Cutting myself free from someone I loved

I still drive by the apartment where I lived with him. I don’t go there just to see it; I love to walk and drive in that historic, hilly neighborhood. When I pass it, I look at the building with curiosity, like a reincarnated person might upon sensing familiarity in a place from a past life.

Someone is growing flowers outside there now, pots and pots of thriving plants. Ten years ago I was a flower cut from the ground and slowly dying there. 

Behind those walls he cooked spaghetti and turkey burgers for me. Behind those walls we watched Tarantino and Scorsese and talked about Hitchcock. On that stoop he played guitar, and I sang, and the neighbors left their doors open to hear us.

Behind those walls I turned my back to him in bed, hoping he would get the signal and not touch me. Behind those walls I ignored the heavy anchor in my gut day after day, kept my eyes forward, just tried to stay busy enough to not let reality sink in. I kept moving fast enough that my anchor had no chance to stop me.

Sitting in his car parked by that curb was where he threw my phone under his driver’s seat, beginning a string of hostage experiences with him. That night he drove me around angrily, desperately for hours, in an argument I hardly even remember. I do remember that that night he told me that I had hurt him so badly and that I would need to prove myself to him to regain his trust. It would be difficult, he said, but we could do it because we really loved each other, and a love like that doesn’t come around every day.

That place was where he wore me down. Secrets, lies, pressure, threats, the coils wrapping tighter and tighter around my neck until it became impossible to breathe.

Not just a bad man

I can’t say he was a bad man. I still can’t say he’s a bad man after the distance of almost ten years separates me from all I saw and endured. I see the goodness at his core, his love perverted into abuse. He was mentally ill. And I hate it. I hate that I can’t say he’s a bad man. Because I don’t want to make excuses for him. There is no room for excuses. I wish I could just say, “What a sick loser.” 

I saw him at his worst in the middle of debilitating panic attacks when he couldn’t breathe and couldn’t move, and I rushed to find the orange pill bottle and open the child-proof cap to give him the only thing that would help.

I saw him. I talked him down. I talked him out of spirals of suicidal thoughts, walking by his side out of the labyrinth, the labyrinth that lead back to life. I saw him at his worst, and I knew the relationship wasn’t good for me, but I didn’t want to leave someone at their worst, especially not someone I loved.

Drowning victims will pull their rescuer down. I could feel myself being pulled under with him. I could feel the water bubbling up and burning my nose. I was under with him for so long that I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. The more I tried to kick away from him, the tighter he held on to me. Every time I tried to pull up for air, he could feel me moving further away from him, and he pulled me down to him in desperation. 

After I left and my friends called him an asshole or threatened beating him up on my behalf, it made me so sad. I didn’t want that for him. Even when I decided I could not be a part of his life anymore, I still held out hope that he could change, that he could be redeemed. 

Love is selfless. That’s what I thought. I had watched a lot of people close to me act in ways that I perceived as being really selfish. I didn’t want to be like them. I wanted to push through my own discomfort, to ride it out. I thought that was the brave thing to do, the loving thing to do.

I had received the message growing up that I was too sensitive, made too big of deal out of things that shouldn’t bother me, and needed to toughen up to survive in a difficult world.

“You are ok” was the official story of my childhood. “You have food. You have a house. No one hits you. Your parents love you. You are ok.” What I felt underneath that story was that I was not ok. What I saw happening in my family did not feel ok. I was pushed to ignore that feeling.

I had grown up in pain that I felt no one in my family could see. I saw Sean’s pain. I saw it, and I wanted him to know that I loved him anyway. I wanted to give to someone what was not given to me. And there were times when I felt like he saw the full me more than anyone in my life ever had.

His two voices that linger

When I imagine him reading my post about the rape or the love I found after him or how his actions continue to haunt me, I hear his voice. I hear the angry voice, the fearful voice, the voice of denial. It says, “Fuck you, you selfish liar. You were just a whore who treated me like a piece of shit. Couldn’t you see how much I loved you? Why’d you have to throw it all away?”

That voice still scares me until I gain my bearings and find my center. But under that voice I hear the helpless, vulnerable voice, the voice that says it needs me. I hear the one that says, “Cathy, I still love you. Don’t do this to me, Cathy. I can’t breathe. Oh my God, I can’t breathe.”

I lived with those two voices for years. The one that hurt me and the one that I held in my arms. He was in pain, I was in pain, and neither of us knew how to make it stop. The arguments lasted for hours, often through the night, cycling through the angry voices, my defense, his desperate plea for me to not abandon him, and finally, my surrender.

