I am sitting here, trying to ignore the Rubik’s Cube that is my brain, which is trying to put things together and I just don’t want it to. Because then I’ll have to look at things that I don’t want to look at right now. I’ll have to start facing the things that I have been so good at avoiding for so long. I’ve dealt with things in bits and pieces but now my psyche is demanding that I at least finish a side in one color before it will let me put the cube down and focus on the rest of my life.
So, these next few blogs might be scattered, they might not make sense and they might be hard to read. They’re certainly going to be hard to write. So I understand, dear reader, if you should choose to stop reading here, particularly if you are FOE – friend of the ex. Wow, interesting acronym. Anyway, this is my viewpoint and I’m sure he has his. So stop reading if you don’t want my viewpoint.
I clearly remember the day I first thought, “I shouldn’t do this. What the hell am I thinking?” We had moved in together, hadn’t been living together terribly long, maybe a month or so. Been dating about six months. He had said, “You need to move in with me so you can see what you’re getting into. I’m not easy to live with.” And I thought it was so refreshing that he understood himself that well and could actually verbalize those thoughts. That’s half the battle, I thought, that he understands he’s difficult. Guess I didn’t see the big red flag that went with that concept.
Anyway, he was making the bed one day and I was just learning about his compulsive-obsessive personality. The bed wasn’t cooperating, according to him, and the sheets weren’t doing what he wanted them to do. Exactly his phrasing – the sheets weren’t doing what he wanted to do. His anger flared very quickly, so quickly that I didn’t even see the build. The next thing I knew, he was screaming obscenities at the inanimate object not cooperating – the aforementioned sheets – and using cuss words that made me blush. Now, I am known to have thrown a few choice words around myself so let your imagination run wild. I cowered at the power of his anger, even though it was not directed at me. He literally ripped the sheets off the bed, tearing them almost in half. I can still hear the sound of the fabric ripping most than 17 years later.
In that moment, clear as a bell, I knew I had a choice. I could walk away in that instant. I could say, “You know what? You were right. You are difficult and I have chosen not to deal with a difficult person. I love you but my life is too valuable to spend it listening to you spend the next 16 years of our lives calling sheets cocksuckers and having you destroy property because you don’t have the patience to make the bed. Have a nice life. See ya around.”
But I didn’t. I chose to stay. I thought that I could handle his anger. I thought that I could help him learn how to become more patient and deal with things better. I thought I could change him. I also accepted his behavior because I had been raised with that type of personality in my family. Can’t get into details as too many of my family read this blog and I just don’t need the repercussions right now. Suffice it to say that this seemed almost normal to me so I buried my concerns and figured I could handle it. After all, his anger wasn’t directed at me. He even apologized, stating that he would never hurt me with his anger, that he was only angry at the sheets and I shouldn’t be concerned about it. It was just the way he was.
I can’t say I should have left him then. I don’t know what my life would have turned out to be had I walked out the door that day. I can’t regret spending the 16 years with him that I did because I can’t change it. But I can learn from it.
What I am struggling with is this – I chose to stay. I chose to stay every time he ripped sheets. I chose to stay in the not too distant past when he threw something across the room and it hit this beautiful piece of art he had gotten for me and framed so perfectly and knocked the artwork to the floor and broke the glass. I chose to stay when he began more and more throwing things across the room. Funny, they always seemed to be my things – my shoes, my books, my photos. His were always gently picked up and courteously moved to an appropriate spot. Mine were not and the throwing was accompanied by harsh, horrible obscenity, then that anger was usually turned on me. “Why can’t you just put things away? Why are they always here? Can’t you just… why can’t you… you’re so…” And on and on and on. But I wasn’t supposed to take that personally because he was angry at the objects, not at me.
I chose to shut down. I could have confronted him about how he treated me, and I did. But eventually, I allowed him to beat me down and I shut down. I stopped feeling because there was no use. He would use my emotions against me and ridicule and belittle them. And I allowed him to.
The hardest thing with any type of abuse is that, yes, we the abused have some responsibility in being abused. There were many times I could have walked away, I should have walked away, before I was too beaten down to be able to. The night he ripped those sheets. The first time he called me stupid. The first time he threw something valuable of mine across the room. I knew it. In my heart, I knew that this was the rest of my life. And I chose to stay. That doesn’t forgive him and that doesn’t condone what he did. It only means that I have to accept some of the responsibility for staying. Eventually, I was beyond that choice and that’s where his abuse takes a whole different turn. When I was strong enough to defend myself, I still had a choice. But when I lost the will to choose, that’s when I become a true victim.
