NINETEEN-YEAR-OLDS-ARE-IDIOTS #5

              ​Dear Reader
 
              I’m going to keep it short, as this part is long enough. As always, a trigger warning for anyone who is sensitive to topics surrounding toxic relationships, abuse, mental health, self-harm, suicide and all that jazz… Now let’s wrap up this story.
 
              BIDING MY TIME
 
                It’s September, 2007. Ben and I have been married for almost a year and a half, and for at least half of that time, I’ve been plotting my escape. Don’t even tell me how horrible that sounds, I feel like enough of a cunt already. But it’s my reality, and it’s one that I can only escape by shaking up in the wacko basket from time to time. People think it’s solely my own brain that keeps getting the better of me, but truth be told, it’s the situation with Ben that’s been pushing me over the edge.
              For as long as I’ve been scheming, it doesn’t seem to me like I’ve made any progress. I mean, there’s still nothing on the horizon that looks even remotely like a viable future. I’m not quite sure what I’m even fighting for, to be honest. I feel stuck, having yet to find solutions to all the dilemma’s I keep getting tangled up in whenever I try to conjure up a plan. I’m still working minimum wage at the supermarket and spending the majority of my time either at therapy, in hospital, or zombie-ing around in a self-destructive haze. I still haven’t figured out where to go or what to do when I leave him. I know my old bedroom is still vacant, but moving back in with my family is something I’m trying to block from my mind. I have yet to come to terms with it being my only option.  
              My therapist aside, I haven’t even spoken to another soul about what’s going on, and I’m quite convinced that no one has a clue. Cause I’m oblivious like that. In fact, I’m quite sure that when they find out, they’ll either assume that I’m the one at fault and tell me to clean up my own mess, or they’ll just think I’m a complete moron and laugh at me behind my back.
 
                I started my new outpatient treatment a month ago. We’re slowly trying to figure out some practical matters like health benefits, but progress is slow. They’ve also booked me in for a family therapy session in a few weeks. They pushed me into it under the pretense that involving family is a crucial and thus compulsory part of therapy. I have my reservations, which they know, and although resistance is futile, I haven’t given up on trying to talk them out of it. Which is why I still haven’t told my parents anything. They’ll receive the official invitation soon enough. For now, ignorance is bliss.
All that I’ve shared with my mother at this point is that I’m on anti-depressants, and that’s only because she saw me take them. I kept the explanation vague, downplaying it, not really giving her anything else to go on. I’m playing my favorite game: ignoring it until it goes away.
              When the family session eventually does roll around, my therapists want me to spill the beans. All of them. The depression, the self-harm, the whole wanting to die thing…And I think it’s a horrible idea. I already know how this is going to go, and I’m utterly terrified. Because in my family, we do not rock the boat. We do not air out our dirty laundry. We don’t do the whole ‘sharing your feelings’ and ‘talking about your problems’ thing, because feelings and uncomfortable conversations are scary. We don’t touch that stuff. Not with a ten-foot pole. Yet here I am, kicking up the dirt, and I don’t think it’s going to be appreciated. I don’t think my therapists understand that.
 
              It’s not that I’m afraid they’ll be angry. It’s actually quite the opposite. I’m already anticipating the uncomfortable tension in the air as they fumble their way through trying to display a normal amount of care, concern and understanding. And all the while, I’ll be gritting my teeth in suspense, waiting to hear what they really think once we all leave the room and close the car doors.
              We’ll leave the room all smiles, making polite conversation about some random topic as I eat myself up from the inside out, waiting anxiously for the other shoe to drop. They’ll think I’m just making a big deal out of nothing, putting on a big dramatic show for attention. I can already hear it in my mind: “What was that all about”, they’ll say. “Come on, don’t be ridiculous. Man up and quit complaining. What on earth do you have to be depressed, tired, sad or anxious about? You’re just being lazy and selfish. You shouldn’t feel that way because <insert logic here>. Are you saying it’s our fault? You’re making us look bad in front of all these people. Just stop it.”
              We’ll pretend it doesn’t exist, because it shouldn’t. We’ll sweep it under the rug, just like everything else. And that empty feeling of dismissal and rejection, combined with the anticipation of a future bomb dropping, is so much more scary and painful than anger could ever be.
So no, I’m not looking forward to that session. The only consolation is that my therapists will be there to guide us through, and apparently that’s better than taking it on myself. Not that I think they’ll be of any help, but it seems I don’t have a choice. So, if you don’t mind, I’m going to bask in the bliss of my family’s ignorance for a little while longer while I work up the courage to have this conversation. Until them, I’m biding my time.
 
