I have time to write at work right now because I am covering someone else’s desk today. Because she called in, because her boyfriend beat her up last night and she can’t see out of one eye today. She sent me a text with a picture of her face, and I thought it was because she didn’t think I believed her about why she couldn’t come in.
I thought she thought that because I have not believed her at other times, because at other times she has lied. She is also a drug addict/alcoholic, and frankly one of the worst receptionists the world has ever seen. Smart person, capable, not cut out to have to be pleasant to our clients and vendors as the way she makes her living.
Anyway, it’s actually true that I didn’t believe what she told me this morning in her message – she said she got in an accident. I knew it was that her boyfriend hit her. We have talked before about his violence towards her. Once before, I had set aside my aggravation with her – her chaos outside of the boyfriend stuff has fucked things up for me several times – and I told her flat out – I know something is going on, and I have been in the situation you’re in, and I’m sorry if it’s bad manners for me to say this but I can’t just say nothing. I know you need help and I can’t just pretend I don’t see that.
So I believed the black eye but not the car accident part, and it killed me that she felt like she had to “prove” she wasn’t just playing hooky from work with what’s actually going on with her. I texted her back and told her – you didn’t have to send that picture, I believed you, and I wish that was not something you worried about right now.
She wrote back that it’s not why she sent it. I felt like I could trust you with the truth, she said. So I wrote back – I don’t believe you got in an accident. I think it was your boyfriend, and I am upset and concerned. She confirmed. Doesn’t know what to do. Doesn’t want to make it worse, she said. I don’t know anyone who has not-needed help in this situation, I said back. “Ur right.” was her last text.
I’m writing this post because I don’t actually know what that help is. And because even though I am not on board with hiding this shit, with acting like it’s her shame and we have to pretend like it’s not happening even though I really have yet to meet a person on this planet who sees a woman with a black eye and doesn’t pretty much immeidately know she got hit – even with all of that, I also am not okay hanging her ass out to all the other employees here. I’m writing this post because I am upset and I can’t talk to anyone about it.
So here is all of it. I was enraged this morning when I got her message. Why today of all days? I know it’s not her fault, but. Really I had that thought in my head. “I know it’s not her fault, but.” And then – “she does have an uncanny pattern of being absent when it will fuck things up the most to be receptionist-less. Why did she go back to him? I saw him here the other day and was mad about it then. Why didn’t she call the people on that pamphlet I gave her a few weeks ago? Or why couldn’t she just be NOT a shitty employee, so that I could feel this as not just one more fucked up thing in a string of fucked up things.” I fucking hate her, is what I started chanting to myself. In between praying – yes, it is the corniest thing in the world to admit but really is anyone here not familiar with my cornballness? – I kept praying “please help me, what is wrong with me, why am I so mad at her? Please get this out of my heart, what the fuck God?”
And I told two people when I got here, I’m angry, not at you, and I can’t talk about it. But they knew. There is a 50/50 chance that any given person here would be mad at her/because of her, at any given time of their madness episodes.
I kept praying and praying, and still being angry, and then I got the text, just the picture, no words. And at first I was like, fuck, I know why she sent it but I so don’t want to see it. And then the first little crack in me came, when I thought of her worrying about not being believed. And my irrational anger went away, and I wrote back to her about knowing it was her boyfriend and being upset and worried.
So partly I’m up here crying at the front desk because I am indeed upset and worried, and partly because I feel weak relief about not being full of bile anymore, and simultaneous horror about feeling it in the first place. And partly because I am afraid that the reason I felt it in the first place is because she is so much like me, her life is so much like mine was in so many ways about 15 years ago. It feels cannibalistic to me, that anger I had towards her.
