In my president I see the man who abused me

I wrote most of this on November 9, 2016, the day after the presidential election. 

This morning I woke up and felt numb.

From the moment my eyes opened, I could feel the weight of the night’s events lying heavy on my chest. I walked to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. My “Salute me I voted” sticker looked just as chipper as it did the day before, clinging to my shirt with the California bear walking on a rainbow. The bear, the rainbow, the stars and stripes. They held a hope that now rotted. I wasn’t ready to peel the shirt off and admit it was over. That would mean that what had happened was real, and it was time to move forward.

When I finally undressed and got in the shower, I felt the same shock, denial, fear, confusion, and sadness that I felt years ago on the day after the rape. The water rushed over my body, and I gasped as the tears came to the surface and trickled down.

I moved through the motions of my day feeling distant from the world moving around me. Feeling like time had stopped and the second hand on the clock volleyed back and forth between my left and right eyebrow, some kind of heavy metronome keeping time for a song I couldn’t hear. My hands brought my baby to my breast for his morning feeding, but my mind ticked back to the images of the night before, trying to make sense of what had happened. I had to get out of the house because the voices filled every room and reverberated off all the walls.

I’ve spent years working to not feel like the victim.

That night I felt like my rapist had been elected president. Every time I see Trump’s face and hear his voice, I see not only my rapist but the other men in my young life who created him. The men who taught me that my voice could be silenced, my ideas shut down, my reality disputed. Who taught me that my boundaries were just the preferences of a too sensitive person.

On election night I had to stay awake to watch it all crumble. I had to watch. Even though it was 3:00 a.m., and I had a 5-month-old who I knew would be waking up shortly to nurse. He would need me to be mom in the morning regardless of who was elected. But I had to watch. I had to see every bit of it for myself to believe it. Just like eight years before when I had to experience the worst of the worst of someone I thought loved me before I could come to terms with the fact that he was not who I thought he was.

When I saw the reporter appear suddenly on the screen to say that Hillary conceded, I was trembling the same way I do when I talk about my longtime boyfriend who abused me emotionally and sexually for years. I trembled the same way I do when I tell about some of the most intense trials of my childhood.

We were not supposed to tell this man that we support him.

We were not supposed to tell him that what he does and says don’t matter, that he can hurt people as much as he wants and still come out on top. I really took for granted that this could not happen. That Americans would not let it happen. I feel betrayed, like the America I thought I knew doesn’t really exist. The same way that the boyfriend I trusted and loved did not exist. And that makes me feel so naive because it was staring me in the face all along.

Some people who were disappointed, enraged, and shocked by the results of the election woke up today ready to unify. They’re posting uplifting messages today–smiling faces of neighborly love and words that are so big of spirit. I love them, and we need them, but I am not there yet. I have to come to terms with the man who has been given the power. I believe in the peaceful transition of power, but right now I feel like I cannot accept this man as my president.

I know President Obama and Secretary Clinton need to tell us that we’re all actually on the same side. But that doesn’t feel right this time. Because when I think of Trump, when I see his face and hear his voice, all the alarm bells that have learned to sound to protect myself from danger go off. I am a survivor of repeat emotional and sexual abuse, and I have learned to trust my instincts. I’ve learned to sense the exact moments when I should leave the room, close my mouth, grab the car keys, or quietly comply in order to not get hurt. I feel like I cannot be on his side and feel safe. I cannot be on his side and feel like those around me are safe.

I woke up to an America that was not safe today.

I don’t care if what Trump said and did was some kind of strategic show of manipulation to get votes. He can put on an earnest face in the morning after all that hurt and try to make me trust him or try to make me believe that that wasn’t the real him I saw in the darkness. But what I’ve learned is that it’s only a matter of time before the darkness comes out again, and it is not an exception to who they are; it is a very real part that will not be controlled and will not be erased.

He can even try to make me believe that I’m making too big of a deal out of what happened and what he said, that it didn’t really happen as I remember it, that I’m just too sensitive. But I won’t let him make me doubt my reality and question my feelings. I know what happened, and I know how I feel. Those narratives don’t belong to him.

Or the last tactic: He can try to make me believe that he couldn’t help but act the way he did because he was pushed in a corner…it was all so difficult…it wasn’t his fault. NO.  You don’t get to abuse people and make excuses for it.

Accepting Trump as my president does not simply feel like being a good loser, accepting defeat, shaking hands, and moving on. It’s not about losing. It’s not about disliking him. It’s not about disagreeing with him. It feels like being asked to take back my mentally ill, abusive ex-boyfriend one more time. He’s begging me. He’s going to change. That wasn’t the real him. He didn’t mean to hurt me. He loves me. In fact, no one loves me more than he does. It’s because he loves me so much that he does crazy things sometimes–he’s so afraid to lose me. Everyone else out there would hurt me even worse if I left him.

No. Just no. My ex-boyfriend asked me to take him back out of love if I really loved him. Now I’m being asked to accept Trump out of patriotism and to get over myself. That wasn’t real love, and this isn’t real patriotism. 

