treatswords

I spent a decade under someone else’s thumb. The finger changed hands over the years, but there I remained, trying to crawl out of the deep fingerprint lines that had become my permanent residence.

I spent years being told that I was not enough, that how I dressed was a tease to other men, that I shouldn’t have said that because it made me sound, “stupid.” After years of that voice standing over me, back curved, hair clinging to the sides of his greasy face, I shrank. When I was young, we used to create toys out of baked clay. Shaping my pink mound into a purse and sliding it into the oven for about thirty minutes. When we pulled it out, the purse was half the size it had been before entering the oven. The perfect purse now a shriveled raisin of its former self. I was that purse in this relationship.

The jealousy was everywhere, even in my bedding. It stuck to everything like a strong perfume that wouldn’t vanish, regardless of how many times it was washed. I hadn’t known jealousy before, not like this. This wasn’t the breezy jealousy that slid through the window with ease after noticing a kid had a toy I didn’t have yet, this was all consuming, all controlling jealousy. The kind that removed me from interactions with anyone of the opposite sex to prevent an argument, the kind that made me prove where I was with pictures taken with an old flip phone.

“See, I’m just out for a walk, look at my tennis shoes and the trees near me!”

I didn’t understand that trust could be broken before it even bloomed. A lawn mower inhaling the pretty pink bulb, coughing it up behind it like shredded paper.

At the time, I didn’t know any different. Love was new to me. Isn’t this what love is? I had seen the way my parents interacted, was that the blueprint for all love? Maybe. But their divorce caused a lot of heartache, turning the print soggy from the massive wound. I had no other choice but to throw it away. My grandparents had loved one another dearly for almost 70 years, was that the blueprint for love? Maybe, but it was a different time when they found one another, in ways a simpler time. What was love with social media beginning to spread like wildfire, eyes being able to wander electronically now too.

I felt what I thought was love on the good days, the ones where we giggled late into the night, the ones where he looked at me so intensely, I think I saw his soul. To be admired fiercely for the first time is intoxicating. I became addicted to the vulnerability, being able to share an intimate side of myself I had never known before. Even on the days my anxiety grew so large, it became me, I still wanted it. Calling him again and again, to apologize for something I wasn’t quite so sure I had done or said, with no answer. Him knowing that ignoring me made my physically ill, my hands shaking, heart racing, stomach turning inside out. My face caressing the porcelain toilet, vomiting excess anxiety into the water, waiting for my phone to start ringing.

And it would. Eventually he would call. He knew just how to make me miserable long enough that when I could finally reach him, I had a list of apologies written out, reading them line by line until he eventually forgave me. The good days were so sparse, I could mark them on a calendar, a large X over two days a month. But I was addicted to those days, so the blank ones were still worth crawling through to experience the good ones again.

I can say that eventually, sometimes, the universe aligns things for you perfectly. Stacking dominos delicately in the background for years, until the moment strikes, and it flicks the last one with its blue finger, watching its hard work finally come to fruition. Sometimes these dominos, click something in our brains. It can take months, years, decades, and sometimes the domino’s never fall. But for me, on this day, they did. I was able to slip out of that relationship. It’s hard when our comfort zone becomes that person. A small womb that holds the two of you together. It’s so easy to slip back in, enjoy the warm fluids for a while. But this time I held firm, never returning to our comfort zone built from straw. I think a subconscious part of me finally seeped through, making the decision it had known was right all along for me when I didn’t have the strength to.

If you’ve never experienced this situation for yourself, it can be so hard to understand why someone stays. I still get asked that to this day.

“But why did you stay?”

I’m here to tell you that it’s the easy thing to stay and absorb the emotional abuse. After so long of hearing those toxic phrases or feeling those cruel actions, my brain became so bruised, it no longer felt anything. It hurts too much to be put through that kind of stress day in and day out, so it just shuts down. I was numb for years, just going through the motions because I was too scared to leave. After years of being numb and blocking those feelings, that hurt still creeps back up, even years later, in moments where a situation resembles the old, the anxiety becomes all-consuming again, my hands sweat, a rash spreads from my chest to my neck.

“Here we go again, the crying, always with the crying.”

His voice plays over and over again in my mind as tears run down my face.

Through years of being in that situation, I forgot what it was like to have a day on my own terms. My mood fluttering around like a blue butterfly until he came along and trapped it in a jar. Watching my wings struggle to move around in the glass, waiting for me to settle to the bottom and give up the idea of ever flying again. The fear of this being my new permanent state of being, the fear of never leaving, consuming what little air there was left in the jar.

