Surviving and Rebuilding

You've taken everything i am

don't leave the job half done

No reason i should stick around

don't leave the job half done

I no longer have a voice

don't leave the job half done

I cried myself to sleep last night

don't leave the job half done

There is no joy in Mudville today

don't leave the job half done

My name is shit and all of that

don't leave the job half done

I'm hollowed out, i will not fight

don't leave the job half done

I can't do it on my own, though

don't leave the job half done

You snuff it out

Why am I staying at this party

I don't want to be here

And I feel like

This whisky kind of tastes like regret

Smooth going down and smooth coming up

You don't know i know when you've had enough

I only wanted a few minutes of your time

Just enough for you to notice that I'm not fine

I sit here alone and wonder...if you had seen

I tried to have the life I wanted

When I finally escaped, 

you told me to have the life I deserved

So I'm trying, but it turns out

What you think I deserve

And what I deserve

Are further apart

Than we are now

I may not have ended up where I wanted,

But I'm where I can breathe and grow,

So now I know

I ended up where I was supposed to be

This place is not a place of honor

But I can be proud of my growth

There is nothing of value buried here

I don't bury myself anymore

Just a quiet, little space,

Tucked away, decorated

With your favorite things

You can't even imagine

How safe you would feel there

How welcome,

How protected

You'd love the life I've made for us

Cooking all your favorite foods

Whenever you wanted them

Just the way you like them

This place is everything you ever wanted

You'd love it so much, or rather -

You will.

[I wrote this around the time my first wife's mother passed away.]

My first wife introduced me to the music of Simon & Garfunkel. (It's funny, but not relevant to this story, that my parents told her early on in our relationship, "thank you for introducing him to some GOOD music", referring to my love of the what-I-recognized-as-"classic rock" that was only a couple of years older than I was, which they didn't approve of [in particular, Queen....ask me about it sometime]; her immediate response to them was, "I dunno...I like Queen, too." It may have been just an unthinking, honest response that meant exactly what she said, it might have been something else entirely. It might have been a non-confrontational way of telling me [and my parents] that she had my back. My biggest regret in life will always be that I didn't take her at her word. As hard as things got, as much as I fucked up, she was never the one that gave up on us. That was me. I wanted a divorce because it was easier than seeing her disappointed in me anymore, because I still wasn't really figuring out my shit.)

For whatever reason, I gravitated towards their later stuff. A lot of the bleakness of the lyrics really resonated with me, and some of the angst as well. That said, one of my absolute favorite songs by Simon & Garfunkel very quickly became "America". The story of our narrator and their partner Cathy taking a Greyhound bus across the country "to look for America", the song seemed to perfectly capture my feeling of wonderment at the world, along with my feeling completely, hopelessly lost in blackness, looking for headlights or streetlamps or anything that might offer some reprieve.

More than a decade later, that song was on my mind again as I sat on a Greyhound bus with a new partner, headed towards Chicago for what was supposed to be the start of an exciting new chapter. In fact, it WAS an exciting new chapter. It just wound up being what I needed rather than what I wanted, and at the time I couldn't see the good, because it all looked bad.

While I was in Chicago, trying to distract myself from how terribly things were going and trying to conserve as much money as I could, I decided to further my musical education, and try to get into Yes. I went through, album by album, grabbing a couple of tracks who's titles caught my eye, adding them to the playlist I was making online. The plan was to listen to this playlist until I really got into some of the songs. But that's when I noticed it: "America". 

THE "America"?

I quickly looked at the album credits.

"Yup. 15 minute prog opus cover of 'America'? Yes, of course it's going on the playlist."

It, of course, rose to the top of my favorite Yes tracks.

As I write this, it's February 9th, 2026. Every day, the news gets scarier and scarier. A lot of people seem to suddenly be seeing that they don't recognize America anymore.

"America" (the original) came up on my shuffle today. That ending chorale of "We've all come to look for America" took on an entirely different meaning for me today.

[What follows is the text of an entry I wrote a bit ago while trying to find a platform I felt I could safely, anonymously tell my story on]

[TW: threats of self-harm]

If I try to think back to what the first red flag was that I ignored, I'm surprised at how far back I have to go.

Try as I might, I can't (right now, at least) think of what should have been the first red flag. Undeniably, though, the first red flag I noticed (and really should have let be the last one) was also the first time in our relationship that she would follow what came to be a familiar pattern: hint at suicidal ideation without actually saying it, and then calling everyone crazy when they tell her they thought she was going to try to kill herself.  It is also one of the things she held over me for our entire relationship.

I don't recall what it was that sparked this whole thing, but I do remember that she was upset about something, and was trying to pressure me into going to driving out of town more than an hour away that night to be with her.  I didn't want to go because I had to open the store the next morning.  When I told her I wouldn't drive down to stay with her because I had to be up early the next morning, she began intimating that she was going to hurt or possibly herself if I didn't.  Still I refused, and told her I didn't much appreciate her threats of suicide to get what she wanted, as a previous partner had played the same games.  

That absolutely set her off, and she quickly told me off for saying she was playing games, and then made another intimation before blocking my phone entirely.