              MAKING A BREAK FOR IT
 
              Ben is sitting at my desk, shaking profusely as he glares intensely at the screen. His eyes shoot back and forth, mouse scrolling down as he speed-reads each line I’ve written.
                I don’t remember exactly how we got here. I know we were having a conversation, possibly even a minor argument. It’s hard to tell these days, as almost every interaction we have somehow spirals into some kind of dispute. Whatever it was, I guess the moment finally came that I saw my chance and lunged for the door, so to speak.
 
                At some point during that conversation, we landed on the topic of my mental health and how it was impacting our relationship. Ben was explaining how my depression and self-harm were affecting him, and in the same breath he mentioned how he sometimes wondered if we might be better off splitting up. It didn’t sound like he actually saw it as an option. It sounded more like an exploration, or possibly even a half-hearted threat. A threat in the sense that he was alluding to leaving me if I didn’t get my shit together, as if that might somehow scare me straight.
                What Ben didn’t realize, though, was that for the first time…he was actually playing into my hand. For so long, I’d been waiting for the perfect moment to make my escape. I’d been wishing that Ben would just fall out of love with me, so that he wouldn’t mind if I left. Or that he would just leave me instead. Hell, for the lack of a stronger incentive, I’d even started fantasizing that he’d just do something heinous. Something bad enough to justify divorcing him. If only he would just hit me, commit a crime, cheat on me…anything, really. As long as it was bad enough to set me free and wash my hands clean of all the guilt that was festering inside me. And after months spent hoping and praying for a free pass, this half-hearted remark of his seemed like a gift from the gods. As though freedom was being handed to me on a silver platter. To the desperate, caged girl that was held hostage inside me, his words sounded a lot like rattling keys. And without thinking twice, I lunged for them.
 
                “I think you might be right. Maybe we should split up.”
I looked up at Ben’s panic-stricken features, the conversation skidding to a halt as he was forced to process this unexpected turn of events. My legs felt weak and my heart pounded heavily behind my ribs, almost like I was physically making a break for it. Just about as quickly as the ball was dropped, Ben picked it back up and began to backpedal, sputtering something about getting couple’s therapy. He had this pleading look on his face, and through my mind flashed the memory of our last ground-zero fight. I had been so ready to walk out the door that day, and yet, somehow, he had convinced me to stay. And just look where it got me. I could not and would not allow that to happen again.
                In my mind’s eye, I saw what I could only describe as a kaleidoscope full of flashbacks and flashforwards, the agony of the past years flooding my system as images of an equally bleak future flashed before my eyes. The bitter truth was that if I didn’t take this opportunity and leave while I had the chance, I would most certainly die. I was already withering away on the inside, and it was only a matter of time before I took matters into my own hands and finished the job. And for all the time I’d spent convincing myself that I didn’t care and that I wanted to die anyway, it seemed that that caged girl inside of me still had a surprisingly strong dose of survival instinct left, and she was now clawing her way out. And she wasn’t leaving anything to chance; she knew it was time to burn bridges.
 
                 Ben’s plea hurtled towards me like a handful of barbs, ready to lodge into my exposed skin. There was no time to pull on my armor, if I wanted to walk out of this conversation a free woman, I had to come in with the big guns. Now.
                “No, couples therapy isn’t going to fix this,” I choked out, shaking my head as I leapt up from the sofa. Leaving no room for Ben to get a foot in the door, adrenaline took over and my shaky legs strode across the room to my desk. Both my heart and my mind were racing as I flicked on my computer screen and pulled up my hidden diaries, swallowing hard as my shaking hands keyed in the password. There was a moment’s hesitation, but it seemed that my both my heart and my mind finally agreed on what I had to do. The sound of a double click pierced the silence, and the letter of confession that I’d written for my therapist, promptly filled the screen. Although I couldn’t remember exactly what I’d written all those months ago, I knew the content was damning. Painful as it would be for him to read, it would be effective. I needed Ben to understand how ‘over’ we really were, and I had to be sure that there was no coming back from this. This was the point of no return. Steadying myself as I stepped back from the desk, I beckoned him over.
               