I’m writing a book right now and part of what happens in the book is the part of my life where I was living like she is now. The dude, how I met him, the way it turned, the particular mind-and-bodyfuck of someone hurting you who at other times is genuinely sweet and good. I don’t know if anyone who hasn’t been in it ever believes that, but I do feel like many of us seem like we’re protesting too much about how “he wasn’t/isn’t always like that.” I think it sounds like making excuses to other people’s ears, but I think it’s me trying to forgive and understand myself. Nobody would ever get with someone in the first place if he/she were abusive from the start. Of course feeling loved by him felt as good as feeling loved by anyone else. Of course that part was real. Of course he is not a monster. How could he be a monster but not me? He can’t have been a monster.
The other thing people don’t often talk about is the drug and alcohol factor. And I lose my mind about it when it does come up, because it’s always the lie – you let yourself get in a bad situation because you were abusing yourself with drugs and alcohol. You can keep yourself safe if you do the right thing and get sober. Ladies it’s in your hands!
So technically, yeah, I am not the same amount of stumbling around vulnerable that I was when I was on hard drugs. And I don’t know if I would be as easy to convince, self-to-self-wise, now that I’m more aware in general, that something that feels dangerous is not really dangerous and so let’s not make a stink and then a few months later it’s run for your life. But what bothers me is – so what?
I was an alcoholic and a drug addict, and I was a terrible employee, and I was even more self-absorbed and entitled and grandiose back then than I am now if you can imagine. But what comes after that is “and…” Not “so…”
I was with people who didn’t rape and hit me, too, when I was high. Being high doesn’t actually cause people to rape or hit you, nor does being high emit a special frequency sound that unconsciously draws people to you who are in the habit of hitting. Contrary to The Secret and any and all psychobabble new agey pull yourself up by your victim straps and be empowered bullshit that’s out there, being high and drunk is not why people get in or stay in abusive situations or relationships.
It is not why my coworker is out of work today. Other times it has been why she’s out – hung over, still high, not in the mood to come in, doesn’t care. Today, she’s out because she can’t see from one eye, and because the looks she could see on people’s faces with the other eye would be unbearable.
Except she did want *someone* to see. She sent me the picture, it turns out, not because she didn’t think I would believe her otherwise, but because, like anyone who is that alone while that shit is going on, she wanted to not be. Not be alone with it. It is so scary right after. It is like being in a horror movie, the part in Halloween where you think Michael Myers is dead but you wonder – if someone were looking at me from the front right now, would they see him pop up behind me again, and coming at me right now? So you can’t sleep or relax or even sit still, no matter how high you get.
I may have an evil enough part of me that I was mad at her because of selfishness and how it would effect my day. I would like that not to be true, but I was there, it’s not like I can pretend I didn’t see that in myself this morning, like it didn’t happen. I would like to go “hey it just triggered something in me because it is a raw area for me too right now and I felt threatened and I wasn’t actually mad at her.”
But why would I be different than other people? You think people don’t just get mad at folks for “not helping themselves” and getting out of it? I know they do. And not all of them have been abused, so it can’t be that it’s just triggering everybody else’s post trauma whatnotandstuff. It pisses people off. It is so inconvenient when you can’t make someone do what you think they should, especially when their not-doing-it impacts your life. It is not that hard to be mad at them, no matter how you think you feel about the subject of parnter abuse.
It’s kind of like – I don’t think anymore “it can’t happen to me,” about the violence. So why would I believe “it can’t happen to me” about the ugly blaming of the person being violated? Why would I think I am immune from either thing when I personally have seen the ease with which both things occur in this world?
Not that I think there is nothing I can do to be less of that asshole, or that I have to just accept it if someone else ever tries to harm me, that’s not what I mean by thinking I’m not immune. It’s, I think I want to say – maybe I am an asshole, maybe she is an asshole. I need for it to not matter. I need to not have to wait until every person in trouble is super lovable, or everybody who is around them super loving, in order for any kind of anything to happen.
I don’t know what else to say about this, or what else to say to her. I don’ t want her to be alone either, is all I know.
