The Truth

Sunday morning came, and I awoke feeling like I had peeled a scab the night prior, my pink flesh left exposed.

It wasn’t the first time I shared the story of the assault I endured when I was pregnant with my oldest son. The first time I had to tell the story was to the main character, my now-ex husband, the morning after while he suffered a debilitating headache. I hashed out details as he looked at me quizzically, lacking recollection. Details, such as my nude groom grabbing the hair above my forehead to smash the back of my head into the carpeted apartment floor—exposing me to the lack of soft underlay between it and the concrete beneath—as he told me I was ruining his life. Or that once I escaped his grasp I ran through the front door, to the courtyard, and was astonished as I saw his exposed penis flapping from one leg to another as he chased me into the parking lot. That I thought of his humiliation, then my own, as I ran right back into our home through the back door, back to his aggression that was intensified by his pursuit.

I retold him this several times throughout our marriage, including when the abuse would persist. Our first date night after our son’s birth ended with the police driving him to stay the night at his mother’s house because I refused to perform fellatio in the parking lot of the Mexican restaurant. His anger persisted on the long drive home, and only escalated when we were in the confines of our thin-walled dwelling. After a neighbor alerted the authorities, the only marks that could be seen were scratches from me on his back, and it looked like I was the perpetrator.

I’ll stop there.

It was not the first time I told that story but it’s certainly the first time I’ve published it. And now, another like it. This same person has gone on to hurt other women, other people in a myriad of ways. Yet I’ve protected him until now.

What has gotten into me?

Perhaps it has something to do with Friday afternoon, when I did a (getting ever rarer) Facebook check and saw that I was invited to a group for my 20th high school reunion. I felt interest in attending; it took two decades and a social media detox to know little enough about these folks to want to fork over the cost for airfare and hotel accommodations to reconnect. Yet when I accepted the invite, I saw that it was a group I was in but decided to leave years prior because in high school, the host, a “nice guy”, abused knowledge from four years of friendship to manipulate me into physical intimacy when I was blackout drunk and he was sober. As I came to the following morning, violated and disgusted yet feeling at fault, fearing the repercussions to our friendship, he kept begging me to not tell my ex. I later saw him bragging about this evening I had little recollection of on social media, and learned he had shared the story with everyone in our friend group.

During the height of the #MeToo movement, a mutual friend of ours made a post asserting that if she was connected on social media with anyone’s assaulter, that she would unfriend them no questions asked if someone was willing to privately expose them. I shared my experience with her in DM. Knowing she was close with him too, I wanted to make the details clear and to acknowledge that I didn’t learn about the principles of consent until nearly a decade after it happened. I had never told anyone about this experience prior and I worried she would doubt my story, or think little of it.

Rather, she said “Me too, with the same person.” She shared details of a similar scenario, similar self doubt.

After that regrettable (aren’t they always?) Facebook check, I returned to my task at hand: shellacking the trim in my painting studio. It was labor intensive and tedious, so I found myself ruminating over wanting to go to a reunion, wondering why this perpetrator got to appoint himself as the one in charge, and considering alerting the person who invited me to the group, a high school acquaintance I’ve known more about through social media than I ever did in the walls of a learning institution, about the crimes of this creep. Coat after coat of applying bug juice, I thought about how I shouldn’t have to forgo an event I want to attend to avoid a repeat offender.

It occurred to me that I’ve been protecting people who I should have been protected from.

No One’s Victim

In recent conversation, a friend mentioned that people secretly hate those who have suffered, and this is evidenced in how prevalent victim blaming is in our society. We want to believe that the world is just and fair, that bad things don’t happen to good people. People who have not been in proximity to suffering want to shield themselves from the realities of life and cling onto fictions so desperately that they will look for evidence to prove that harm is deserved.

Because I was harmed so much in my childhood, I believed that there was something wrong with me. My high school boyfriend and my first husband both physically assaulted me on many occasions. What’s the common denominator? Me.

That’s the messaging I received from my mother when she didn’t want to help me end my first marriage. I believed that narrative, that my suffering was a result of my own flaws, my own inability to be loved.

I didn’t want to air my dirty laundry, for people to know the ways in which I suffered, because I didn’t want my stories to be experienced as “woe is me.” I didn’t want to paint myself as a victim. I wanted to take ownership of my role in every situation.

The Truth

The truth is that I was harmed frequently because I was unprotected. I was a child and I was in unsafe situations because, through no fault of my own, I lacked guardians and a safe haven.

I couldn’t control my circumstances. I still don’t have the power to control most things in the world. But it’s within my power to tell my stories, no matter who the truth hurts.