It’s Okay if it doesn’t Go Away
This was originally going to be a piece called “The Ache of Not for You.” It was going to be an irritatingly self congratulatory and frankly uninspired piece about how I have made enough peace with my past that I can start being in spaces my abuser also happens to be.
This is not that piece. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to write that piece.
Let me back up, since it’s been a while since I contributed to this thing I am loosely calling The Sunlight Series, named for the second essay about what it’s like to feel sunlight again. If you’re very curious, these links will take you to the pieces in order. In them, you can see the arc of coming to terms with my own depression, which in no small part was because I was in an abusive relationship at the time. The piece for which I have named this whole project is actually about the healing properties of a relationship that was, from month 6 to the cold hard end, founded on emotional abuse.
If you want some real whiplash, read this piece, immediately followed by this one. Those are about the same person.
He’d get me back into his apartment, hold me until the tears stopped, and go about his business. Often he’d end up doing laundry between rounds of DOTA while I lost myself in a book, and those days when I was one step above comatose on his bed, he’d bundle me up with his warm laundry right out of the dryer and kiss my forehead before he went back to the computer. He situated things such that he could still reach back and touch me — stroke my hair, squeeze my hand — but was never scrutinizing me, never making me feel like I had to be anything more than I was at that moment.
Sounds great, right?
No, he wasn’t that bad.
No, he was just only attracted to me when I was sick — and made sure I knew it. No, he was just mercurial and his moods were somehow always my fault, especially when I happy and he wasn’t. No, he was just vain and shallow and I was never as beautiful or sexy or feminine as someone else. No, he just kept me a secret from everyone in his life like he was embarrassed of me, and so he could do as he pleased with me and to me with no outside observers who could hear my version of events. No, he’d just hold my health and the care he gave me over my head like I owed him something. No, he just wouldn’t touch me when I wanted to be touched, or speak to me when I wanted to be spoken to, or love me when I wanted to be loved. No, he just never treated me like a priority, but was happy to use my body like a plaything, an object to be used and discarded. No, he wasn’t that bad.
No, he was awful
There was 309 days between those two pieces. 309 days to come to terms with the fact that I was always so depressed, often too depressed to even feed myself, crying in the bathrooms at work, feeling like my brain wasn’t connected to my body, because he was keeping me in that cycle.
Because I let him keep me in that cycle.
This piece was supposed to be about why I did that — why I didn’t think I deserved better, the slow evolution from not knowing better to being livid to making my peace with what it is in me that willingly participated in that cycle. Hmmm, yes, I said, looking at it all with my clinical, hindsight microscope. Hmmm, yes, it was these social factors and these things from my family of origin and this particular character trait that created the perfect storm for him to come in and elevate all my worst fears. Hmmm, yes, isn’t it grand I got that out of my system. Hmmm, yes, so glad that with careful observation and healthy boundaries I will never have to feel like that again.
I was half way through this thing Friday night, and 458 days away from when I’d written the piece naming his abuse. A lot has changed in 458 days. Enough, I’d thought. This morning, I woke up, ran an errand, loaded the dog into the car, and headed for Pride. I parked on the 1100 block of Logan. I walked past the 1200 block of Grant. And as I walked down 12th, heading for Civic Center Park, I passed that apartment where I’d spent a summer decaying in the air conditioning of a shitty studio full of Ikea furniture drinking and smoking my brain out of my body to escape the pain of not being loved, an apartment building I have driven past a thousand times thinking that no one would possibly stay there for 5 years on purpose.
And who should be taking his garbage out.
In times of dangerous conflict, I am geared very heavily towards “fight,” both physically and emotionally. No small part of how toxic that relationship was is built from my instinct to “hit back.” It’s something I’m actually proud of, outside of this specific context. There are few situations where I am afraid because of this instinct, something I know is uncommon in women and a trait I try to use for the protection of others.
I did not fight.
I tell you all this so you know exactly how terrified I was in the moment I recognized him. A friend of mine is an avid camper, and once in some remote wilderness realized there was a bear in their campsite in the wee hours of the morning. He said his whole body locked up, and no amount of trying to will his arm to reach for the bear mace at the end of his tent could physically make his body move. He’d seen bears before, and once had shouted one down on a trail with his dog, making himself as loud and large as possible while backing away. But some primal terror in his body activated that night, and he was powerless — if the bear had decided it wanted him as a breakfast burrito, would his body have stayed locked like that?
That’s how it felt, seeing him.
He’s grown a beard. Doesn’t look like he has any tattoos still, but his weekend wardrobe is still flip flops, a tank top, and gym shorts. I was staring — how could I not? Every neuron in my lizard brain was telling me I’d die if I looked away for even a second. He was looking right at me, and I will thank this dog every day of his life for continuing to pull me down the street, just so I didn’t freeze on the sidewalk on 12th and Logan to be eaten alive, to be torn apart. Again.
“Hey.” The word came out of my mouth of its own accord, which I’d always thought was dramatic hyperbole and not a thing your mouth will actually do when in shock. I’d thought for sure if I ever saw him again, I’d only be able to stammer “I hate you, don’t touch me!” on repeat like a demented Teddy Ruxpin. He waved. “Hey,” was his response.
I will light a candle to every saint I can name tonight in thanks for the dog that kept me walking down the street, insistently tugging on his leash despite trying to train him not to do that.
There was another conversation going on in the group chat of the friends I was meeting. I couldn’t form a full sentence to explain what happened, but I will look up the rest of the saints, and light candles in thanks of friends who immediately know when I am not okay, and who wordlessly give me hugs when I just need to cry a little bit in a public space.
There are few moments in my life I’d actually want a do-over for. Most mistakes I’ve made, I’m okay with the arc of the consequences. This is not one of them. I would sell my soul to the first demon who offered to be rid of this sensation, this crawling skin gut punch, a filthy burning sensation of distress, the sewage stink of anger this is still A Thing following me around right now. 458 days wasn’t enough to scrub this thing that almost killed me out from my cerebellum. Just to know my body still reacts this viscerally to shorts and a beard on the wrong motherfucker is enough to make me want to pull my skin off. There is no price high enough, and yet no price I wouldn’t pay, to remove the scars this Thing left on me.
I don’t know what I do with this incredibly unwanted information. My immediate instinct was to find another human I could lose myself to — I didn’t, I ended up picking up a couple drinks instead. But 458 days and I thought I had a clean bill of mental health. I thought I wasn’t wounded anymore, that I was done defining myself by this thing. I thought I was okay with it.
I am okay. Genuinely. Not okay with this, specifically, but my overall level of okay is still in healthy ranges, so put down the platitudes. I was going to call this thing “The Ache of Not For You” because that’s my depression’s new favorite track — “Joy is for Other People.” And when I am so far away from healed… it’s hard not to wonder if it’s right.
I had to write this. Both to get it out from under my skin like an infected splinter, and because I know we need more voices saying “It’s okay to not be okay.” I have to say it to myself, on repeat, until I die, because the lesson hasn’t sunk in quite yet, and if I’m going to be stuck saying it until I’m blue in the face, someone else might as well hear me, too.
It is okay if this Thing is still with you. It’s okay.
