By C.Kimberly Toms | September 3, 2025
After twelve years of living under duress due to crimes committed against me, and following my offender’s release in June and years of monthly hearings, I finally took a month to simply be quiet. This wasn’t vacation, it was necessity. I needed to literally clean the past, my offender, and the State of Wisconsin out of my life.
The month unfolded in the most ordinary ways imaginable, and that ordinariness felt revolutionary. I walked my dog when we both felt like walking, not squeezed between appointments. I slept when my body wanted sleep. I cleaned closets and arranged furniture until every corner of my home felt welcoming and peaceful. I bought a carpet cleaner and renewed my rugs. I added lamps to the darkest spaces. All of this — the cleaning, the lighting, the pursuit of basic peace at will — felt deeply necessary after so many years of living differently.
The background that made this month so crucial involves the unique complications that arise when your offender is a special agent. Because of who the predator was, my reporting of his crimes immediately triggered extensive federal investigation. What began at the US Department of State expanded into a Joint Task Force involving the Department of Justice, Homeland Security/ICE, the IRS, and various local and state agencies. I even accidentally pulled in the Secret Service through my own efforts to report “the problem at hand.”
From the very beginning, I was told that due to the nature of his work, I would also be investigated. This is the part I rarely discuss and still cannot address without emotion. While I never felt like the criminal, I felt as scrutinized as the criminal from the start.
This invasion was thorough and often bewildering. There were strange, reaching questions about whether I had once traveled to the Bahamas. Financial inquiries arrived, including a request for my bank account information “now” on my birthday as I walked the beach for peace, no less. Some questions were so personal, I wondered if I was being defrauded or even framed for crimes I didn’t commit. At times, it seemed the federal agents were toying with me to wear me down, perhaps hoping I wouldn’t reveal my offender’s secrets. Other times, they demonstrated their surveillance with comments like “You haven’t left your house since last week,” leaving me uncertain whether this was a protective eye or something serving a different purpose.
During this period, I was also living under a fake identity in my community, feeling like a fraud every time I went to the grocery store. Something as simple as being asked my name became a source of anxiety.
Given my offender’s trickiness and unpredictability, one federal agent developed a method to help me assess whether it was safe to venture into my community. This agent used the “defcon” scale with levels 1 to 5 to communicate my current safety and risk level. I generally shelve these memories so I can function normally in society today, but there was genuine trauma and terror in being investigated, watched, and informed of threat levels. There was certainly terror in knowing these actions were so necessary and that I had walked willingly into them.
Now, years later, these experiences have left lasting marks on the most mundane interactions. Calling a customer service representative for any reason can feel challenging. Being asked personal
questions by anyone triggers old responses, such as, “Why is this any of your business?” Since my offender’s sentencing—and the respite that came with his incarceration—I’ve had to actively retrain myself to react normally to routine inquiries.
Today, operating at what I consider a typical Defcon 4 (likely the best level I’ll achieve in my offender’s lifetime), I’ve set myself a different kind of challenge: to “leave the customer service rep in a better mood than I found them.” I’ve accomplished this three times in the past week, and I find it deeply satisfying to know I’m a better person in society than I probably was before this journey. I doubt I cared about customer service workers at all before experiencing this hell. Sometimes I still need a moment to collect myself after a difficult customer service interaction, but the progress feels meaningful.
This evolution brings into focus how many struggles an “average rape victim” navigates in daily life, the undefined and unreported challenges that the rest of the world doesn’t consider. Being traumatized by bank or store customer service representatives certainly isn’t something one would expect as a consequence of rape. Given all these nuances of trauma, it’s truly remarkable that any of us return to functioning normally in society: holding jobs, finishing school, shopping for groceries, or engaging meaningfully with others.
This complexity is why I find it difficult when another survivor tells me, “I want to get where you are in your life.” I, too, once held public survivors up in my mind as aspirational levels of recovery I hoped to someday achieve. Sadly, all but one of those survivors are no longer walking the Earth. I’ve had to learn to hold myself up as my own shining example and accept small victories as achievements my offender never wanted me to reach. These are wins that even the federal agents on my case didn’t believe I would accomplish.
Every single time I leave a customer service representative smiling at the end of a call, I become the survivor I want to be, even if the rest of my world will only ever reach Defcon 4. This is my return to softness: not the erasure of necessary vigilance, but the conscious cultivation of kindness alongside it. In adding lamps to dark corners and choosing to spread warmth in brief encounters with strangers, I reclaim something that years of investigation and surveillance tried to take away, my ability to be gentle in a world that required me to be constantly guarded.
The month of quiet, the cleaning, the organizational furniture, the carpet cleaning—all of it represents more than domestic maintenance. It represents the deliberate construction of peace in spaces that can finally hold it. After twelve years of living under the weight of someone else’s crimes and the apparatus built to address them, the simple act of making my home welcoming and walking my dog at will becomes its own form of victory. This is what healing looks like when complete safety isn’t possible: the patient, persistent return to softness within whatever constraints remain.
How are you rebuilding in the aftermath of “survival?” I’d love to hear about your experiences! Connect on LinkedIn to discuss.
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