doot :p

This piece is very very personal to me. My close friends already know this, but for 6 months of my life in the past year I was in what I now understand to be an emotionally abusive relationship. I have always struggled with getting very attached to people even when they are not good for me, and repeatedly forgiving people who do not deserve it. I try to see the best in people and believe that they are capable of changing. I used to believe that most people are ultimately good at heart, but I have since realized how harmful being too forgiving can be.

I feel somewhat silly talking about what went on, but I want to be honest and set these feelings free so I can close this chapter of my life for good. Maybe by talking about my experience, someone will be able to better recognize the signs of emotional abuse and avoid being in the same situation. Or maybe it will just be a story that some of my friends read. Either way I want to get it out there and let those feelings out with this drawing :). I was too embarrassed to tell anyone in my life what was going on until the end. I couldn’t talk to my therapist about what was going on, so I quit going. I convinced all of my friends I was happy even though I was in a constant state of severe anxiety and depression throughout most of our relationship.

It started with very intense love bombing, which has become such a buzzword I didn’t even recognize it as something that was actually happening in my life. She told me she loved me very quickly, and talked about how she wanted to spend her life with me. She made me feel very understood in the beginning. I want to note that it is very normalized among lesbians to jump quickly into relationships, to the point that uhauling has become a ubiquitous meme within lesbian culture. I myself have always tended to move fast in relationships. Although the level of intensity from her concerned me at first, it wasn’t atypical enough for me to recognize it as a bad thing.

Next, I became isolated. She would cry when I went home and repeatedly told me I did not make enough time for her. Eventually, this got to the point where I would spend half of the week at her house and I barely saw any of my friends for the duration of our relationship. She took more and more of my time until I had nothing left. I never recognized how much I missed until the end. As someone who has struggled with attachment for most of my life, I was happy at the time that someone wanted me around that much. For once, I didn’t feel constantly scared to be abandoned in a relationship.

The emotional abuse itself began with small things such as ordering me around, as well as getting upset when I wanted to spend time with my friends. Then she would do things like publicly humiliate me: saying embarrassing things about me to the cashier at the grocery store, calling me a stupid bitch and pretending to punch me in front of my friends. Eventually, it got to the point where she would “jokingly” hit me to the point that I consistently had some sort of bruise on my legs or arms from her. I repeatedly asked her to stop and she refused. I was made to feel crazy because it was all “just a joke.” She would tell me I didn’t love her, I didn’t like anything about her because I was asking her to stop when this was just her sense of humor. As these things went on, I continued to feel worse and worse about myself, like I deserved to be treated this way.

She would constantly push my boundaries throughout our relationship and start arguments any time I did not want to do something she wanted. For example, when I told her I didn’t want to smoke weed with her one night she yelled at me and told me that I didn’t love her because I did not want to do the things that were important to her. This happened in every aspect of life: how we had sex, what activities we did, who drove when we went places etc. If I ever disagreed, an argument would start. I started feeling like I was not allowed to say no, and began agreeing to things I did not want in order to avoid being yelled at.

It’s probably confusing why I would stay through all of this, but the thing about emotional abuse is that they are very good at breaking down your confidence, convincing you that you are the problem, and causing you to question your reality. Our arguments would consistently end with me apologizing and feeling terrible about myself, despite the conflict beginning with something she had done to upset me.

I would often be pushed to the point of having outbursts. I became the worst version of myself that I have ever known. I was constantly anxious and irritated, and she held all of this behavior against me. Where I would forgive her for everything mean she had done to me, she would repeatedly bring up anything I had done to remind me how terrible I was. This combined with her being excessively sweet to me following our arguments is what convinced me to stay for so long. I felt so worthless, as if no one else could ever love someone who behaved like I did.

My anxiety during this time escalated to a level that my body was barely functioning. At some points, I could barely eat more than a few bites of food a day. I lost a significant amount of weight, which is when my friends began noticing that something was wrong.

As an example of what my behavior looked like, I will talk about one of the worst moments before we broke up. One night I was driving to her house and I had not been able to eat anything since the day before. It was a 2 hour drive, and when I got there I told her I was so hungry it was painful and I just needed her to take me somewhere to get food, I didn’t care where. When we got in the car, she started driving and kept asking me where I wanted to stop. My brain could not make decisions at this point and I told her over and over I did not care where. We continued as I asked her where we were going and she told me she didn’t know yet.

When we had been driving for an hour, I started getting very frustrated because of how much pain I was in. I kept asking her why we were still driving and if she could please just pick somewhere. She told me I needed to pick. We continued arguing about this, and eventually parked at a mall. This got to the point where I began screaming, hitting myself, and hitting the dashboard of the car telling her to just decide somewhere to eat. I asked why she would drive out all this way when I told her how much pain I was in and how I just needed anything to eat. At this point, this was the worst breakdown I had ever had in my life. I stepped out of the car and walked towards the mall sitting on a bench in the rain trying to think straight and calm myself down.

Eventually I walked back to the car and she told me how ridiculous I had been. She made me feel so ashamed of the way I’d acted. I felt so disgusted with myself. I was convinced I had just screamed at her for no reason. This was the moment I fully began believing that I was doomed to be a terrible person forever. After berating me for a while and telling me I should just go home, eventually she took me to get ramen. At the restaurant, she was very sweet to me and made me feel so loved after what had happened. This is what perpetuated the cycle. I believed that no one else would ever be able to watch me act the way I did and still love me. I’ve realized now the reality is that no one who loves me would push me to that point.