A Life I Almost Lost

Answering your FAQs, featuring all the greatest hits like 'why didn't you just leave'.

There’s a threshold in everyone’s life, the before, and the after. Most people, I believe, will approach and cross multiple thresholds. Multiple befores and multiple afters. As people, we are constantly changing, constantly becoming. After every threshold, the befores become versions of ourselves that sit extinct behind a sheet of glass, like in a museum, or a photo frame.

Trigger Warning: domestic violence, rape - mentions and insinuations but no graphic descriptions.

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I spent years trying to get an old version of me back like they tell you to after something horrible happens. To ‘get back to your old self’. I will never be my old self. The self that believed in such black and whites that people were bad and good, awful and wonderful, but never both, and never neither.

That’s the kind of life view you have at seventeen. Fresh from girl-hell an all girls school, where I was blissfully unaware sexism existed. All the men I knew, I was related to. I had no male friends, the closest thing I had to a boyfriend lived in words on a page or ink on a poster and I was completely unaware of the dark possibilities that lie beyond those walls. Because then, as is often the case with seventeen year olds, I met a boy. And as is often the case with boys, he was ever so nice to me. To begin with.

Question 1: You must have known though.

Not so much a question as an accusation. No, I didn’t know. Because as previously stated. He was ever so nice to me. If at that point I’d known. What on Earth do you think would have possessed me to commit myself to that eventuality? No. I did not know.

Manipulation and coercion are like magic tricks. While they distract you, the magician switches some cards around or changes the deck right in front of you. And you’re none the wiser. The words never match the actions. The words are pretty at first, there are promises, distraction. And I believed them, because why wouldn’t I? I was young, naive, and desperate to be loved. He told me he loved me, he even acted it out for a little while. Then he stopped. He changed, he stopped trying so hard to cover up his misdirections. He’d show me how all the tricks worked. And it felt like our secret. A cult of two that he allowed me to join. Because he was always the leader, and I was always the prey that took itself willingly into the trap.

Question 2: Why didn’t you just leave?

Now this one. This one’s a question. And it makes my veins pulse out my skin. The rage I feel when anyone utters anything close to this question, can only be described by a guttural scream.

Why didn’t I just leave? There are many answers to this one. It varies from situation to situation. Sometimes it isn’t safe to leave. Sometimes, it just isn’t possible.

For me, it was both of these - he locked the doors and I didn’t have a key. I literally, physically, couldn’t leave. But there was one reason that was more prominent than even that.

I didn’t know I should.

When someone tells you they love you, you believe them. When they say they’d do anything for you, you believe them. When they’ve snatched away your first years of adulthood, all your firsts, they hold such important parts of you, parts you want to stay close to. And then one day, they drop them right in front of you, what do you do? I stayed. I justified his actions. He had a lot to hold, he’ll pick them up again later. Because I didn’t know I should leave, I didn’t know this wasn’t what love was meant to be, that I wasn’t feeling what I was meant to be, and I didn’t know I could.

It’s always more complicated than it looks from the outside.

Question 3: Why aren’t you happy now? Do you think maybe you like being the victim?

Truthfully, I am happy now. But it took five years.

There are so many things I thought I’d surrendered when I was trapped in a dark, slightly moulding room that I’d accepted as my prison cell. Not to be bleak, but living was pretty high up on the list. I survived through years of my life, just to be thrust into an After carrying suitcase after suitcase of emotional damage, no map, no direction, just no longer being abused. And who am I without that?

Grappling with being a victim, and then no longer being a victim, an ex-victim if you will, is a complicated thing. For years, I felt like it defined me. If people knew this one thing about me, they’d get me. They’d get why I am the way I am. So every time I met new people, I found a way to tell them, to warn them of who I was. A damaged, confused, weak, victim. Because that’s how I saw myself, that’s who he made me think I was.

I thought they needed to know that I panic when anyone slightly raises their voice or moves suddenly. That I can’t handle silence during a disagreement. That if I’m ignored or left on delivered, I descend into a mental spiral where I can’t tell the difference between intuition or crippling anxiety. I thought I needed to be looked after, and I was giving everyone the tools to do so.

Despite not being in that situation anymore, I never processed any of it until then. It all happened after, my body finally feeling safe enough to process anything. And it’s a really weird feeling to be going through the emotions of something that’s no longer happening. You can’t say, this just happened and I feel like this about it because it was hundreds of instances of a This, and hundreds of feeling like this about it all happening inside me, silently about a This that happened years, months, weeks ago.

