The Bruises We Carry, The Bruises We Lay Down
I’m about to share a story that four million other women in America could tell you this year alone and that millions of men could tell you too. This is the story of how I have reclaimed my identity after an abusive relationship.
Almost a year ago, I packed up everything that would fit into my car, and I drove away from San Francisco.
I wasn’t moving to a new city; I was running away.
I moved to expose my bruises. I left so I could learn to be me again.
This is not about recounting all my dark memories or revealing all the ways that violence against women is a global epidemic. That issue is indisputable. It is a fact that 35% of the world’s women have faced a situation like mine.
Instead, I hold a story in my hands about what happens after those dark days, after you grope for the light switch above your head and finally flip it on.
I have two choices: Write the story and shed light on what I’ve hidden in the dark for so long. Or hold the story inside, feigning composure, all the while knowing it will continue to break my spirit.
There are two choices, but really no choice at all.
I must begin.
What It Really Looked Like
We met in the spring, and we began our innocent courtship over Twitter. After a few weeks and a dozen tweets, we agreed to meet over coffee to talk about work. I called it “networking” at the time.
We sipped our fresh brewed coffees in the sunshine and then sauntered together toward Dolores Park. We stopped by Bi-Rite to get a bottle of wine and a sandwich to share.
“I’m a feeder,” he had said while he insisted that he pay for everything.
On our second date, he wore a suit jacket and his mother called. He almost started crying when he told me how much she meant to him. I was sure I had stumbled onto something I should work hard to keep. A few months later, we began to date in earnest.
While I liked his seeming sensitivity, it was his ambition that magnetized me. We would talk about our work, our dreams, our hopes, our visions for the future. We’d stay up all night, scheming about projects. He had a habit of staring at me with wide eyes, catching me off guard, and complimenting me until I blushed. I had never felt so seen in my whole life, so matched.
He was peeling away all the armor I’d covered myself in over all the years.
No, let’s correct that.
He was tearing off my armor, exposing me.
This is what it really looked like. It looked like being seen.
It began with him stating that he wanted to be with me every single weekend, with him ordering black Uber cars to my apartment to pick me up because he said he must be near me.
Abuse does not usually come in the form of anything dark or dangerous. It comes dressed as everything we’ve ever dreamed of.
He waited until I felt loved and safe. He waited a few weeks, a few months. Then he tore it away meticulously, one piece at a time.
He took away the Uber cars. He stopped going to his job. He stopped giving compliments. He turned everything into darkness and lies, forbid me from seeing friends, told me that I’d never be enough for him.
My reality unraveled like the frayed ends of rope pulled tautly. I kept pulling it harder, hoping to stop it, but it just kept unraveling. And a few months later, there I was. Undone.
How did I become a vessel for all his pain and anger? How did my body become his battleground, filled with bruises?
This kind of thing doesn’t happen to me, I thought. I must be going crazy.
Many days in the dark depths of the relationship, I never left the bedroom in his apartment. My thoughts grew fuzzy, my stomach pulled itself inside out, a dull headache pounded at my temples.
I cried almost every single day. I cried at work a few times. I cried when I couldn’t sleep at night. I cried while I tried to cover marks on my face with concealer. I cried after our fights, believing I was to blame. I cried when I learned the depths I would swim in if I had to, the days when I saw my undoing and could bring myself to do nothing but watch.
I chopped off my hair and dyed it dark. I lost 15 pounds on my petite frame. My face became gaunt, but I was rarely hungry enough to eat meals.
Why did I stay so long? Why didn’t I tell anyone? I’ve asked myself these questions countless times, and here I am again. I could offer a handful of explanations that never seem to fit quite right: Leaving meant leaving a broken man, who then would be alone forever. Leaving meant that the reality he had painted for me would crumble and I’d have to rebuild the one he’d cut away from me. Leaving meant admitting that I was in an abusive relationship in the first place, which I denied for months. Leaving meant giving up on love, or what I believed love to be.
I know I don’t have the answers, even now. I have only a handful of attempts and the knowledge that some things stay messy forever, no matter how hard we try to clean them.
About a year into the relationship, I saw a crack of light in the shadows. It came one day sitting in a psychiatrist’s office in Pacific Heights. I was looking at the floor as a strip of sunlight cascaded over my shoe when the psychiatrist — who had been listening to me narrate this relationship over months — told me she was pregnant. It occurred to me that she was willing to bring new life into the world — the world I learned to see as cruel, unfeeling, heartless. And it felt like the end of something.
Weeks went by, and the crack of light grew larger and larger. I wrestled with the decision, but I ultimately knew my time had run out. I was standing on an empty stage. I still did not have a name for what was happening to me, but I knew it must have a name, and that the only way I’d ever learn it was to leave.
I gathered my things into garbage bags for about the third or fourth time. I moved what I could into a storage unit I had rented after he once threatened to burn all my belongings. I had tried to leave many times before, but this time, I finally did it.
My god was it bright outside in the world without him. My god was it frightening.
My eyes burned for days. Colors burst forth in electric, garish blues on the taquería signs of the Mission District. I had to avert my eyes from the greens and pinks and yellows of the illuminated shop windows.
It was like losing a limb. I kept looking behind me, thinking I might see his figure. I kept wondering if there was some way I could repair it — if only.
I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t sit with the absence. I moved from place to place so he wouldn’t find me if he were looking. I spoke to lawyers about restraining orders and started gathering evidence.
