Abuse, but Quietly
I keep thinking back to that relationship and I hate that it still has this much gravity in my mind. I had a nightmare about being trapped in another abusive relationship after promising myself I would never tolerate that again. When I woke up, I felt sick, like my body remembered something my mind keeps trying to put in order. What keeps haunting me is the beginning. The moment that should have ended everything. He screamed at me over the phone, unloaded a psychotic episode on me when I had no context, no understanding of what was happening, no idea what I had done wrong because I hadn’t done anything. I still gave him a chance. I set a boundary, no screaming under any circumstances, and he respected it after that. But I shouldn’t have needed to set it at all. That should have been it. And I keep asking myself why it wasn’t.
I know part of it was that I was trying to be patient in the way adults are supposed to be patient. Patient in the way no one was with me when I was younger. I was trying to rationalize instead of trusting what my body was telling me. I was trying to be fair, to give grace, to not overreact. At the time I was in a very dark place, painfully alone, and I needed someone so badly that my standards collapsed into something terrifyingly small.
I remember thinking something that scares me now. A quiet, detached thought that if this man killed me, I wouldn’t lose much. And if he didn’t, at least I would be with someone who cared. I didn’t even know there was a third option. Being stuck with someone who didn’t kill me, didn’t protect me either, but slowly tore me down in ways that were harder to name. Someone who could be vile, invalidating, cruel, making jokes about abuse as if it were a competition. I remember staying silent because I was already emotionally gone and arguing felt pointless. Silence felt safer.
I get angry when I think about it. Mostly at him. Sometimes at myself, but mostly at him. I understand now that there is a difference between responsibility and blame. My responsibility is to protect myself, to draw boundaries, to leave when they are violated. His responsibility was how he chose to treat me. I didn’t cause his behavior. I didn’t deserve it. Holding myself accountable for learning does not mean taking responsibility for being abused. I don’t want to erase my agency because that feels like erasing my power, but I also refuse to turn my survival into a moral failure.
What hurts more than that relationship is what it represents. I have grown. I know I have. I am more aware, more boundaried, more honest with myself. And yet my life still feels stuck. I am still in survival mode. I still can’t plan for the future because nothing in my life has ever felt stable enough to plan around. My childhood home was unstable. My nervous system learned early that safety was temporary. Trauma didn’t come and go, it rearranged things permanently. I grieve the dreams I had when I was younger. The version of life I thought I might have if I just tried hard enough or healed enough. It feels like the odds were never in my favor to begin with, and no amount of effort can fully correct for that. Sometimes it feels like everything is working against me and I am exhausted from trying to prove that I am not lazy, not irresponsible, not careless with my life.
I wish I could stop caring. I can’t. Caring hurts because it hasn’t paid off. From the outside, my life probably looks confusing. I didn’t grow up poor. I wasn’t homeless. I had a nice apartment, private school, food, clothes, electronics. And that makes me doubt myself. It makes me wonder if I am just ungrateful or dramatic or trapped in some self-made victim narrative.
But I know now that material comfort and emotional safety are not the same thing. Having things did not mean having security. It did not mean having consistency, warmth, protection, or someone who helped regulate my emotions instead of adding to the chaos. I learned to survive in a house that looked fine from the outside and felt unsafe on the inside. That kind of damage doesn’t announce itself. It teaches you to doubt your own pain before anyone else ever has to.
I am not broken. I am tired. I am someone who learned endurance before I learned safety. I am someone who is still trying to build a future while carrying a nervous system that never learned to trust one. I care because I am still alive inside, even when it feels like caring is what hurts the most.
I don’t need to minimize what happened to justify my struggle. I don’t need to earn permission to say that this has been hard. I survived something real, even if it didn’t look like the kind of suffering people are quick to validate.
I am still here. Still trying. Still wanting a life that feels like it belongs to me. And maybe that has to be enough for now.