Violence Unsilenced.

Today, on August 15th an excerpt from this blog was shared Here on Violence Unsilenced.  If you are not familiar with the site it is a forum for victims of Violence to share their stories.

What first struck me about this is how many people are featured. There are stories from every life stage, stories like mine. There are also some stories very different from mine, but the outcome is always the same. The decision to leave is a difficult one. For me, my friend and my mother showed up and saved me. Some days I think I wouldn't have done it without them, but I remember the struggle in the days that followed my emancipation. How hard it was not to pick up the phone, to go back to him. How tiring it became being awake, my eyes throbbed as badly as my bruises.

It is in moments of reflection that I know that I needed to be brave to make it through this. It is in moments when I hear the voices or read the words of others who have made it through that I know I am strong. I know we are all strong.

For those of you who left comments,  words of love, understanding, support. Confirmation that violence can happen to any of us, there is no definition or reason. The reaffirmation that all that matters is that I survived, and I am okay, I am out and I get my life after 10 years.

Thank-you.


The excerpt can be read here, alongside the stories from others. It is defiantly worth a visit. I also encourage you to leave a comment. Trust me, it matters.

http://violenceunsilenced.com/

M

And I Blew Take 1...

A year ago today I was sitting in my condo, legs crossed on the floor. A year and a half of work lay in front of me. I sorted through invoices, checking my account balance after studying each one. I checked off lists and crossed off points. Text the girls to ensure all plans were inline.

A Year ago I sat in a home I thought I would share with a man forever. My wedding dress was hanging in the closest, the loveliest thing I had ever owned. I had a count down going on FB, everything was ready.

What the heck was I thinking? I can see you know, yelping at your monitor like a wild woman. How on earth could you marry a man who hit you?

Yea, I know.

In the happiest of moments he was not that man. He  was my true love. That's what I believed anyways.

The last couple days have been rough, really rough. I look back often as the date that would be my first anniversary. The anniversary we promised we would return to Costa Rica where we honeymooned. It would mark the first in many years together.

Instead I am sitting in a Starbucks Grande Green Tea Lemonade beside me as I sit hunched over Pouring my feelings out. Trying not to cry.

It's been six months of healing, and although the notion that my marriage failed hurts like bare feet on hot concrete- a lot of hot concrete. What troubles me the most is the thought that I used my shot. My chance to wear a white dress and walk down an aisle on my daddy's arm, my shot at planning and laughing and fighting through the process. I missed my chance to say that I married the (true)  love of my life.

I was never one for marriage, I probably would have been fine without it. I could have been happy without it.  But now that that shot is gone, I wish I had never cashed it in.

I know I wont be alone forever, I hope anyways. I know one day I will find that man who makes me happy without making a mark. I know I will one day get that happily ever after. And I know this person will love me with or without a ring.

I just cant help but wonder what my life would have been like without the divorce handstamp.

Reflection

At the end of yoga practice you meditate. 10 minutes of peaceful reflection.
I cry every time.

No matter how good my week has gone or what I've accomplished my mind wanders to him. It is like a shadow you don't notice until you are alone, until you are vulnerable.  When it doesn't matter how reasonable or rational or tough you are. It is the shadow that always manages to get inside your head and terrify you.

Today my mind wandered, I thought about how my husband felt the day I left. What happened the moments after the door to my condo shut. What happened to him as Kay and my mother loaded me into the Pontiac. Did he cry? Did he get up and clean the broken glass from the floor. Wash the spit and blood from the 800 thread count cotton sheets. Did he have a cigarette and absorb what has unfolded.

My head ran through a thousand different scenarios each one of them amplified my silent tears as I lay there on my mat. Each taking me back to last Tuesday.

Last week I spoke to him on the telephone, for the first time since Christmas. If you read the post from that morning you are already aware that it was not a conversation I would chose to have again.

When I hung up after 43 minutes and 28 seconds I was alternating between sobs and gasps, by chest hurt my head pounded. It was 4am and I couldn't call anyone, my texts went unanswered as I sat alone grasping at the teddy bear he had gotten me for my 17th birthday.

I was scared, the first time in five months I remembered what it was like to not have anything to hide myself in, no one to talk to. Suddenly, I was back in the world I lived for six years, alone.

I feel for him, I really do. He has lost more than I have. He has lost someone who took care of him, who loved him despite flaws, who tried to fix him, tried to help him. I understand what it feels like to be alone, I was there- a lot.

As the clock hit 5am I wished I could just slide my rings back on and go back to how it was, so all the hurt I was feeling would end. I can't, those rings should have never been on at all.

At 6am I wrote that post, I was hurting.

It took me a couple days of fighting to get back to where I am, it took some hard truths from my best friends and some good ol' fashioned hugs but I am back. I am back on my way to my new life. I know I will have lots of moments where I am flat on my back quietly crying during meditation-

I will be okay.

Before I Knew

Do you ever think about those moments you are sure saved your life?