At this point, I called the non-emergency number for her local police department, and asked for a welfare check.  I knew she hated the police, but I reasoned I would rather have her alive and hating me than dead and happy with me.  When I finally did hear from her again, she ripped into me because I had traumatized her by sending the cops to her door, and she made no bones about telling me how much she hated me for not just letting her die.

I didn't know it, but going forward, when she was drunk, this would be one of the things she would pull out when telling me what a horrible person I am (along with a misrepresentation of when I initially ended our affair), often telling me in detail which parking lot she was laying in when the paramedics found her, and how much she had hated me that night. Occasionally, she would be drunk enough to tell me that she still hated me.

[What follows is the text of an entry I wrote a while ago while attempting to find a platform that felt safe for me to use to share my story]

So, I guess I don't really know if it's better to start from the end and work backwards, or go from the beginning. Or maybe some sort of just jumping around as things occur to me.  And then I don't know if I'll go back and put them chronologically, or what, but.....see, that's just my brain once again trying to get ahead of itself.  I have to actually write before I can worry about what comes next.

[What follows is the text of an entry I wrote a while ago in a note on my phone, and it's stayed there until I felt like I had a platform to safely post it on]

It's taken a while to get here, but I think I'm finally ready to tell this story.  To me, it's an important one to tell, and I am no longer going to be silenced, either by someone else, or my own fears.

Here at the start, I am going to attempt to establish some ground rules for myself, so I don't burn myself out.  I am not going to push myself to discuss something before I feel like I'm ready to confront it. I'm not going to try and give every moment that I recount some sort of neat little button, as though it's an amusing anecdote. Most importantly, I am the only person I am doing this for. Yes, I feel like i need to be an advocate for other male DV victims because I know how hard it is to find support. 

I am not going to speak for anyone but myself. No one else's story is mine to tell, but this one is mine, and nobody else has the right to dictate how I tell it. 

On the other side of that coin, though, I am going to state right now that I know and acknowledge that my abuser herself was previously a victim of what I understand to be some pretty horrific abuses herself. No matter what she put me through, she did not ever deserve what happened to her. It doesn't make what she did acceptable, though. (One thing that we often argued about was that I feel one has an ethical responsibility to those around them to always try to be the best version of themself.  Come to think of it, she never really stated an opposing belief, only that she thought I was wrong.)

In order to tell the story of where I have been, I have to clarify where I currently am.  I am safe physically, I am alive.  We are, at this moment, still legally married.  (She initially threatened to file divorce and try to seek spousal support from me.  At some point, she suddenly shifted into no longer wanting to file, hoping we would "work things out", but saying that if I wanted to file, she would not contest it.  I haven't had the money yet to be able to file.)  I am living in another state; she knows the city and state, but not my address or place of employment (to my knowledge).  She has recently taken to (yet again) dragging me on her social media, making unsubstantiated claims about me, including that I'm a predator, stalker, and rapist.  This was almost immediately after she had added my name (multiple times) to a database which was built by a hacktivist with the intent to allow users to anonymously to submit names of dangerous individuals in their local communities.  Said hacktivist subsequently took down their page, stating that they saw it being used to silence victims.  (Even though the clues were pretty obvious, including the fact that my own wife apparently doesn't know how to spell my middle name, she bragged on her social media about the people she added to the database, and I was included in that list.)  She'll periodically attempt to "name and shame" me....

I need to state once again, for myself: I am safe, I am alive, I am here in the present, where I am living alone in a studio apartment, controlling my own life (to the best of my ability).

[Addendum]

         What follows below is the text of a post I made in a Discord server filled with other exvangelicals the same day I started working on writing all of this:

I've been working on writing some of my experiences as a male survivor of DV, which has meant digging back through the timeline of shit. It was just fascinating to me looking back through my email, and seeing date and time stamps of emails from her: multiple emails a day for months after I left, then it literally tapered off into 2 emails a day, then 1, then she skipped a day, then she skipped 2 days, 5 days, 2 weeks, a month... I also hadn't realized that it was a year to the day between when she emailed me saying that she no longer intended to file divorce and seek spousal support, because she hoped that we could work things out, but that if I wanted to file for divorce then she wouldn't contest it, and when she publicly stated on her Facebook that I had abused her. 

I also hadn't anticipated when I started on this just how frequently I would need to stop and remind myself that I'm here, I'm safe, and I no longer live in that environment

I've been thinking about doing this for a while now. For my own safety at this time, I'm going to try to tell my story while also including as little potentially identifying information as possible.

I've written a few things already, but my plan is to use this blog to tell my own story and be a voice for others like me: men who have escaped domestic violence. Understandably, most of the resources available out there are supportive of women, but with little apparent thought given to how men can also fall into this.

That said, I may also occasionally post things I've written that are meaningful to me in my journey through all this, but maybe not directly related to the exact trauma that brought me here. If you're reading, and you don't like it: tough.

So, here's what to know at this point: I'm a male, I'm probably closer to the end of my life than I am the beginning, and I've been on this particular journey (from understanding that I was being abused to today) for about 5 years now.