Once I was out, instead of making a better decision the next time I fell in love, my wounded heart searched for something familiar, a reflection of itself. When he laid eyes on me, he saw the broken house in front of him, shingles falling from the roof, broken glass crashed on the linoleum floor. It was clear in my timid mannerisms, my constant apologies that flew from me like a sneeze. I fell into him and he absorbed me.

My self-love at that point was none-existent–lighting had struck, burning anything that had a pulse, until I was left with nothing but an outline of the tree I once was, and because of that, I had attracted a man who hated himself.

Since my blueprint was still in the making and had started off in red, messy ink, I didn’t know any better. But I knew a spark when I felt one. Talking to him was exciting. Tiny fireflies danced around us in blades of grass, their bodies emitting the light we both felt in that moment.

A desire to heal was all I wanted to do, but I didn’t realize that desire was to heal myself. Instead, I tried diligently for years to heal him. Over time, he had taken so much of me that when I glanced in a mirror, I saw glimpses of a skeleton. A femur bone shifting beneath my dress.

Trust lacked due to the inconsistencies in his stories, a look from a bartender, confused that the man who was known for taking home random women, was now here with someone he called his, “Long-time girlfriend.” I saw her eyes linger on me, a pitiful glance before shifting over to make his next cocktail. The red flags were there from the moment our connection was born, raising one by one slowly but consistently in the air. My gut became polluted with them, red fabric rubbing the organ raw. My gut continued to fire off that instinct, the one screamed something was off, the one that crept into my bones late at night, waking me from a dead sleep to turn and look at the stranger sleeping next to me. My gut became a permanent state of red, it didn’t know how to be balanced anymore. A doctor pulling my test results up on his computer, a reflection of red casting over his face. My inflammatory markers had climbed so high, they were afraid of falling back down due to impact.

And yet I stayed.

He still had healing to do. He was a mound of clay that had been a lifeless block for years, but I knew if I had the time, I could shape him into the man he had always wanted to be, chiseled jaw and all.

He never knew love, not in the doses I was prescribing, so he lashed out in controlling and toxic ways. Drinking until the sun came up, wallowing alone in our dark living room, reflecting on all the things he did not have. Being with someone who hates themselves, made me start to hate myself too. But I couldn’t figure out where this self-hate was coming from.

Calling my mom on a work break, “Mom, I just don’t like myself. I’m not saying this to scare you, but I feel ending my life would be the easiest thing right now. It would all be so much easier.”

We tried together, my mom and I, to change my diet, change my hair, but I held onto a heavy resentment for myself. Not understanding that the man sleeping a hangover off in our bed was the culprit. If the universe could have spoken to me then, it would have said in its white coat, stethoscope around its neck, “Lay off him for a while, see if you start to feel better.”

To be with someone who is suffering from depression, severe anxiety, PTSD, and who is also a manipulator by nature and shows narcissistic tendencies, it took my life over. He made me question myself, my friendships, my family relationships, trying to keep me in a black hole he knew and loved dearly. Because if I started to see the light, I might leave, and he would be left there alone, eventually buried alive. It was selfish of him to keep me there, and I am still working on forgiving this.

In that hole we had become one, our hips glued together. I forgot how to walk on my own.

It was a hopeless hole, where all beautiful things came to die. We had funerals for them, their sparkling carcasses wrapped in a white sheet, our shovels dropping dirt over them until they disappeared. I quit doing the things I loved, like writing, or when I did it was very hard to get an idea and flow with it.

“There isn’t time for our passions, with our full-time jobs it’s impossible to find time to do the things we love. Life is hard on us.” He would say, watching an idea of mine still grow from the weeds he was planting behind my back, the infection taking over my small idea before it had the chance to be.

“See, told you so, it’s just too hard for us.” He would say, a trail of weeds sprouting behind him.

I didn’t know it then, but the universe was back stacking its dominos, this time moving quickly, it making the rash decision to let them fall the second it finished its plastic dotted trail.

The hole became too much for him, the affairs, the lies, the story he had told himself over and over again about us, had finally grown old.

Coming home from work one day to find he was leaving, breaking our newly signed lease, leaving the pictures we collected together on the walls for me to take down.

He left in a months’ time. I watched from below as he climbed out of our hole and started dropping shovels of dirt over me, trying to silence me once and for all.

But the universe had other plans and when the dominos fell, it woke something in me that I thought had died a decade before.

Self-Love.

It took months to fully return, it was timid and rightfully so. It needed to dip its toes in first to make sure the water was finally warm.

Learning to love yourself doesn’t happen overnight and sometimes changes happen even we don’t feel like they are.

