Sacred Places: A Tribute to the Library Where I Died — Twice
Reader advisory: this article contains mature subject matter in reference to sexual assault.
When my mom had her fourth kid, she nearly bled out in labor. She terrified the doctors and the nurses, not to mention my dad. By the grace of God, she pulled through. I was three-and-a-half at the time.
Six months later, rescued from the jaws of death, my mom sat next to me in the parking lot of the Schenectady County Public Library after story hour had just finished. Prompted, I’m sure, by my endless list of questions, she told me about how Jesus died for my sins and I ended up saying a prayer to accept him as my Lord and Savior. A classic pastor's kid conversion, I made that choice before my fifth birthday.
I don't remember the words we said, but the event is recorded in my tattered Precious Moments Bible, and I do remember that a deep peace settled over me. Oddly, it's one of my earliest memories, and what I remember so distinctly is the feeling. I don't have many early 'I felt' memories, except that one. Christian conversion is considered a death of a sort – I died to myself and was raised with Christ that fall afternoon.
“I died to myself and was raised with Christ that fall afternoon.”
Nineteen years later, I would die in that same library a second time. It was a year after I’d been the victim of a sexual assault while on a mission trip. I wouldn't have told you (I didn’t know) it was tied to the assault in that moment, but I knew my mind had started to unravel over the months that followed the trip. The trauma was building inside me like a pressure bomb.
I later described that time as an emotional concussion. Every decision seemed to take an enormous amount of energy and I always seemed to make the wrong one. I had this overwhelming urge to fight the world, though I didn't tell anybody about that urge. I also no longer knew which men I could trust. Some bad experiences with men in spiritual authority had marred my perception, and the feeling of ‘I can’t trust men,’ is a common symptom for rape and sexual assault victims.
It felt as though every guy either wanted to attack me or ignore me, especially on social media. When the anniversary of my attack passed, something snapped.
Schenectady Public Library at night. Source: VMJR Companies.
So, I sat there in the Schenectady County Public Library at a small table with my laptop open. I’d planned to work on job applications, but ended up on Facebook, staring at my friends list. I said a prayer under my breath and started to unfriend every single guy, with the exception of relatives.
Once that was done, I went to look at the pictures of me on my profile. Who was this smiling person I used to know? Where was she now? She felt like a ghost. Those pictures started to feel like lies; the girl in them was all too vulnerable – exposed to attack by strangers. She had no control over what pleasure they took from her without her consent.
So I fought back the only way I could think of. I untagged myself from each one. Could I have just deleted the account? Yeah, maybe. But my trauma logic demanded that the violence against me and the fight inside me play itself out. Other victims may have (and do) turned to drugs, self-harm, or suicide. My bloodbath played out online. As I untagged and unfriended, I was no longer dying from the inside: I had bled out.
Once again there would be life from death. That moment, the moment where I erased myself, is the reason I started to get the help I needed.
“Once again, there would be life from death.”
I told Karen, a woman from church, about what I’d done the next week, nonchalantly as if it were a non-thing, as we were working on some paperwork for small groups. She stopped. I’d already told her some of what had happened on the mission trip. “You know that’s tied to the attack, right?” she said.
“No. What?” I asked incredulously.
“Alyssa,” Karen said, “it's tied to your assault. It's what you felt when it happened and afterward: every guy was either attacking you or ignoring you… You should join this group at church I'm starting for women struggling with emotional, physical, or sexual abuse.”
“Well, that’s not me. I grew up in a loving home.”
“You’re not okay. Come. Please come,” she said, making her case once more.
I fought the idea for a few days, but ended up joining the group. That one decision made way for an avalanche of help and paved the way to my resurrection.
“That one decision made way for an avalanche of help and paved the way to my resurrection.”
Another year later, I was on the other side of that group, the other side of individual therapy, of anxiety and panic attack medication, of exhaustion, of the emotional concussion. The poison left my system as I dared to tell God and others how bad it really was. I started to rebuild trust in male Christian leaders as I wrestled with stories I had heard my whole life of Bible heroes. Part of my homework in the group was to study how David and Jacob made righteous decisions and how they made terrible, screwed-up decisions – and God used them anyway.
It started to change my perspective as I realized that every person, myself included, rises and falls to Him alone. I also realized that there were more Christian men who were for me than against me in my life. I came back to life – my joy was restored, my hope was restored, my future was restored. The trauma faded and a hard-won resilience took its place.
When I was twenty-three, I wouldn’t have called the Schenectady County Public Library a sacred place, though it was a significant hub in my childhood. At four years old, I enjoyed its story hours; at ten, I checked out piles of summer reading books; and at fourteen, I frequented its VHS/DVD rack, the ‘Plock Flock’s’ version of Netflix and Disney+.
But it was – and is now for the rest of my life – a sacred place. By having those two significant moments in my life happen on the same plot of land, I’m reminded that God’s eyes are on me. It was as if He had made the SCPL holy ground. As if, when I reached the end of myself nineteen years after my conversion in the parking lot, Jesus whispered to an eternal part of me that my troubled mind did not understand then, “You died here once and I raised you. It is not a coincidence that you died here a second time. Will I not raise you once more?” And He did.
In short…
I invite you to reflect on your life. Discover your sacred places. Treat them as living stones that tell the story of how you were not left to die alone.