I am sometimes so filled with shame for how I allowed him to treat me for so many years. I am ashamed when someone says how much they disliked him for so long and then asks me how I stayed with him for so long. I am embarrassed that I couldn’t walk away from him and that I gave him so much power over my life. I am ashamed to be so victimized and not able to say anything to anyone. In the midst of it all, I was so embarrassed when we would go out and he would behave the way he could and humiliate me in front of so many people and then accuse me of being in the wrong when I would confront him about it. It was always just me, the way I felt, that had no value. He was never in the wrong. I always was. I let him do this to me. And I feel so much shame sometimes over it that I cannot deal with it. So I put it in a mental box and it sits there until my psyche is pissed off and forces me to deal with it.
Shame is a huge thing when you’re abused. You don’t want pity. I don’t want you to feel sorry that I was emotionally abused by this asshole. I really don’t want to know how you didn’t like him because, fuck you, you never said anything to me. I don’t care if I loved him with reason. I thought everything I felt about how he treated me was in my own mind. It wasn’t until a friend finally spoke up and said, after a very disastrous, destructive dinner, “I can’t believe the way he talks to you. Does he always talk to you that way? How can you stand it?” That’s when I finally stepped back and pulled myself out of my victimization and tried to see objectively how he treated me. That’s when I started to notice that he talked to me differently when we were alone. He saved the humiliation for when we were in private, although it would occasionally crop up in a social situation. But mostly, those gems were reserved for behind closed doors.
And I think I understand where that came from sometimes. He said something in counseling once about being frustrated because I wasn’t the woman he thought I was. He was attracted to me because I was this take-charge, aggressive, together woman. He thought that was who I was and what I was going to be for the rest of my life. He apparently didn’t take into consideration that we change as we get older and life throws things at us. He never took into consideration that his constant barrage of criticism and harsh words would erode at the core of that strong, aggressive woman and turn her into a suicidal, depressed basket case who lost the ability to decide whether to make chicken or fish… oops… no fish allowed in the house because the smell bothered him. I couldn’t decide whether to make chicken or beef for dinner. He was disappointed that I turned out to be human, not this super-human being who had no feelings and no emotions. He was disappointed that I could be hurt and feel and fight back. He wanted passive woman who was aggressive and let him be who he was. I, however, was never allowed to be who I was. I had to be perfect. And when I wasn’t, he was there to point out the flaws, as a help, so I could learn and grow.
And I let him. That is my responsibility. I let him. I stopped fighting it and allowed him to destroy me. And if I’m not careful, I could find myself in that same position just as easily again. Finding someone, overlooking their flaws, and thinking I can handle it. It’s the cycle that I have been living over and over again in my life because that’s what I know. Living with my folks has sure shown me that.
My responsibility now is to not let that happen again. That’s probably why I never was able to confront the OOMA because I was and am terrified that, should we have hooked up, I would have done exactly the same thing – become what he wanted me to be, allowed his emotional distance to push me to an emotional distance and become closed off and shut down again, ending up counting pills on the kitchen counter years from now, wondering what I did to lose him and what I could do to hold on to him. I’ve already been thinking that just because I thought I was in love with him and he has pulled away – what did I do to lose him and what could I do to hold on to him. And we haven’t even kissed. It hurts to admit that he’s probably not good for me because that’s not what my heart says. But I can’t allow myself that much pain again.
And that means I will probably be alone for a long time. I can’t allow myself to leap into something because I can’t allow myself to be hurt that deeply again. I need to make sure that anyone I do get involved with is someone who will let me be me – emotional, cranky, occasionally weak and insecure, fragile, depressed, slightly bipolar. I have to make sure that I am allowed a full range of emotions, not just those that he thinks are acceptable. I need to make sure it is someone who won’t throw things across the room – whether or not they are aimed at me. I need someone who, yes, can be angry, but not in that obsessive, horrific abusive way that the main men in my life have been.
I have to accept the responsibility for controlling my own life from here on out. That means walking away from people who hurt, situations that are detrimental, men who only hurt not heal. I need to be responsible for me first, then someone entering my life. But the priority is me. If that’s selfish, then so be it. I’ve given up enough for so many years that it’s time for me to not give up. And I’m not ready to give up on me yet. I just need time.
As a side note, I also realized that I could have been a huge bitch and forced him to liquidate his huge book collection and taken half of that from him. I could have forced him to sell his collectibles and taken half of that. I could have forced him to do so many things that would have hurt him the way he hurt me. But I didn’t. Because I couldn’t. So that’s it. I just had to put that out there.
Thanks for reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment