Things have been going so well that I almost forgot. I spend my days learning so much, so fast, that there really isn’t time to think about the past and what I’ve been through. Keeping busy has been the balm to my grief. I constantly walk away from the thoughts that used to hold me hostage, because dwelling on them keeps me from focusing on what’s really important.
And then I fall asleep.
It’s in dreams that my subconscious tries to work out how I feel. Last night, the vision was of the evening I went to my abuser’s house, and her partner told me that the back story between my abuser and me was “this big bag of shit that I’d been carrying around forever.” Then she coached me on changing my story so that it was unrecognizable from what really happened. I knew it was wrong, but I was too scared to disagree.
Again, I was not dreaming something new. I was reliving a memory that had already happened and analyzing it now that I’d had some distance from it.
Next, I went back a little further, to the first time I’d ever come to visit. She was called away on business (or said she was, anyway) and left me alone with her partner for the night. Her partner became so angry when I washed a dish incorrectly that she stuck my hands under running water so hot that it left burns on my skin. It was the first time I’d ever experienced that kind of anger, and in retrospect, it was the first time I’d ever really experienced physical abuse.
I thought I was doing the right thing by not arguing and just accepting what happened. I thought I was doing the right thing by keeping this information from my abuser, which, at the time, was someone I thought of as a close friend. I thought I was protecting her, and at the same time, I didn’t think she would believe me, anyway.
As time went on, they both became so well-known that breathing anything seemed impossible. I also knew that the moment I said something was the moment it all ended. My parents would get involved, and there would be no more. She would pick up her toys and go home in order to avoid that whole scene.
When I woke up, I realized that even when I was a teenager, I knew that if I spoke about the game out loud, that’s what would happen.
Just because I didn’t have the strength then didn’t mean it was going to be that way forever. However, that’s the part I didn’t know. I kept myself in that place of fear for a very long time, because I didn’t think I had the strength to go through as much pain as I have been through in the last year. What I know for sure is that I’m sort of glad that I waited. If I had tried to go through this while it was still fresh in my mind, I might have died. It would have been a stupid thing to do, to kill myself, but at the time I thought that all her secrets would die with me and I wouldn’t have to carry them anymore. I was too young to see that I never should’ve had to carry them in the first place. I was too young to see that because I wasn’t being raped, I was still being used. I still had my attention yanked away from my life and focused on hers. I still had years and years of people saying that I was so over-focused on her that it was weird, but I didn’t realize how I got to be so emotionally laden in the first place, so I couldn’t fix it. I was too afraid of her leaving and not giving me attention, love, focus anymore that the abuse became second-nature. Of course she could use me. Of course. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Finally, finally, I realized that I could give her all the love in the entire world and it still wouldn’t be enough to get her to see that my needs mattered, too. I needed a friend as good as me, too.
I woke up to the fact that I had plenty of them… just not her. I saw our abusive relationship for what it was, instead of walking on eggshells and hoping not to fall through… not knowing that falling through them was the best thing I could have done.
But I know it now.
Stories That Are All True 