At the end of the storm, we held each other and cried, so emotionally drained that I dared not revisit the original problem that caused this cycle. All I wanted was this momentary relief. We were both in pain, but we were in pain together. Somehow it felt better than the idea of being alone. The relief I felt seemed to be greater than relief from our argument; it felt like relief from the pain of the world, from my whole life. He was the storm, and he was the shelter from the storm. 

Why did you stay with someone who hurt you so much? 

I can feel the question no one wants to ask. Asking makes the victim sound responsible. 

It’s hard to convey why I stayed. I’ll try to describe it because I want people to understand what this is like for so many people who have stood in this exact place. So many stand there right now, and their friends, powerless, see them stuck there in the same spot. They don’t know that their friend’s feet aren’t just standing there. The land has grown over them, and now they are part of the place where they stand. They can’t tell where their body ends and the place begins. They are planted there.

Leaving him meant leaving part of myself

Escaping an emotionally abusive relationship doesn’t feel like saying, “Man, how am I going to leave this asshole who is hurting me?” No. It doesn’t feel like you’re just removing a parasite, flushing it from your system with some de-wormer.

It feels like waking up one morning and saying, “This is the day I cut off a limb. This is the day I saw through my own flesh.”

It feels easier to stay in the relationship, to go on pretending like you still have a functioning body. Even if others can see you’re sick. Even if you can feel you’re sick. When you’ve been sick so long, you don’t remember what it feels like to be well. You only have the energy to get through each day, not the energy to saw off a limb.

I had to distance myself from the part of me that felt for him. I had to cut it off. I had to find the part that connected us and wedge a piece of metal in there and start sawing. I had to burn the wound to close it.

I had no roadmap for this. No training. This was me in the wilderness doing what I could to save my life. It was dead tissue that connected us. It was rotting flesh that was spreading, and it would claim me if I didn’t remove it. I could feel the rot claiming me.

I did what I needed to survive, and I didn’t know what would come after. I was scared.

Will I be able to live– did the infection spread to my bloodstream? To my heart? How will I function? Will I have permanent nerve damage? Will I feel again? Who will I be without this part of me? Will I be disfigured? Will others look at me and know? Will I ever be able to use that part of me again?

No day seems like a good day to saw through your own flesh.

No day seems like a good day to tell your mom.

I could hardly breathe when I thought, This is the day my mom finds out that the child who grew in her has been violently altered. Someone took her and did some Frankenstein shit to her, cutting off this part that he didn’t like and sewing on this other part he chose instead. And she was awake during each iteration, each step of the procedure. He had numbed her enough from her own sensations that she could feel something was happening, but she didn’t quite know what. She didn’t know until she looked in the mirror at the end of it all and said, “Who is this person? Is this me?”

It’s so easy to put off the moment that says, This is the last time my mom gets to think she has a whole child. After this she sees what I saw in the mirror.

I’m not who I was before the abuse.

I never will be that person again. I came out stronger. I know more now than I did before. That’s true. But it’s not the whole truth. We like to say these things as survivors because it helps us reframe the narrative and take back our power.

The truth is I have to fight every day to be stronger; strength is not just a status I’ve achieved. I am stronger not because I lived through it but because in order to truly live now, I have to work hard. I have to do the kind of gritty mental and emotional work that naturally makes you stronger.

I am constantly lifting the weight of my experiences, raising them to a place where all the pain I lived through can be redeemed. I work my heart every day when I embrace myself, holding out my arms and inviting myself into them. I work every part of me when I return to the darkness to push my perspective forward, to dig deep holes and pull insights from them. This work makes you stronger, and it makes you tired, and it makes you sore. And I don’t know if it will ever end. To stay healthy, you keep showing up to do the work.

I am still recovering from trauma. I am still learning how to have a healthy sexual relationship with my husband and to connect with my sexuality as a part of myself, not just as something I can give someone. I am still learning to fight disembodiment, fighting to be present in my body and present in the moment after years of disassociation. I am learning to listen to my intuition again and to honor my feelings while also holding myself accountable for any unhealthy habits that creep in. I’m vigilant to emotional entanglement, to breaches of boundaries, to hiding from myself. I keep my eyes on the truth because for so long lies helped me survive.

I still run my fingers over the scars of the places where he snipped away at my heart and my mind. I find new signs of his work ten years later. Those scars haven’t disappeared. Neither has the knowledge that he did not work alone; I didn’t stop him. But new tissue grows. New life happens. Scars fade. Miraculously we live. We feel.

Life would have looked different without his mark on me. But I’m not his Frankenstein. I’m my own beautiful creation. And in the end, his mark is not the one that seals me. He doesn’t write my story.