A rare glimpse of emotion
It’s not often I write about my emotions so transparently. But as a word of warning, I’m going to dig deep into my mind and reveal some things that might not be all that comfortable for you to read if you don’t know me that well. Not that I think many people will read this. It’s just some of the things I’m going to write I haven’t told many of my closest friends or family.
With that disclaimer out of the way, I’m going to start by telling you my favourite band is Jimmy Eat World. Deep stuff I know. This often makes people laugh because it sounds like I’m stuck at a mental age of 14, refusing to grow up, and longing to be back in the past. That’s sort of true, but it’s mostly just because I’m hugely nostalgic. I live in my head. I always have. It’s probably something to do with being an only child and being comfortable with being alone.
My release and passion has always been writing, and I’m so lucky that I’m able to do it for a living. But I barely ever write about myself. I’ve never kept a diary, I just keep everything locked up inside. This is not healthy.
So this is me, getting out of my own head for once.
Anyway, I’m totally fine with admitting that Jimmy Eat World probably aren’t the greatest band in the world. I also know they probably haven’t released the greatest songs in the world, or are going to be that popular with many other people my age. Whatever — that’s not the point. I started listening to them in my early teens and their songs spoke to me in a way I couldn’t speak or connect to people. Jim Adkins’ lyrics seemed to line up with exactly how I felt about so many different situations, mostly involving heartbreak of some kind.
Whenever I needed to be told everything would be okay, Jimmy Eat World appeared to be there for me. Their albums got me through my intense teenage relationships, my loneliness at university, and finally dealing with the breakdown of an abusive relationship last year. The latter is the most important.
In November 2016, I was a complete mess. Not many people were aware of how much I was struggling, because I’m a compartmentaliser and I’m really great at pretending I’m okay — until I’m not. The previous June I’d been dumped by someone who had become my entire toxic world for over a year, and I’d lost a lot of myself over that time. I couldn’t eat for weeks. I cried, a lot.
In November, I found out he’d started doing the same thing to someone else, and it destroyed me. I’ve never dealt with that much emotion before, and it ate away at the self-esteem and self-worth I’d been working so hard on over the last 5 months in therapy. I started seeing a therapist after the break up because I had completely lost a sense of who I was, and I didn’t know how to motivate myself to do anything. I also knew somewhere deep inside myself I was still there, but I couldn’t connect to her, and I needed help to rebuild myself.
So yeah, I took the setback pretty hard.
I realised my favourite band ever had released an album and as ever, there was something to comfort me in the lyrics:
As much as you can stand to be
And it's anything you think that means
What you need, yeah, who you want
What you need, baby, you are free
I went back to my home in Hertfordshire to put myself back together, and I attended my next therapy session with a new perspective: I was free.
It was like I finally saw him for what he was. A narcissist, an abuser, selfish, inconsiderate, cruel, mean, controlling, and manipulative… It was as if I finally realised I had nothing to miss anymore. Maybe I never had anything to miss in the first place.
It’s a confusing place to be in because I’d more or less been obsessing over whether or not I could get him back since he broke up with me. I thought me and him were the same identity, because he’d made me feel like I couldn’t live without him.
I’m not going to say the song changed my life. But somehow, finding out about his new relationship and hearing the song coincided perfectly, and it was like a lightbulb turned on. Actually, it was more like being hit by a bus. Or a toxic fog lifting so I could see clearly for the first time in months. I realised he was doing the same thing to somebody else and I should be thankful I’d gotten out while I could.
His words suddenly took on a new meaning. I kept a mental diary of some of them.
“You’re a manipulative cunt”
“Seriously you’re such a bitch”
“It’s your fault I’m acting like this”
“You only think about yourself”
“I’m going to leave you here if you don’t shut up”
“Lower your fucking tone”
“You need to stop being so selfish”
Because being an abuser doesn’t just mean you’re totally fucking mean the entire time. You also have to create the illusion that the person you’re abusing has something to lose. I consider myself pretty mentally strong, but he really hooked me.
I believed nothing I ever did was good enough for him, because that’s what he thought. He didn’t work for much of our relationship so I spent a lot of money on him, but nothing I did was ever enough because he “treated me so well” and he obviously deserved more than I could give him.
Have you ever heard of love-bombing? Here’s a quick summary:
Someone bombards you with compliments, text messages, wants to see you all the time, promises or buys you gifts, showers you with affection, and makes you feel like the luckiest person in the world. Things between you progress really quickly because you think anyone who’s treating you so well must be the love of your life, so why wait?
It’s a psychological trick manipulative people use, and it’s also seen in religious cults. Well, that’s what happened to me.
I was in a serious relationship far quicker than I’d intended to be, and after a few weeks of dating this guy was confessing his undying love for me. I was so different, I was the one, it must have been fate we met. Actually no, it was Tinder, which makes it sound all the more predatory doesn’t it?
It was nice to hear because I’d never been given this kind of attention before, so something primal in me fired up and told me I shouldn’t lose what we had, even though we barely knew each other in reality.
Then of course, all the promises fell through. All the things I thought he was quickly dissolved, and I was left with someone who looked at me with contempt, used intimacy as a weapon against me, and called me things nobody has ever called me before.
The first time the mask slipped was after he told me he loved me for the first time. We’d met 3 times by this point.
“If you don’t love me I’ll go and find someone who does,” was pretty much the climax of the argument. I felt this panic inside me which was so foreign to everything I thought I knew about myself. What if he was the one? What if I was fucking up something amazing? I told him I did love him. I didn’t mean it. But it didn’t matter, because I then started to believe it and I was sucked in even further.