On February 3, 2009, I chose better for my life. I chose a different path once and for all. I got out. I wanted better for my future children. And this morning I woke up to find myself back in a reality I didn’t recognize as my own. I can’t just forgive and forget what this man has said and done. It’s too much like a cycle of abuse that I refused to let rule my life any longer. I said “no” to Trump with my vote. I seriously never thought that my “no” would end in the Electoral College’s big stamp of “yes”.  I said, “no” and I thought the country would say “no” too. Now I’m engulfed again in a toxic reality I thought I had left behind.

After a woman is raped, she is often reluctant to tell her story.

Maybe she worries she will be criticized and blamed–for what she wore, for how much she drank, for what she said when she was having a good time. She worries that when the questions come, she will be revealed at fault. Maybe she knows the person who raped her and she still feels loyal to him and somehow still wants to protect him. Maybe she is ashamed and doesn’t want people in her life to know what happened to her. Maybe she wants the rape to just go away and doesn’t want to have to speak the words into existence. Maybe it hurts too much to relive the story. Maybe she worries people will doubt that it happened at all, that they will think she is grabbing for power or attention or that she just wants to punish the person she’s accusing. Maybe they will say she just has “buyer’s remorse”. So she stays silent.

The morning after the election, I reluctantly returned a phone call to one of my closest family members. A month prior I had gotten in a very uncharacteristic argument with her when I learned she supported Trump. I was nervous to call her this morning, the morning after Trump was elected.

“Hello! How are you?” she answered the phone in her usual upbeat way.

“I’m not doing so well,” I said with hesitation.

“Oh no, what’s wrong?” she asked. I think she was expecting me to say the dog tore up my favorite shoes, my son had been crying non-stop, or I was coming down with the flu.

“I’m having a really difficult time because of the election.”  It felt like bravery just saying those honest words.

“Well, I’ve learned these things usually balance out in the end,” she offered.

“No, there’s more to it than that for me,” I pushed back.

“Well, I’m probably not the best person to be consoling you about this.”

And there was my silence.

I just wanted a hug from her. I wanted understanding. I wanted support. I got the conversation stopper. I was afraid to say, “No, you see, it’s not just the stupid election. It’s not politics. It’s not you on the right, me on the left. It’s not ‘I’m right, you’re wrong.’ It’s the fact that in my new president I see the man who abused me. It’s the fact that I have to turn the TV off or switch to a different radio station when his voice booms through because if I don’t, his voice will touch my body, and I will start to tremble. I will be transported to the scariest times of my life.

It’s the fact that I am afraid. I am afraid for all the people who will be hurt by him and his decisions and those who already have been hurt by what he’s said and done. I’m afraid for the boys who will listen to him and learn what kind of behavior is not only permissible but is elevated to the highest office in our country. I am afraid for the girls who will learn what kind of respect to expect from men and what kind of treatment they deserve. I’m afraid for our world.

I’m afraid for people who have been abused who right now feel that they’re being entrusted into the care of someone who will hurt them and will fuel an abusive culture that will be kindled by his example. Where verbal assault is normalized, where damaging words are seen as a person being honest and real, where proven facts are disputed as truth. A whole country gaslighted.

I’m afraid because I’m surrounded by people who support this man, for whom making fun of a disabled person is not a deal-breaker, for whom talking about grabbing women by the pussy is not a deal-breaker, for whom pages of lies and a complete unwillingness to apologize or take responsibility are not deal-breakers. I cry for my country and the people who support Trump because we must hurt so deeply in order for these things to not be deal-breakers.

I’m afraid because I can’t talk to people I love about how I’m hurting. I feel like I need to pretend my world isn’t crumbling. I feel like I can’t even talk to you, someone who has supported me through difficult times and understood me when others haven’t. Today I’m afraid that if I tell you why I’m hurting, you will think I am overreacting. I’m afraid you won’t understand. Maybe you would be compassionate, and I’m just not giving you a chance to show me your love. But I’m in too much pain to risk any other reaction from you. It just may put me over the edge.”

Today an army of people woke up feeling like their country told them, “Your experience isn’t real. Your reality isn’t real. Your truth is not true. You are too sensitive. You’re not tough enough. You’re overreacting. Your wounds are your own; they do not belong to me. You have issues. The problem is you. It is in your head. Get over it and move on. Get with the program and support your country, you crybaby. Grow thicker skin.”

And perhaps the scariest thing is that when survivors of abuse hear others sending us this message, we send this message to ourselves. All the doubts we’ve worked to dispel in our recovery return to us once again. We write the words on our skin. They bleed from our own veins. Crazy. Delusional. Weak. Self-absorbed. Some of us were silenced for so long that we don’t even need others to do it for us anymore. Our body remembers what happens when we speak. Our silence is programmed deep in the firing of the sympathetic nervous system.

Some of us woke up today feeling alone and like the people around us don’t want to hear us or aren’t capable of hearing us. We woke up feeling vulnerable and like the people around us will do nothing to protect us. We woke up feeling like our country decided that the hurtful things our abusers told us, the lies they upheld time and again in their white-knuckled grip on control were not relevant, did not matter.

A whole army of people woke up silenced today. Today I’m silent. Tomorrow I fight. Words matter.

 

 

Photo credit: Christopher Guider