*TRIGGER WARNING This article contains information about sexual assault and/or abuse which may be triggering to survivors.

The horrible realization doesn’t hit you until it’s over.

You lay at the bottom of the ocean, nothing but an animal in the sea. You’ve lost your human form, you don’t even know what you are anymore. It isn’t until you break free until your body begins swimming upwards that the sunlight becomes brighter, and you hear the muffled voices of your family and friends screaming from the shore. And just as you’re about to reach the surface, he drags you back into the pitch black abyss. You play tug of war, struggling to save what is left of yourself. When you finally break the surface, your senses return, and all those voices that told you to swim away suddenly make sense.

When you were under, you told yourself, “At least he doesn’t hit me,” which was true. He never gave you a black eye, never left you bruises, not a hair on your head was harmed. He never hit you, but occasionally, he jiggled the fat on your arms while laughing. He deemed your dress size as “irregular” and critiqued your outfit choices. After constantly pointing out your imperfections and comparing you to other women, he eventually convinced you that physical improvement was necessary.

Your body became nothing more than his property. With it, he forced you to do things you were uncomfortable with and talked about your body in ways that sent a shiver down your spine. When you tried to tell him this, he'd puff up his chest, defensive and angry. Everything you said was twisted to portray an attack towards him, never seen as self-defense. He said that no one else would ever want you and made it clear that other women were attracted to him. You were lucky to even have him, so why would you complain?

Your accomplishments were intimidating. You could not be “the successful one” in the relationship. He supported your dreams, but only when they aligned with his own. He took every chance he could to make you feel stupid and always lectured you like a child when you were wrong. He used interrogation and manipulation to prove to you that he was always right.

And once he made your strengths into weaknesses, he turned your struggles into strings that he could pull up and down like a puppeteer when he chose. All the things you once told him in confidence, he then used against you. He painted your mental illness as a lie you made up. And yet, he still used these “nonexistent” anxieties to control you. The responsibilities in your life towards others that were out of your control kept you from him, so he then turned your helpless situation into guilt. As hard as you tried to keep him happy and impress him, it was never enough. You were never good enough, but you stayed because you were nothing without him.

He slowly began to isolate you from your friends and family. If you enjoyed yourself without him around, he acted hurt. If he deemed other men around you a threat, he acted jealously. He made your loved ones and the things you’re passionate about seem like an inconvenience. At the end of the day, your happiness was the ultimate cause of his misery.

It was always your fault.

So you let him control who you saw and when. You let him keep you from visiting your family. Your independence was gone. He had you so well trained, you automatically spit out an, “I’m fine,” when someone reached out to you in concern. They tried to make you see what he had done to you, but you were in so deep that no light could reach you down into the abyss, the voices of your loved ones became indistinct. He slowly depleted every form of support in your life until he was all you had left.

He has a lot of anger and insecurities inside himself, and he took them all out on you. His outbursts came suddenly and without warning, and despite knowing that it was not your fault, you couldn’t help but to blame yourself. Even though he made you cry more than he made you smile, even though he took pleasure out of seeing you wince, even though you didn’t know which version of himself you would greet tomorrow, you forgave him every time he told you this was the last time he would hurt you. Because you loved him. Because the inevitable optimist inside you saw the good in him. Because you believed he loved you enough to one day change.

But he doesn’t love himself, so he doesn’t know how to show you proper affection. He enjoyed having power over you, abusing your trust, and never making you the only one. He never hit you because he didn't need to. You were already dead.

He made you feel like nothing, he killed your happiness, your spirit, the very things that made you, you. Because he didn’t love you. And until you relearn to love yourself, you’ll never live again.