                Each second of silence that passed, drove my heartrate further through the roof. My feet nailed to the ground, I watched his eyes shoot back and forth across the page, his jaw tightening more and more as he scrolled further down. His body started trembling at some point, and I couldn’t tell whether he was scared, hurt, or very, very angry and about to explode.
                Eventually, about half way through the document, he got to the part that I feared the most. As if the knife hadn’t already been driven deep enough, this would surely twist it.
 
              “He’s a perfectly nice guy. And someone else could be really happy with him, as he could with her. But he’s with me. Someone who hides behind a fake smile and feeds him excuses every time he wants more than a friendly kiss or cuddle. Someone who lies to his face every time he asks her if she still loves him, or if she still finds him attractive. Someone who makes mean jokes about him, that she secretly means. Someone who is secretly annoyed with so many things that he does, and so many of his traits, quirks and characteristics. Things that she wouldn’t mind so much if she wasn’t stuck with them. Someone who feels disgust at his naked body before her, or lying beside her in bed. Someone who clenches her teeth and closes her eyes, waiting for him to finish…”
 
              Watching his hand grip the mouse tighter and tighter, his knuckles going white as he read though my confession, I closed my eyes for a second, raggedly exhaled, and waited…
All of a sudden, Ben shot up out of his seat, the chair almost toppling over backwards as he got to his feet. I took a quick step backwards, clearing his path as various scenarios crossed my mind.
Would he come for me? Would he start a fight? Would he up and leave? Would he break down?
Anything was possible.
              Bile rose in my throat as panic, pain, guilt and regret washed over me. Had it really been necessary to put him through that? Was there really no kinder, more humane way to get my point across? Could I really not just have told him that I wanted out, and left?
              And yet, how many times over the past 4,5 years had I tried to voice my concerns, my needs, my boundaries, all to no avail? How many times had I already tried to get out, only to become more tangled up in this twisted web? They say desperate needs call for desperate measures, and this indiscretion of mine had been years in the making. I’d just come to a point where I had no other choice but to say “screw tact”, and throw everything I had left on the table. I did what I had to do. But if all that was true, why did I still feel like the biggest piece of shit on the planet?
              My breath snagged in my throat as I turned and watched Ben storming past me and out of the house, slamming the door behind him. I listened to his heavy footfalls on the metal staircase as he ran out into the street, and I heard the lock to his bike snap open. And then, silence.
I stood there for what felt like forever, frozen in place, shaking in my Dr Martins. Somehow, I just couldn’t process what was happening and figure out what to do next. And so, I just stood there. For all the months of preparation that had gone into the whole exit-plan, I hadn’t really given this part much thought. Ben may well have left, but I had no idea where to go from here. I didn’t know where he’d run off to, or if and when he’d return. Should I stay? Should I start packing? Should I go after him? At what point do I contact him, so that we figure out all the practical aspects involved in separation? I had no clue…
I wandered over to the couch, dropped down and let out the breath I’d been holding. And then I broke down. I’d wanted to escape so badly, so why did I feel like I was dying?
              I must have been sitting there, sobbing uncontrollably for at least twenty minutes before I heard heavy footsteps charging up the stairs and the front door swinging open. Fear gripped my heart for a split second, half expecting an enraged Ben to come storming back in to take control of the situation. But when I looked up, I was surprised to see not Ben, but my parents striding toward me with anguished, tear-stricken faces. Fear morphed into confusion as I took in their emotional entrance and quickly attempted to unravel the mystery of how they’d known to come, and how much they knew. I certainly hadn’t told them anything, so, quite frankly, whatever they knew, they knew too much.
 