We think parts of ourselves die when we’ve changed for so long, but they don’t, we are resilient, and those parts of us are always there, waiting for us to tap into them again.

And self-love isn’t something anyone “Arrives” to, you always work at it and some years the connection is deeper than others, but we must remain patient with ourselves. It took me only a few months to start to find me again, a gemstone buried somewhere deep inside me was finally starting to surface. But this time it wasn’t for someone looking for something shiny that they lacked in themselves, this time it was for me and only me.

It takes practice and a lot of work to heal from wounds like mine. Even after finding a partner who finally reflected my new bout of self-love. He is everything I need and more. He allows me to grow as big as I want too, he’s not intimidated by my growth or scared that it might change him. He keeps marking my height on a wooden board like when I was a kid.

“Cali is 5-feet tall today.” A swipe of a green marker scribbles.

And even still, the trauma of my past can creep in. We all have snow tracks in our minds that we get used to taking. Our skies slip into them and we feel at ease, knowing the carved-out tracks like the back of our hands. Even when my supportive partner who resembles nothing of the past, brings up a conversation or situation that feels familiar, there my skis go, drifting down the path they’ve known for over a decade, assuming the worst, my shield coming up quickly, a fence of thick glass I can barely see out of.

But I am working on creating new snow paths, even two years into my healing journey.

I’ve done some hard work trying to uncover myself from the decade of hiding under shelves, rugs and beneath the bed. Parts of me come out slowly, and others are still too scared of what’s outside. I keep working with those frightened parts of myself, showing them that his time, I promise it’s safe to come out.

I wanted to write and share a glimpse into this part of my life that only my partner, family, and close friends know about. I never considered what I went through as “trauma” until this past year. I used to laugh at that, thinking, “We’ll what I went through wasn’t that bad.” But here I am, two years later, still healing from it.

There is no level of “bad” something has to be to be considered trauma. I recognize that now.

I am a trauma survivor and through that, I feel ready to talk about it. I think emotional abuse is always seen as the lesser evil, but it’s important to know that it is abuse. When another person turns you into a shell of what you once were, that’s abuse. Gaslighting, belittling, diminishing, manipulating, and spitting toxicity from their every cell and rubbing it into yours, is abuse. And sometimes in order to accept that we have been through something like this, we need permission. My permission came to me from an old friend who said, “Looking back now, I understand that you were in an emotionally abusive relationship.” And that is when it all clicked for me. If you don’t get that permission from anywhere or anyone else, take this piece as that permission.

I wanted to share this, not to hurt anyone or put anyone under a microscope, but to tell those who are either still recovering from emotional abuse or are in that situation now, that you are not alone. I want you to know that I understand how hard it is to escape this, I do, but I’m on the other side now telling you that you are a fucking force to be reckoned with, you are not a caterpillar forever trapped in a cocoon they’ve made for you. You are that blue butterfly, and you have every right to fly as far away as you can from that glass jar.

And I hope you flee, fly like the wind, take your heart, and perform CPR on the red floppy disc. Practice self-love, no matter where you are on your journey. Tend to yourself like you are worthy of being tended to. Even if you feel that nobody believes in you, I want you to know that I do. I believe in you and your ability to love yourself fully and unconditionally.

The scariest thing to do is to walk away and I get that. Trust me, I wouldn’t have spent a decade of my life miserable if I didn’t understand how hard it is.

But I am asking you to join me. I know you haven’t seen the sun for a while, but I promise it won’t burn you.

It’s warm out here and yellow.

For me yellow is the color of my mother’s kitchen in the morning, it grows brighter as we sip our coffee together and giggle. Yellow is the color of my grandma’s old house. It sat on a quiet patch of land near a lazy river. Dozing on and off until late afternoon. My feet kicking the dirt beneath me on the swing set nearby, never fearing how high I climbed.

And what’s so scary about that? Is it hard work? Yes, but is it worth it? Well, let me ask you this.

What color triggers a childhood memory for you that fills you with warmth and comfort? How good would it to feel to be back there again? Covered in that color and swimming in that feeling? To connect to your inner child again?

That’s what it feels like out here.

The air is cool but refreshing and this space will always be here waiting for you whenever you do decide to emerge from the shadows.

Life is too short to not have every corner of yourself filled with that color, that childlike heart, filled with imagination, racing in your chest again.

Swing high, higher than you even think is possible, high enough that you are flying over that yellow house. Grow diligently, take up space, burst from that cocoon, sweat sheening off your back as you spread your wings into the wind.

The universe is almost done stacking, and your last domino is next to fall.