The mask slipped more and more after that. Everything I did from that point was an attempt to try and get the person he was when we first met back. That never happened, because that person never existed.
Once, he left me crying in a hotel room alone on my birthday because I’d asked him if he was going to be late to my party. Once he yelled so aggressively in my face on the Tube that a stranger had to come up to him to tell him to calm down. Many times he left me in the street alone crying because I couldn’t work out what I’d done wrong. Many times he would be aggressive and mean to me and later deny it, just so he could blame my sadness and bad mood on me. He would make plans with me only to cancel them last minute so he knew I couldn’t see anyone else.
To give you more of an idea of how frightening he could be, narcissists are incapable of something called “object constancy.” This is when you have the ability to love somebody and be angry at them at the same time. Usually in relationships, you can argue, but you don’t want to really hurt the person you love and you work it out. With us, he really, truly hated me in the moments he was abusing me. He honestly didn’t care at all how much he hurt me or how much damage he was doing.
He never physically assaulted me, but his touch got more sadistic over time. If I opened my mouth to yawn, he’d poke his fingers down the back of my throat. He’d prod my sides, hard. He’s hold onto my hand so tightly that I couldn’t let go and he’d pull back my fingers so they clicked. It was painful and I told him to stop because I hated it. He told me not to whine. I was overreacting.
He gaslighted me. He made me think I was crazy for being upset. He made me feel like I was losing the plot, and I must have been doing the things he said because he loved me so much. He made me believe I was losing my mind.
Countless times he made me feel small and insignificant, and made me apologise for things I didn’t really understand why I was apologising for. Over and over again he threatened to leave me if I didn’t act a certain way. Time and time again he would punish me with silence or no affection because I’d said something wrong. Thousands of times he told me to shut up because I disagreed with him.
Because a narcissist is never wrong. You can argue and defend yourself as much as you want, but if you believe something even slightly different, they see it as some kind of attack. Your feelings don’t matter. They have zero empathy for you if you’re upset. It’s only when you agree out of exhaustion that they start to be nice to you again. They’re conditioning you like a pet.
It’s a confusing way to live because you know you have values, but you find yourself compromising on them time and time again. You treat yourself with the same amount of respect the abuser does — which is none. So many times in an argument I’d be struggling to understand how we got there, what I’d said, or what I’d done wrong. 99% of the time I couldn’t work it out, and I’d be stuck in this alternative reality where nothing made sense.
Have you ever been in a situation that’s so hurtful and confusing that you don’t know what to do with your body? I have, and I still struggle with that. It happens with gaslighting sometimes. It’s like you know what’s real but you don’t. I used to just pace and sit down and put my head in my hands. I tried to make myself as small as possible because I wanted to disappear. This still happens unfortunately. I tense up and I don’t know how to relax.
There’s a weird hypocrisy abusers live by. They often claim to have certain values too, such as being a feminist or very caring of other people. But you soon come to realise none of this care applies to you.
I was sucked into this cycle of desperately trying to please him, and walking on eggshells incase what I said would set him off. It was like Jekyll and Hyde. One minute he’d be talking about how much he loved me, the next minute he was replaced by a monster who seemed to hate everything about me.
But I didn’t tell anyone. I let him treat me this way and I stayed, because I honestly thought I deserved it and he must be right. Maybe I am selfish, maybe I’m not a nice person, he deserves so much better. It’s me making him upset.
I lied to my friends, a lot. Many of them never met this guy. This is probably because he knew they’d suss him out a lot quicker than I managed to. I told them I was sick or something urgent had come up when he forced me not to see them.
I questioned myself constantly: Am I pretty enough? Am I thin enough? Am I outgoing enough? Am I selfless enough? Some of those questions still haunt me, and the fear of eating in front of people I’m intimate with is not gonna go away any time soon.
But when I found myself again, it was an immense feeling of relief to finally release all the self-blame and realise it wasn’t my fault. This became my mantra and I’d repeat it to myself over and over at work, or at home, or at the gym whenever he entered my head and I felt myself getting upset. It wasn’t my fault.
It wasn’t my fault he treated me like I was nothing. It wasn’t my fault he shouted at me. It wasn’t my fault he gave me no respect. It wasn’t my fault I’d felt like crap for over a year.
I do not want pity — at all. This past year has been one of the most influential of my life and I’m thankful I went through it in a weird way. One good thing is that all this has made pain a lot easier to deal with. I really know how much things can suck. Even if something is hard, or somebody hurts me, I know I’ll get through it, because I truly believe I’ve seen what evil looks like.
When it happened in June 2016, I was ripped apart, but I managed to channel it into getting the job of my dreams. Somehow.
Even better, in November I realised I liked someone. I had a few awful dates but I met someone who reminded me what it’s like to have a crush. It didn’t amount to anything but it felt great. It was like the final step to realising I wasn’t a bad person, I was just controlled and manipulated into thinking I was. People can and will like who I am.
I just have to make sure I’m in the right place for a new relationship, because although I feel so much more myself, I’m carrying around the baggage of the past and it can be pretty obvious I’m not totally back to normal. That was a bitter pill to swallow. I’m still pretty oblivious as to how a normal relationship is supposed to progress. I know the early signs of a sociopath so it’s difficult not to apply them to everything that someone new says or does. I’ll get there in time with someone who’s patient enough.
Long story short, I then went to go see Jimmy Eat World twice in November, on my own. Both times were amazing. 2017 has had its ups and downs so far, because I’ve been hurt, but you know what? It’s great to know someone else could hurt me, because it means I have the capacity to care again.
My abuser doesn’t control me anymore. I am “free.”
