Even in my Weakness, I am Strong.

(Sensitive content/trigger warnings: abuse – sexual, mental/emotional/physical)

I talk about general dysfunction in relationships far more than I gravitate toward the topic of abuse – whether it be physical, mental, or emotional. My immediate assumption was that I must have just gotten the most abusive relationships out of the way early and tackled those first when healing so I felt like I moved past that point in my life. Just now when I circled back to a memory from one of those relationships, only to conclude that I handled it far better than I gave myself credit for at the time, the way my whole body felt electrified the moment before being covered in goosebumps made me realize that maybe my assumption was the tiniest bit off.

I was never hit so it’s hard for me to admit, or perhaps accept, that my experience counts as abusive. There had long been a theme of never feeling enough that popped up in every aspect of my life, even in my traumas. I tell myself that if anything, I just wasn’t standing up for myself enough and that’s my fault. Now at this point, I know you want to interject that victims often blame themselves and defend their abusers but the truth is I just struggle to own that I could have ever allowed that to happen to me.

Shame is one of the indicators I look for when I’m scanning myself for reactions, opportunities for growth. The events leading up to my pregnancy and ones that followed for quite some time after seem to be a place I’m stored a lot of shame. It’s as if I don’t want anyone to ever know that I was weak enough to let someone guilt me into getting pregnant at 18 years old. But I want everyone to know because it’s been a really heavy secret to hold on to.

I met my son’s dad for the first time the weekend of my 18th birthday. He was 26 and seemed to know how to give me the attention and understanding that my upbringing had left me craving. You know, temporarily at least but we’ll get to that soon enough. A few months into dating, the very timid me of the past had worked up the courage to tell him that he either needed to use a condom or we weren’t having sex because my birth control was on backorder.

When I hit 26 years of age, I thought back on this interaction thinking maybe I’d understand where he was coming from a little better when he started telling me that “it was a sign”. Now mind you, at 26 I had just recently started believing in signs and was seeing them everywhere. That part, I get. I didn’t think, though, that signs came as people protesting that they were scared, not ready, didn’t want to. Something tells me that’s not the message the universe likes to send.

Some of the details get foggy when my emotions start coming into play but I believe I stood on firm ground until I was told that if I cared about him, loved him, and trusted him, then I wouldn’t have been reacting that way. Sometime during my pregnancy, my insecurity surfaced and led me to a paranoid fit of searching through emails that were not mine.

Found it. It’s funny how we can do something wrong and we suddenly feel justified in it, so long as we get the result we desired. It’s almost as if we forget about our parents waving their fingers in our faces over and over, “two wrongs don’t make a right”. So often adults think the values that we try to instill into children no longer apply to us, no wonder the children seem to have such a hard time picking them up.

I didn’t find the proof of cheating I was looking for, no. At the time, I really wished I had. Instead, I found a series of emails in which he was trying to guilt someone who came before into giving him the baby that he so desperately wanted but couldn’t have himself. I was proud of her. She was much firmer in her “no” than I was. That was the moment I tucked this experience away as shame. I can’t believe I let this happen. Why couldn’t I be like her, whoever she was, and love myself enough to stand up for myself? I must be the reason this happened because clearly if someone else could avoid it, I could have too.

I let my shame keep me hidden and quiet longer than I would have liked. Sometimes I’m hard on myself for that and I had to fight the urge to replace the words “would have liked” with “should have”. I’m trying to speak to myself more kindly, though. It wasn’t until this morning when I realized that even though I endured a rollercoaster of mental and emotional abuse for years when I finally got up the courage to walk away, I only gave one chance before I trusted my knowing that things wouldn’t change and I wouldn’t let that be my life.

My first attempt came with a first month’s rent and security deposit put on an apartment down the street and waiting until I thought it was too late to take back before I confessed what I did and that I was leaving. Tears. Woah. I didn’t know you had emotions like that. I didn’t know that you could feel. Does this mean you care? Men expressing emotion in a world that demands they be tough has this funny tendency to bring me to my knees so when he sobbed and begged me to stay, promising he didn’t know I was hurting that bad and that everything would change, I believed it.

Things changed. For the next two weeks we got along just about as well as we did in those first few months of dating and I was hopeful. Week three, metaphorically, slammed us into a wall, and from that point on it seemed like all I could do was crawl from one moment to the next, numb again.

I’ve long credited Isaac for me leaving the relationship I was in when I did but the truth is he was just the first thing I found to reawaken me out of my numbness. I wasn’t looking to cheat, I just wanted to feel understood. I believe Isaac was a product of the strictly platonic section and as much as that was my intention we slipped quickly. The speed of our descent down that slope is what’s to credit for my final departure more than the companion with whom I was slipping.

I believe that the reason people get trapped in these cycles of constantly going back to abusers is that when you’ve reached the level of numbness that exists to help you survive the seemingly unsurvivable, you forget what feeling is like. As soon as you find the courage to break away, you’re faced with it hitting you all at once, and sometimes that’s too much to handle. There’s a lot of backlogged feeling waiting to be addressed.

My heart aches for anyone that believes at this moment that numbness is preferable. I’ve been there but that doesn’t necessarily mean I understand how hard it is on you right now. What I do understand, though, is that the life you build after you endure that flood of emotions is well worth breaking away from. No matter how hard it seems, it’s worth it. No matter how many times it takes, it’s worth it.

I was reluctant to say I was proud of myself for breaking away after the first failure because I don’t want anyone to feel discouraged that they’re on their 9^th attempt and still waiting for it to stick. Maybe I’m still sensitive that the girl from the email was firmer in her no. We all travel different paths at different speeds because we are all unique in our needs and lessons. Finding courage and following it through isn’t easy otherwise more people would be living the life of their dreams. Trust that you’ll get there – I do.

Much love, until next time.