              As it turned out, after Ben stormed out of the house, he called my parents and told them that I had broken up with him and that they should probably go to me before I hurt myself. He then told them all about my struggles with self-harm, depression and suicidal ideation. Now I know that a lot of you will see this as an admirable thing, like he was just looking out for me. But here’s the thing: if Ben really only intended to ensure that I was safe, he could have just told them we were splitting up, and asked them to go to me. That would have been enough information, and I could have taken it from there. But that’s not what happened.
Instead, he took my rejection and without missing a beat, grasped for my biggest, scariest, most sensitive and most securely hidden secret, and without my knowledge or consent, outed me in front of the very people that I was the most afraid of being vulnerable with. I don’t know about you, but that sounds less like caring and more like revenge, to me. Another act of passive aggression.
              His actions felt like an incredible breach of my trust and privacy, especially since he was well aware that our family session was only three weeks away. There was a reason I’d kept all this stuff from my family for so long. And given our family dynamic and the sensitivity of the matter, it made the most sense to have a hard conversation like that under the guidance of trained professionals. He knew this. Yet, when Ben intervened, he took that opportunity away from me, potentially creating an even more damaging situation in the process. It says a lot about our relationship; the fact that the last thing he did at the end of our marriage, was to yank my autonomy away from me. You know, just one more time. For old time’s sake. And I still haven’t forgiven him for that one.
 
              Although my parents’ response to the situation was pretty supportive, I wasn’t happy about the way they’d found out and I felt very uncomfortable and vulnerable having it all out in the open.
I don’t remember exactly what happened when my parents came charging in on the fateful afternoon, nor do I remember how the conversation ended. I do remember that I was an emotional wreck, yet numb at the same time. There was a lot of crying, and I remember my mother asking me if I wanted a hug, to which I agreed. To my mum, that was a pretty big deal. I also remember a strong sense of relief radiating from her. That makes sense, looking back. My mother had never been keen on my relationship, but she’d kept quiet about it because she knew that I wouldn’t have listened anyway. When she received the news that we were splitting up, of course, she was relieved. And, still quite oblivious to the full extent of my issues, she hoped that the separation would kick off my healing and that the sun would soon be shining again. I suppose I kinda hoped so, too. But I was running on 20+ years’ worth of trauma responses and pent-up emotions, so obviously, that assumption fell under the category: “Well ain’t that cute…but it’s wrong!”
              Granted, leaving Ben was a good move. And it would have been a step in the right direction, had I actually taken a new direction. But I did not. I was literally moving back into the situation that I had been so desperate to escape, less than two short years earlier. Once again, I was jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, and it was a recipe for disaster. But it was the only option I had, and so I could only paint a smile on my face and keep going. So, that’s what I did.
 
              DISCOUNT ON DIVORCE
 
              Over the next week or two following the big bang, I worked with my parents to fix up my old bedroom as fast as possible and move all my stuff back in. It was important to me that I really turn it into my own little space where I could feel at home and comfortable. I craved space, I craved a place where I could hide away from the world and be alone, a space where I could just be me.
I picked out my own colors, then after we’d taken care of wallpapering, painting and putting in a new floor, I bought some lovely furniture on marketplace and at the local thrift store. I actually still own the rug and the little Chinese cabinet to this day; I still love them. Then, after everything had been fixed up, my father and I hooked up the trailer and went to pick up the rest of my stuff.
              In the meantime, Ben had been staying with his parents, sleeping on an inflatable mattress on the kitchen floor until I was done moving out. Ben and I were still in contact almost daily, in part because we had a lot of practical stuff to figure out, but also out of habit. I didn’t have anyone else to turn to, and neither did he. We had been the center of each other’s world for so long, it somehow made the most sense to just talk to each other throughout these hard times.
              It was a weird dynamic, though. I felt like I had a responsibility towards him, to be his rock. I had to be the calm, strong, down to earth one who let him rant and rage as much as he needed to, in hopes that one day he’d heal and move past all this and we could just be friends again. After all, I was the one who had torn his life apart. The least I could do was help him to fix the damage.
As much as our split hurt initially, I bounced back pretty quickly. This makes since given the fact that it was my choice, and I’d had months to prepare, process and grieve before actually going through with it. For Ben, the whole thing came like a bolt from the blue. So, naturally, it was a lot harder for him, and it took a lot longer for him to process.
 
