had landed in mental hospitals and unhappy relationships, who was probably drunk during that brief encounter in his office, who was randomly trying to make himself feel better--none of that occurred to me. I need a god to worship in order to get through my studies, and he was it. 
How silly it all seems, how shameful, now. 
Is this the worst that ever happened to me? No, of course not. Had I been in a healthier frame of mine to begin with--as were many of my fellow students--I'd have seen through this pathetic professor whom I continued to defend. The more I saw what a jerk he really was, the more I defended him. Because I needed a god, and he was the one I'd chosen. Once you've picked your god--once you're in that sad mindset in which you need one--it is awfully hard to find a different path. 
I wish I'd known anyone in whom I could have confided. I did have, like most women of my background, a psychoanalyst on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, who listened to my every confession. And with whom did he side? The professor, naturally. I must have done something. I was a slut--the shrink's definition of slut being a girl who felt attracted to boys--and I should forget all this and buckle down and study. 
Is there a moral to this story? Learn to be wiser when young, not when you're my age. When a situation smells wrong, don't let your longing for perfection do you in. It does seem to me that young people have a very hard time getting over the need to admire the imagined perfection in some one or some thing--one of my kids was just talking to a (thank goodness!) wise older person about his longing to be "the best!" and the wise older person said, "You shouldn't think of being the best but of being yourself." I might not have taken that advice as a twenty-year-old, but now I love it.
Yes, I feel empowered by my understanding: how young and silly and ignorant I was, how pathetically a grown-up who should have been helping me demanded the admiration I was all too willing to give him. How much perception could have helped me--had I been able, or willing, to perceive what he was. But at the time, I could not do so. 
So, tell your stories! As Emily Fox Gordon has observed, and I'm paraphrasing: confess them to yourself--then confide them to the world. Once you have understood what happened to you.