Victims talk about the abuser's actions. Abusers talk about the victim's character.
You can go back and read in my journal entries the compassion I tried to hold for you, see me saying I was far from perfect; I've never blamed you for my side of things, nor have I minimized it. I said I was the only one responsible for my actions regardless of what was happening between us. Most of my entries are just lamenting the fact that I couldn't understand why you would treat me that way because I still cared about you as a person, and I foolishly believed you when you said you cared for me too.
But you've always found a way to convince yourself I deserved the awful and abusive ways you treated me and found ways to make it all my fault. You've done it since we were kids, for over 20 years - and that will never change because you never will.
Saying that I'm a lying narcissist who uses false sexual abuse allegations to "make everyone hate my exes" (demonstrably untrue, because I've always owned up to being toxic and shitty in many of my past relationships, needed therapy to realize how sexually abusive you were, and talking about SA doesn't win you social favor lol), sending me suicide threats to silence me, getting other people to stalk my blog and report back to you, having your friend Viv hover 10 feet away to watch over me while I minded my own business at a public event despite my track record of actively avoiding you in public, saying I'm smear campaigning you by processing what you did in my journal while you tell your friends half the story, and obsessing about whether or not I'll tell the truth about the affair...
Those are all things an abuser does.
And you don't get to determine other people's boundaries and consent. You don't get to decide you didn't violate them when I told you that you did - especially not because I'd been saying from the beginning that I didn't want to be in an affair, that I wanted to end the sexual relationship, that I wanted to wait until we could be in a real relationship, that I felt used. I literally told you to your face, "Kind of hard to take away something I don't want," when you threatened to stop having sex during an argument. Of course you didn't listen when I finally had the guts to say no in the moment instead of waiting until it felt safe. Why would you hear me then if you hadn't all the other times I said it? Even you admit that you "held on too tight" - by that do you mean threatening suicide any time I told you I just wanted to be friends? Because an environment where it's unsafe to say no is a sexually abusive one.
An apology was all I needed. If you'd just acknowledged what I felt, I'd have forgiven you (far too easily tbh).
Instead you doubled back on every apology, left me cryptic messages and posts, used me trying to be there to support you through your Granny's dementia after our "break up" as an avenue to try and guilt me into getting back with you, withheld my childhood things after promising to get them to me (because you were already dating Dani at that point, and presumably had been talking for a few months by then), blamed it all on me, and switched up the story. But you'd already been doing that anyway about what Russell was and wasn't okay with, and about how much he knew about the situation entirely. You apparently tell people now that things were above board the whole time, but I don't think you'd have been so worried about me talking to people about what was going on, broken down about how you didn't trust me not to blow your life up by telling him and/or outing you vindictively, or directly threatened to tell him about me during fights if you were being as transparent as you say. You change up the narrative about the sexual assault: Sometimes you insist I irreparably damaged you by "making you feel like you raped me" because I sat you down and calmly talked to you about the importance of stopping when I said no, directly after you'd failed to listen during an unwanted sexual encounter. Other times, you don't remember the event I'm referring to at all, despite the fact we talked about it multiple times via journal entries, text, and spoken conversation before you claimed it didn't happen.
You took me having boundaries and trying to hold you accountable for your behavior as a personal attack rather than an attempt to repair, and always have. You were controlling, manipulative, jealous, punitive, and emotionally volatile throughout our entire relationship, even when we weren't dating. You have always lashed out when I've tried talking about the things you did and controlled how much I was allowed to speak about it, no matter how privately - but describing your actions and how they affected me isn't revenge. If it makes you look bad for me to state the objective facts, that's on you and your conscience; it has nothing to do with me. Only one of us actually has a reason to lie about what happened. Only one of us has a reason to threaten the other into silence. Only one of us cheated and manipulated both people the whole time with lies, omissions, and half-truths.
I spent our whole lives staying silent for your benefit, while you talked shit about me to your friends, publicly made art about how heartbroken you were, sent your friends to watch over me or read my things on your behalf, and kept tabs on me to make sure I wouldn't speak out. When I finally did start processing it openly on my own blog, you silenced me with suicide threats and self-piteous laments about what a "terrible person you are" (which then, of course, became accusations about how I'm actually the terrible one). I spent 18 years reassuring you that you weren't selfish, abusive, controlling, manipulative, or mean every time you spiraled about it, spent countless hours trying to convince you of how good you were when you would argue. And every time I've had to walk away and say, "Let your actions speak for themselves," that's when you decide you hate me: When I stop sacrificing my own well-being and overlooking the ways you mistreat me to protect your ego.
I think the only reason you worried about being those things is because you knew that's how you were behaving.
I hope someday you can look in the mirror and make peace with what you see instead of projecting it into other people, and that someday you can stop seeing yourself and others in black and white, for both your sake and for those close to you. I'll always be sorry for the pain I caused you, but I will no longer take any accountability for the ways you hurt me. That's yours to carry and always should have been.
kianamaiart
germansingergirl
romaincrisis
tangentwithtanner
vaporwave
