There were good times, and I will miss those. Nobody ever tells you there will be good times because it is hard enough to figure out when your abuser is being acutely abusive. They just say that the relationship might look or seem normal from time to time, or that the abuser might be extremely kind. They said nothing about the way the abuser might play off of your weird and offbeat humor, forgot to mention how you might be able to talk to the person until five in the morning – that is just normal relationship stuff.
Amidst remembering all the bad times, those memories make seeing him even more troublesome, but now, in this modern age, I can see him in my friends’ Snapchat stories, Facebook and Twitter pictures, too. Blocking accounts only goes so far when my abuser exists in people’s lives outside his own. Although I know otherwise, it is easy to feel like my college and my country’s justice system do not actually care about me when it has been 71 days and the title nine investigators have just contacted me. I would check my email anywhere between four to 30 times a day, depending on if I have acute anxiety about this at the time – still, the message is never there – and dream of what that email would say. It did not say sorry. They just wanted to meet with me, and the only message I am receiving is the image of my abuser in my friends’ pictures, living his normal life.
I am told that my abuser has his own problems, despite the way it looks. But the fact that he can have a clean record and that to the public, he can be my abuser anonymously, troubles me; he is not going to learn, and it is not going to get better. No problem in his life is going to teach him about consent or respect, and until this is remedied I fear for anyone emotionally close to him whenever I am not feeling sorry for the time I lost on myself.
I cannot take back the time I spent waiting on his every desire; I cannot undo what has been done to me, and after two trips to the ER and one hospitalization for the anxiety he caused me and the trauma he put me through, all I can do right now is deal with it. But I can’t effectively deal with it in a society which asks me if the relationship was so toxic, why I stayed in it so long, which is fantastically slow to believe my story, and which fails to inform me of my rights as a survivor. I cannot deal with it, and I will not deal with it until I deal with every misconception of my story and as many stories like mine as possible, until there are better educational systems in place across curriculums dealing with abusive behaviors, until there is justice. He will hide behind this disbelief, misinformation, and injustice to the public until these wrongs have been amended, because this is the tragic reality of life after these harmful relationships: the abuser remains anonymous and modern society’s support system fails in the same ways it has failed again and again throughout history. It is time for a shift in this reality; it is time for real change.
We need to listen to each other and learn from one another, and we need to try to learn from these tragedies. We need to be more open, and we need to lift up what we love rather than tear down what we do not, as these acts encourage hateful dialogues. We need to learn respect for ourselves and for each other and understand that while we cannot undo the damage that has been done, we can speak up and stand together and prevent it from happening in the future. So, I ask you: speak up.
