My Shorts Story
An ex once told me that I shouldn’t wear shorts. And so in honour of him I have been wearing them every day this week as I approach my 40th birthday on Saturday.
I suspect he doesn’t even remember telling me that my legs weren’t good enough. I suspect he doesn’t remember each one of the insults that still echo in my memory a decade on.
My granny used to say ‘sticks and stones may break your bones, but names will never hurt me’. She was right about many things, but not this. Words do hurt.
They linger on long after they have been hurled like weapons; long after they have hit their target. They live in the shadows, fester in the quiet moments of insecurity, in the darkness, poisoning their victim from within.
There are other things too, that I suspect my ex doesn’t remember saying or, if confronted with, would deny, dispute or deem to be all in my imagination.
Like the fact that he told me I was on a gravy train and would never get off, despite the fact that he would laze like a drunk demigod on the sofa of my friend’s house, refusing to work, or take advantage of the generosity of my friends and family, taking jobs only when they suited him and only on his terms.
Like the fact that he would order me not to mention anything I had done of merit – be that running a marathon or going to Oxford University – but would be quite content to regale others of his trips overseas with tall tales of his life as an adventurer, and even taller excuses when yet another job would go wrong.
Things were never his fault, but they were mine.
I suspect he doesn’t remember the times he told me that I was deluded, insane, not as pretty as his ex-girlfriends. And yet he would wear me on his arm like a trophy when it suited him.
Because to the outside world, things often appear ok. Abuse like this can be masked under a cloak of words, a lying smile. Physical bruises heal quickly. Emotional scars take much much longer.
It’s been years since I mustered up the courage to grab the bare minimum of my worldly goods and go; it’s been years since I realised that if I didn’t go, then pretty soon the criticisms, insults, would turn me into something I no longer recognised.
Never mind that my friends might notice. He’d already seen to that, by driving me from most of them when he made the unilateral decision to move us hundreds of miles away from all that was familiar.
But that decision didn’t mark the end. Even years after leaving him, I still had to deal with abuse, with lies and with harassment – not all the time, but often enough to feel that he still exerted a control over me.
But this is where it ends.
This weekend, I am 40.
This is the end of one story and the beginning of another. My shorts are the outward display of something I should have done long ago.
By wearing them, I’m gifting myself a present – a glorious, unwrapped gift that sticks not two fingers, but two long, athletic legs up at the insults and the injury, a gift that allows me to stride forward into the future.
This is my shorts story – here for the long-haul.