              Once I’d fully moved all my stuff out and taken up residence with my family, Ben moved back into our little coal shed. He called me in tears the very same day, distraught over how empty and quiet the place was without me. For the first couple of weeks, we spoke almost daily. He’d usually call me about something practical, and then about half way through the call, he’d get really upset about the fact that I didn’t seem to be hurting as much as him. Or he’d weep about how lonely he was. Or he would cry that the boys living across the canal, friends of my brothers, were making fun of him and he wanted me to ask them to stop. There was always something, and I would always patiently listen to him weep, rant and rave for however long it took.               Then, once it was all out of his system, we’d hang up, and I’d just go about my day. I was glad that I could still be there for him and do something for him, and that he let me, despite everything. I was equally glad that now, I was no longer bound to him and his moods bore no consequences to me. Now, I could just hang up the phone, let it slide off me and get on with my life. I was feeling more and more confident about my decision by the day, it was like I was finally getting myself back. I missed him, but in the way that you’d miss a best friend, and I hoped that we could maintain a friendship after it was all behind us.
 
              The moment came that we had to take care of all the formal stuff. You may remember how quick and easy we sailed through the wedding preparations, and well, we flew through the divorce process in a similar fashion.
              Ben’s father worked at a notary office. This had one big advantage for us: we could get a discount on our divorce fee. And since we were married without joint ownership of goods, most of the legal shit wasn’t even relevant to us. We also agreed very quickly on who got what, and we sat on his living room floor with a pair of dice to decide on the rest. Furthermore, I declined my right to partner alimony because I didn’t see how it would be fair to take money from him, and I didn’t want to cause extra hassle. Quite frankly, we’d already figured everything out. The only thing our solicitor had to do, was sign some papers. Given how easy we made everything, the fee couldn’t be that bad, right? Well…wrong. If you look at the bill, you’d think they served our coffee in golden cups or something. But no, legal stuff is just expensive, even if you do most of the work yourself.     
 
              FRIENDS
 
                After our divorce was finalized, I told Ben that I really wanted to remain friends with him, but that I understood if it would be too painful for him. I let him know that I’d give him space for as long as he needed it, and that he only had to call or text, if and when he was ready.
                After that, we didn’t speak for weeks. I felt the most horribly tug in my chest, a huge fear that I’d ruined everything and lost the only one I had. But I waited patiently, because I didn’t want to push him further away. It had to be his decision, and he had a lot to work through to get there.
I’m aware that this sounds insane. I mean, I was in an abusive relationship that I’d wanted to get out of for so long, and now that I was free, I wanted him back in my life. But you have to understand; not only was I still very unaware of how abusive our relationship really was, but we had been so enmeshed that untangling him from my life seemed virtually impossible. He was everything to me, my world revolved around him. I had lost myself a long time ago, and without him, there was just a gaping hole in my soul and in my life. I didn’t know how else to fill that void.
              My birthday rolled around in October, and I just couldn’t wait any longer. I had an excuse to at least give him a little nudge, so I invited him. His response to my e-mail was rather short and catty, and he told me that he didn’t want to come while anyone else was there, but he agreed to meet up with me for coffee. That first meeting was really awkward, Ben acting short and distant, and me on eggshells, just like the good old times I suppose.
 
              From that moment on, we saw more of each other. We eventually had a weekly coffee-date every Thursday morning. I’d walk up the road towards his house, and he’d walk towards mine. We’d meet half way, and stroll down to a local café and do a coffee & catch-up. We were texting again, and we sometimes went places together. When Ben’s grandfather went to hospital and eventually passed away, I was there with him. When his grandmother was ill, I went along to visit. Ben even gifted me a trip to Movie World, which was a lot of fun until Ben started and argument on the way back, about – I shit you not – my brother’s outfits on our wedding day. Apparently, they weren’t fancy enough and he thought it was humiliating. Go figure.
              Our relationship was still…weird. But it didn’t bother me as much, because I wasn’t tied to him anymore. I didn’t have to deal with it every day. I got the benefits without the burdens. And in that time, especially since things weren’t going well at home, I was really glad to have a friend to talk to. Because even after all this time, and even now that I was ‘free’, I still had great difficulty making or maintaining connections with people. My social network was still very distant and limited. Ben had been all I had for so long, even divorce couldn’t change that, apparently.
 