It was May of 2005, I was a year into my Television Broadcasting education. Something I had hoped to do since I was a child. All I wanted ever was to create things, to help make something bigger than myself. I wasn't bright, I wasn't exceptional, I didn't excel physically or academically, but God was I creative.  And no matter what shit I got from others about not being adequate, I knew wholeheartedly that I could be something.

But at 19 you forget where your priorities lie. You often forget your dreams. At 19 you’re not sure about your life or your path, but you are always sure about the boy. So after a fight with your mother you drop out of your almost completed program, work full time at a burger place and move in with your boyfriends white trash family while you stop speaking to yours.

I remember walking the boyfriend's golden retriever one afternoon after I had completed my 4 hour shift at a $300 a week job when I spotted my mother and little brother riding their bikes. I tried to plan an escape route I couldn't. There I was face to face with my family, the family I had left.

It was an awkward and angry conversation, one to this day I try not to think about. When it does cross my mind I know that this encounter was what pushed me out of a path I would never have escaped, a path and a life that I later saw approaching.

I might not have been a smart teenager, but at least I did this before the beatings began. At least I was able to get out of his family's home, reconcile with mine and enrol in another program, complete my education. I got a job and made a life outside of him. I sometimes think about this. What if I hadn't? What if I was not educated or didn't have a job outside of that $300 a week burger place, what if I didn't talk to my family now. I wouldn't be out.

I am fortunate in so many things, not only did I get a second chance, I had the means to support myself, I had no children, minimal shared property and a family to go home to. I have great people in my life.

I know this isn't the case for everyone, some days I don't feel right writing this blog about a situation that could have been so much worse, that is so much worse for so many other people. People without means to leave or with families to think about. I know as much as my situation sucked, there is worse.

Nightmares

I woke up last night with my heart pounding like a war drum.
This has become a frequent occurrence lately and I can't seem to make it stop.

It's never the same dream but it is the same enactment, he is dragging me across the room by my hair,  I am screaming for help hoping the neighbours hear. Almost three years I lived in that condo, probably dozens of nights that you could hear my screams echoing through the halls, never once did anyone call the police, check to make sure I was okay. Not even that night, a night I remember calling out, "help me please", someone.

Sometimes I hear or read about how someone doesn't understand how women could let it get so bad that they lose their lives. How you could continue to love someone or stay even through fear. Now I understand. I understand what it is like to be afraid, to comply to live, even if it is barely living at all.

A few weeks before I left for good I got smacked around for not being affectionate after returning a trip with my girlfriends. I couldn't, it was that trip when I decided I would leave, that I was unhappy. At the end of the night I sat on the floor, scared, convinced that I needed to go, not knowing what people would say or how my family would react, I didn't want to tell them he had done these things to  me, would they even believe me?

As I sat there, my lip bled and my arm throbbed from being bent in an unnatural direction. He approached me, my stomach turned. He told me that I would not see my friends, I would leave work promptly at 6pm when he would retrieve me, I would come home with him and that was my life. I was his, his wife and his wife did what she was told.

After that I wasn't sure what to do, I felt like I was living in a dream-world.  My actions had no weight, I could try my hardest, do my best at work, be spectacular. But it didn't matter. In the end two things would happen; I would be his wife, have children I didn't want and take care of him in a little house in the country between beatings, or I would die.

Whether it is being dragged across the floor, or his hands around my throat, or his knee on my chest. The nightmares don't end. My therapist says they will subside, in time. Like my concious mind, my subconscious is working it out, making sense, trying to understand.

My Constant

The hardest days are the familiar days. The days where you remember what you were doing a year ago. The days where you know what you would have been doing if your life was still the way it had been months ago.

Today is one of those days.

I know that now I am stronger, I am safe and I am happy. I don't worry about what will happen if I come home late or don't want to clean the house. I don't worry that disagreements could turn into bruises. But still it is difficult to get away from the happy moments, the moments the Husband and I shared that were good, that were what marriage was suppose to be. It is difficult to forget how good he was when I was sad, when things in my life got too hard to handle. Sometimes, missing those things overshadow everything else.

I find it is important to focus on what I have now rather than what I could have had, or what I did have. It is times like this when I focus on the gifts the universe has given me. My Friends.

I have always been a believer the the universe; or whatever higher power attracts you will never give you anything you cannot handle and when the going gets tough it gives you the tools and the people that you need to get through.

I might have been handed a tough go for a bit but I have been blessed with the most amazing friends in the world. I small group of people who all through their own methodology keep me sane, help me find perspective, tell me the truth when it sucks, hold my hand and pick my sorry and sometimes inebriated ass off the floor.



Some of these people are new, some have been around since the only English they knew was Boy Band lyrics, others have slipped out of my life and fell right back in when we needed each other the most. Each of them are best at a different part of me and though our lives have grown with the times and we have all seen our moments in and out of the sun; something about these people keep me going.

So Thank-You to my Besties, who remind me no matter where I could have been I am here and without what I have been through I would not have them, I would not have ever known unconditional love, total acceptance and continuous support, not to mention the times we laugh until we almost pee.