February 1, 2008 at 8:29 pm |
Harsh stuff to be going through. I dont have any suggestions. She needs to get rid of him but its never that easy is it. Its times like this I wish we could call on friendly feminist vigilantes to beat the crap out of him and warn him never ever to come near her or her home again, regardless of whether hes got anywhere else to go or not. But thats fairytale land and this is reality and there is no easy way out, no heroes to come to the rescue. Its terrible that she is so alone to the extent she shared a photo with you by text – good that she was able to do tell anyone at all, terrible that its significant of how desperate and alone and messed up she is. If she is only an acquaintance, someone you work with, then maybe all you can do is keep passing her advice and support numbers so no matter how many she loses or throws away, theres always one there when she really needs it.
February 2, 2008 at 12:35 am |
Damn.
Part of my reaction to why she sent the photo was also the thought that this is documented and maybe if someone else knows of the abuse, it can then be real—not in (her) imagination. Y’know, because most abusers do their work in private, and are so damn charming and polite and intelligent and articulate to everyone else.
Don’t give up on her. There were people who reached out to me when I was in my abusive marriage; they could tell even through my silence and lack of visible marks. It helped immensely—just knowing that (a) some people actually did give enough of a shit about me, and (b) it wasn’t my imagination, it really was that bad. It really wasn’t “normal life”.
One thing you can do that may help her someday is to keep a record of days when she has been abused. If she ever needs to go to court, your written record can then be documentation of the abused, and you would probably be viewed more as an impartial observer (unlike a mother, sister, etc.).
February 2, 2008 at 8:02 pm |
Thanks, v and La Lubu, for your comments.
What you said about mabye if someone else knows, it can be real – that’s something I experienced also.
I don’t know if I will explain this right, but there is a difference, or was for me, between people being like “hey this dude’s a prick and you have to wake up and get out!” versus what finally happened with me, which was my best friend, who had recently moved away, listening to everything and then naming what was happening. Like, I told her that he had slapped me, but that it had happened when we were joking around about something and I had thought – did he mean that as a joke? – but if it had been a joke, why would it have been that amount of hard? – and am I uptight to not be sure that it’s funny to slap me as a joke anyway? – but his face had changed to that creepy/scary thing so something was definitely weird –
And I didn’t need to hear “oh my god he’s a jerk and what are you doing!” What snapped me out of whatever I was in and helped me finally was hearing her say “this is what happens, this is what they do, this is the pattern of it, this is the pattern of what it feels like to be on the receiving end of it, your confusion is part of *what that pattern is* not some mysterious question to be answered.”
Because it is flat-out painful to accept that what is happening is that someone who claims to love you is purposefully harming you. You question everything in case there is some small something you missed that would explain it all as something other than what it really is. And you do get isolated as part of the pattern. And in that isolation you have only your own desperate mind to quiz about what means what. It sounds so simplistic but at least in my case, hearing someone say “that whole hey-that-hurt-when-you-slapped-me” response? it’s not you. It’s him. It does actually hurt to be slapped in the face and it does additionally hurt a person’s feelings and humiliate them when you don’t even know where the fuck it came from.”
Which is not a comment on some-slaps-are-explainable! It’s about the way that, well, when you’re fighting with someone and they hit you, you can go “ouch,” and “violent person.” When you’re getting along with someone and they hit you, it still hurts but you feel like you totally just missed something, and you have no fucking idea where you are anymore.
Meaning, I guess, that some people respond with “oh my god I don’t know where you are anymore either but there’s something wrong with both of you that you’ve let it go on,” while a precious few others respond with “I do know where you are, you are in an actual place, this is what that place is.”
February 8, 2008 at 6:19 am |
Thanks for all of this layered, vulnerable clarity.
February 8, 2008 at 9:56 pm |
Thanks for the kind words, MBS.
February 22, 2008 at 5:39 pm |
this post is just what i needed. it all resonates, esp the part about the former victim’s animosity towards another (current) victim. thank you so much for these words, and thank you for blogging. i’ve always enjoyed your comments @ other blogs.
February 23, 2008 at 5:47 pm |
Thanks for stopping by, b. medusa, and for the kind words.