              THE BEGINNING OF THE END
 
                After my divorce, everyone sort of expected my mental health to bounce back and for everything to be fine. Yeah, spoiler alert, that didn’t happen. Things actually got a lot worse, and rather quickly, too. That makes sense in retrospect, but it didn’t make sense to us all at the time.
                Granted, I was no longer self-injuring as much, but that’s only because I couldn’t sneak out of the house at night to go to A&E anymore. Anyone who understands unhealthy coping mechanisms will know that if you block one out without dealing with the underlying issues, you just end up playing whack-a-mole with a whole bunch of other, equally destructive methods. So, yeah, I ended up developing a serious eating disorder. My depression got worse, my suicidal tendencies got worse, I spent another few weeks on a crisis ward and landed myself in day-treatment after I’d run out of therapy options. Quite frankly, by the end of 2008, both my family and I were out our wits end. And that’s when Tyler – a good friend who I met over the internet – came up with an idea that probably saved my life. He asked me to move in with him in Leiden, so that I could follow in inpatient treatment course in that area. And I didn’t really have anything to lose, so I went.
                I remember meeting up with Ben on one of our Thursday-morning-coffee-walks, and breaking the news to him. When I told him that I was moving, he was utterly devastated. He was sad that I was leaving him behind, all alone, and moving on without him. I told him that he was welcome to visit, and I hoped that we could keep our friendship intact even while I wasn’t living around the corner anymore. In fact, I was quite sure that we could do that. We’d been through so much already, and we were still best friends despite everything. What difference would 70 kilometers make, right?
                After I moved to Leiden, we remained in contact via text and phone. He came over to visit once or twice, and we went to a festival together. He told me about his life, and about someone he’d met and was now dating. I was really happy to see him moving on with his life, at last. And still, I was sure that we’d be able to maintain our strong friendship throughout.
Then, after a few weeks, the line went silent. At first, I thought it was a fluke. Maybe he’d just been busy, or lost my number. So, I texted him instead, but there was no response. I still didn’t think much of it, and I just kept waiting a few days before trying again. But after a few weeks, it became painfully clear that Ben was avoiding me on purpose. I had been cut off. Discarded.
              My best friend in the whole world. Someone I’d been with for so long, and overcome so much with…gone. I knew that his new girlfriend had been somewhat uncomfortable with our history, so I can only assume that she asked him to stop talking to me. I don’t know if that’s true, though. All I know is, if Ben would have told me that he wanted to move on with his life and break contact with me, I would have been hurt, but I would have understood. I’d have accepted it, and there’d have been closure. But he didn’t say a thing. He just disappeared, from one day to the next.
              And that absolutely tore me apart. It broke my heart, and it made me feel so worthless. I cried many tears over that, and spent so many hours coiling with pent up rage, unable to sleep from all the feelings coursing through my veins that had nowhere to go. I was pissed, I was hurt, but every message I sent out, just smacked into a brick wall. I think ignoring someone, is probably one of the worst things you can do to them. And I would have much rather just had him chew me up and spit me out, than discard me and pretend that I didn’t exist. It’s a good thing I was already in therapy at the time, because otherwise I would have needed it for sure.
 
                COWARD
 
                I ran into Ben once, years later. I was walking down the street during a festival in Alkmaar, and he was suddenly walking towards me. His eyes met mine, and he immediately looked away and ducked into an alleyway. His parents ran into my parents on occasion in the supermarket, and there were no hard feelings. But whenever Ben ran into my parents himself, they’d greet him and he’d just awkwardly duck away. I even discovered a few years later, that he’d been telling people things about me that weren’t true. He’d been telling people that I had gotten sick from reading too many books about eating disorders and such. It’s almost as though he perceives our divorce as a personal failure, and he needs to shift the blame. It’s easier to blame it on me, and tell people that I was just crazy, I guess. To me, it just smells like cowardice.
                I was heartbroken for so long, grieving the loss of my best friend. Then, I was angry. Every time I was reminded that he was being (and had been) an asshole and he was blocking my ability to tell him, I fell apart. For the longest time, I wanted to just show up unannounced at a place that I knew he’d be, and force him to look me in the eye. And in all honesty, sometimes, that little spark of rage still pops up. You can do a lot to me, and I’ll take it. I’ll get over it. Whatever. But do not treat me like I don’t exist. Especially if you plan to tell people lies about me at the same time.
                Today, I see a coward. A see a very, very sick individual and I genuinely hope that he’d bettered himself and found happiness in the end. I know that he’s married with children now, and he owed it to them to be a better man.
                As for me…I think that my relationship with my father had already shaped the way I see and experience relationships long before Ben came along, but Ben certainly hitched a ride on those unhealthy patterns, consolidated them and added a few more to the mix. And all this has certainly colored my relationship with myself, and the relationships I had with others after that. Suffice to say, all of that’s still complicated. For now, I’m happily single without all those complications.
 