I had to keep moving, I thought. I had to run further to claim myself again, to live a life without a shadow of trauma, or to claim that shadow so I could make peace with it. I thought running might erase the pain, just for a little while, just for a moment, just for a breath.
The Story of 4 Million Women
My story of abuse is part of a much larger narrative that a third of the world’s women live every day. It is part of a narrative about gender, power, the price of freedom.
Abuse is about power. Most commonly, this is a gender-based power, undermining the self-worth of the victim. That should come as no surprise unless you’re just satisfied enough that you don’t need to question the way you think about gender and power.
I’m a white woman, and I spent the bulk of my childhood in the Bay Area. I know there are pains and hardships I will never understand. I haven’t always had the courage to know that, and I certainly didn’t have this courage when I met him.
Until I met him, our culture gave me a few inches, enough success to keep me from becoming angry. I was happy with that for a long time. My privilege made me ignorant, especially of other women-identifying people’s struggles. But my eyes are open now, and I cannot shut them tight again.
Where words might flow from a man’s mouth, women must fight to voice our most basic dignity and desires. This silencing, like violence against women, is a global epidemic. As Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche explains in We Should All Be Feminists:
“Girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up — and this is the worst thing we do to girls — they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.”
She sums up perfectly what I did, even while I always believed I had agency. I was making the semblance of decisions. I was hoping that he had all the answers to my questions about my worth. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to keep fighting to have my voice heard. I was wrong.
I hid everywhere I could because not hiding would mean I’d have to speak up and claim what I really wanted: to be loved, to be seen, to be heard, to stop fearing my own body and my own strength. I’d have to admit that I didn’t even believe I deserved those things.
I’ve hidden until this very moment. Now the words have spilled out of me. My voice shakes when I speak of these truths, but that will never stop me from speaking them.
Your Pain Holds Endless Meaning
“Shhh, Carrie. None of that ever happened. It happened to someone else. You’re safe now.”
I said this to myself over and over again in the last year. It helped me sleep at night until the nightmares got the best of me. Then I had to open my mouth and say something.
When we fight silently, alone, we hold the pain in our bodies until it breaks us.
This is not just a metaphorical break. Statistically speaking, one out of every three victims of abuse develops PTSD or long-term depression. Put that statistic together with the fact that 35% of the world’s women have been abused, and you can see that 10% of the world’s women are living with depression or PTSD related to abuse — and those are just the ones who report both.
After I ran to my new home in Seattle, I hit a wall. I spent my first few months oscillating between aimless drifting, vivid nightmares, and bursts of ecstatic joy. I started to see a new therapist. And, most significantly, I started to speak up. I said, out loud, what happened to me. I shared my journey and my joy in an online community and in a biweekly group for those who faced trauma.
Finally speaking the words burst something in my heart, something that was waiting to heal since I was a little girl. It allowed me to see the larger narrative I was playing out. And that narrative of suffering, unworthiness, conditioned silence, paradoxically, began to mend the broken pieces.
Today, I feel tender and raw, like I have met a younger version of myself, and I am holding her hand and guiding her through the deserted hallways of her middle school. She’s about 11, and she is so bright and she just wants someone to believe in her. Someday, people will want a piece of her quiet sensibility, her insistent passion. She will allow some of them in and keep the bad ones out. I promise her this.
I live on my own these days. I found an apartment that catches the light from the sunrise each morning. I usually wake up, make myself tea, let my dog sleep in under the covers.
As I have opened up my story to people, dozens of them (mostly women) have nodded their heads. They have said, “Me too, Carrie,” with wide, knowing eyes. I discovered that I’ve been living in a world where all along all these people have silenced their pain, boxed it up and shoved it down, hoping that it has no significance.
All our pain has significance. No matter what its origins, your pain has a meaning that multiplies when you share it.
I was silent to protect his ego, to protect his fragile heart. But what about mine? What about all the hearts who’ve been broken in the name of protecting an abuser’s fragile ego, in the name of preserving a patriarchal bullshit system that was created to keep my open, wild, untamed heart in check? What about all the bruised arms and legs and cheekbones? What about mine?
I’m letting the sun shine down on me now, warming the insides of my bones. I’m letting the pain, once twisted so tightly around my shoulders, unfurl and fall to my feet.
It is a rebirth of sorts, a chance to love myself the way someone else told me I wasn’t worthy of being loved.
Last week, I took a trip to the mountains north of Seattle with my dog, where the late summer rain beat against the windows and the clouds hugged the cliffs. I stared out the window at a steel-gray sky, at blue mountains, and I breathed all the details out into these words — my strength, my weakness, my everything is right here.
The colors have calmed. My heart no longer races. I am no longer running away.
I love with an imperfect love. I hope with an imperfect hope. I live each day, and, in the end, I have to believe I’ve done enough, loved enough, hoped enough.
Isn’t that all we ever want to do? Isn’t that all any of us can be? Raw, loving, feeling creatures?
Today, I say to all those around me who are hurting: you are not alone. You are not standing in an empty room. There are people all around you who will let you speak the name of what hurts. You don’t have to nurture your bruises anymore. They were never yours to bear.
Lay your bruises down next to mine, and let’s love and hope and live again. Or, perhaps, you can take my hand and we can learn together how to love, hope, and live for the very first time.
If this story moved you, please hit the heart “recommend” button just below. Sharing this story spreads the word about the prevalence of violence against women and the hope of recovery.
Thank you to the brave and talented Amy Selwyn, who edited this piece, and whose words pushed me through my fear to share my own. Thank you to patient and passionate David Hathaway for editing early drafts.
