[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).
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 know it will be healing...I just had hoped the healing would be more like "ok, thank god that joint finally popped, now I can walk normal again", and less "changing the gauze on a very deep wound"