                THE GUARDRAIL
 
              Boundaries are strange things. For the longest time, boundaries were a mystical and foreign concept to me as I’d been conditioned not to have them. Very convenient for those in your life who want to use you as a pawn in their own games, you know. As I’ve learned over the past few years, boundaries should kind of work like the guardrails along the highway. Those guardrails are hard boundaries, but you don’t want to get so far as to crash into them all the time. That will wreck your car. That’s why there are bumpy lines on the road that you can feel and hear when you drive over them, warning you that you’re getting close to the rail and you need to steer back before you actually bash into it.
              When setting and holding boundaries, the best time to speak up or take action is when you feel those bumpy lines. That’s when you still have control over the wheel, and it’s way easier to get back on the road. If you wait too long, you’ll just spend your life scraping the guardrail, inevitably crashing into or smashing through it all the time. So basically, you start when the issue is still small enough to get a handle on, so that the problem doesn’t get to the point where you’ve lost control.
Kind of like that awkward situation where you don’t know someone’s name, but you’ve spoken or hung out so many times that it’s too late to ask them. Or when you’ve already said yes to so many things that you feel like you can’t just start saying no, or back out now.
              Until I was well into my thirties, I had no idea that those metaphorical bumpy lines were a thing. I couldn’t really feel them, and I certainly didn’t know that they could signal the best time to take action while I still could. I always just kept going until I smashed into the guardrails, time and time again. I ignored signals or let things slide until I was in way too deep and I found myself stuck, tangled, my only option being to keep going until I eventually crashed and everything fell apart. That’s when I’d escape and start over, vow to do it differently, and proceed to repeat the cycle.
 
              Reading everything I’ve just disclosed about my relationship with Ben, you may very well be wondering ‘why did you do along with this stuff’ or ‘why on earth didn’t you just leave’. There’s no straightforward, clear-cut answer to that question, but I’ve gained a lot of insight over the years as to what factors went into my choices and behaviour. The weird thing is, up until a few months ago I could look back on the whole relationship and see that it was toxic and unhealthy, but in more of a ‘gee, weren’t we young and stupid, but we can laugh about it now’ kind of way. But now that I’m sitting here sifting through all my memories, writing them down and seeing it all from a helicopter view…there’s this bigger picture staring me in the face, and I find myself thinking…wait, what?!
              I look back at everything that occurred, everything I swallowed and accepted, everything that I did out of either love, fear or habit, and I’m inclined to blame myself. We were both there, and I didn’t take enough of my own responsibility. But as I sift through all the memories and fragments of information that I’ve raked together from all the corners of my mind, I’m starting to wonder, how much responsibility could I realistically have taken?
              When this began, I was sixteen years old. And although I never looked at myself that way, I was still a kid. I made poor choices and I blame myself for that, but for the lack of a fully developed prefrontal cortex, realistically, mistakes and poor choices were to be expected. And with both a history of sexual abuse, having been bullied relentlessly for years and -unbeknownst to me at the time- having been dealing with narcissistic abuse and a toxic home situation my whole life, I was a hell of a lot more vulnerable than I’d like to admit.               ​There’s a saying that goes: if you’re wearing rose tinted glasses, red flags just look like flags. I was definitely wearing rose tinted glasses, infatuated as I was. But I was also wearing glasses tainted by the abuse I’d encountered in my life. The abnormal experiences that had formed ‘my normal’, rendered my glasses scarlet and made it very hard for me to distinguish the regular flags from the red ones.
              Ben, on the other hand, was twenty-three. He was an adult. A full-fledged, grown-ass adult. It still feels wrong to say this, but realistically, he should have known better. He should have done better. He took advantage of me and the situation I was in. I certainly see those red flags now, and that shit was pretty damn fucked up.