And all of them were a This that I couldn’t quite remember properly. It came to me in waves, in partial memories, and I never quite trusted a lot of what I remembered because I never learned that it was okay to trust myself. In fact, I’d been taught the opposite. When you teach a dog a trick, you don’t expect it to forget that trick if it goes to stay with someone new. He’ll respond to the same command in search of some praise. I was constantly searching for some kind of saviour to make it stop. And it only stopped when I realised I didn’t need anyone else to stop it for me.

Being told for years what to feel, what to be, and who I am makes it completely terrifying to be left to make those choices alone. Because while it’s a horrible reality, it’s familiar. And even in agonising familiarity, there’s a twisted kind of comfort.

This year, I found myself alone, and developed a comfort in myself that I’ve never had. I trusted myself for the first time since I was a child and realised that I don’t need to be looked after to be safe. I finally accepted that my reaction to another person’s inhumane and violent treatment of me is not weakness, pathetic, or shameful.

But he will probably never feel shame for what he did to me and that was the hardest thing to make peace with. I can tell myself I’m safe over and over but I will never be able to tell myself he got what he deserved. Because he probably never will.

Question 4: Why didn’t you report it?

I did.

But I have no proof. I have nothing that could convince a judge I’m right and he’s evil. And I never will.

These cases will never be simple — even when there is clear evidence, they often get let off. So I chose not to go through the horrendously traumatic experience of a court case against a family — because it would be me vs his family, his very wealthy family — and their horrible lawyers, treating me like I’d been the one to cause all this. Like the situation was my fault.

Because I knew I wouldn’t get anything other than more hurt. He’d get nothing. The reality was that my report wasn’t the first against him, and I’m led to believe it wasn’t the last, but he walks around living a normal life. He strolls the aisles of Tesco wondering what to make for dinner. He spends weekends walking down the high street, popping into shops. He goes to work, and he goes home to a family. He goes on holidays, sits on commercial flights, and he goes for pints at the pub.

And he did all of it while I was rebuilding my life after he tore it apart, before and after sending me a message asking to ‘catch up’. Was he unaware of what he did, or unaware that, now, I knew?

Question 5: Don’t you feel guilty that you not going through court means he’ll do it again?

Yes. I think about her every day. A woman is in an even worse situation that I was, because I didn’t take my report further. My further suffering would not have saved her. He’s manipulative enough to get out of anything. He told me he had rape allegations against him and he made me feel sorry for him. He’s done that before, and I’m sure he’d have done it again. A woman is in an even worse situation that I was, because of him.

Someone else’s choices, are not my fault. Blame him, not the woman he tortured for years for not screaming loud enough, or to the right people, or at the right time.

Question 6: It’s been years, surely you’re over it now.

Ah, another helpful and supportive statement! Will I ever be over it? Impossible to answer. I will never know who I would’ve been without this part of my life. And I’ve mourned a woman I will never know for so long. But I made her into the perfect version of any woman ever, and told myself if this hadn’t have happened, I could have been her. It took until recently to realise I am her. I am a version of the woman I’ve always wanted to be and I didn’t actually realise it. At completely random times, I have an overwhelming feeling that I made it. Not to anywhere in particular, I just built a life I’m happy in, and that felt so out of reach it hadn’t even crossed my mind in 2020.

So am I over it? Over him? Yes. Over what he did? Never. I will never forgive him. And I should never have to.

But I’ve had to let it go. I am not who I am because of him. I thought for years that was the case, but who I am has nothing to do with another person. I loathe to give him credit for anything I’ve built since I turned 21. Everything I built during the years I knew him. She was a stronger version of me than I ever gave her credit for.

I’ve always questioned whether the versions of us that are built at every threshold replace the old ones, or if they just pull up a seat at the table. I used to think at each threshold, it killed the last version of me. They’d be available only in the past. But to kill them off is to discredit all of the things they went through to get to today.

When I started writing this, I wrote that the version of me who didn’t leave, didn’t report any of this, felt comfort in being a victim, that she cowered in the corner of my mind, and I, being the big, strong, wise 26-year-old that I am, comfort her. But is that not to agree that the version of me that was abused I am pathetic and weak, and I need to be looked after?

I think it is. And I don’t buy into that. So she sits proudly at that table, and she tells the tale of how when she was growing into an adult, she lived a completely isolated life, she was hurt repeatedly, and while she never fought in the traditional sense, she never let him win.

At that particular threshold, I never gave up. I thought about it, and I tried, but I didn’t.