An Open Letter To My Abuser
(TW: Sexual Assault/Abuse)
I do not forgive you.
Without going into too many specifics, I’m going to go into specifics.
You made me a sexual assault and abuse victim.
We met in high school. We shared classrooms and stages. You took advantage of my kindness, and we became friends before anything happened. In fact, although I have you blocked, I know we have many mutual Facebook friends. We began to date. The constant issues you had (although presumably not your fault) were too much for me, so I broke up with you. Months pass by, and much to the chagrin of my parents and friends, we dated again.
There are parts my brain has pushed out. I know for certain it mostly happened in the summer, in the afternoons.
I agreed to what was going to happen. I felt pressured by myself to comply because maybe it would make your issues better. Maybe it would help us. I was miserable, and I was desperate for something to get better.
So it happened. I took away my consent verbally. It kept happening thereafter, and I became frozen in my body. I was being held captive by not only an extremely manipulative and manic person, but now I was trapped in a situation where I felt so wrong about everything happening.
You would tell me that I must not have loved you since we hadn’t done anything physical in a while. You told me that if I broke up with you, you would never be right again. That if I cheated, you would kill yourself.
After these things happened and I finally left you, even knowing you were emotionally abusive, it took me eight months to realize that you were sexually abusive. It took me a year and a half to tell a friend that I was a victim of sexual assault.
I cannot forgive you for robbing me of feeling safe in my own body. I cannot forgive you for making me feel guilty about how you treated yourself and others, including myself. Most importantly I cannot forgive you for using mental illness to control me and manipulate the people around me.
It has been almost two years since you’ve been in my life, but finally coming to terms with it after not being able to has been one of the most difficult things I have ever done. You made me a victim of emotional abuse and sexual abuse/assault, but you also made me a survivor. For that, I am not grateful, however, I am grateful for my own fortitude.
There might be a day in my future where I will forgive you for the things you’ve done to me, and what I pray you never have and never will do to anyone else. Forgiveness is not an earned thing, and I believe forgiveness is given freely, yet, it takes time. Just as healing is a process, forgiveness is too. I must also forgive myself for feeling guilty, as if I put myself in an abusive relationship willingly. I must forgive myself for getting tangled in the web you spun just for me. I only hope you realize what you’ve done and are able to forgive yourself. Everyone deserves that, if not from others, from ourselves.
As I felt more and more compelled to come out as a survivor, my relationship with forgiving an abuser became more complicated, but now I feel space to breathe. Forgiveness will come when it comes unfettered and honestly.
I do not forgive you, but I am on my way to making peace.
