This is where my memory gets blurry. I stopped journaling. I stopped texting friends and calling family. My mom started to get scared. My boyfriend got increasingly angry with the ways I was neglecting and disrespecting him. My best friend felt de-prioritized as I isolated with Lionheart more and more. All of their feelings were valid and justified. I was not myself because “myself” was dissolving faster and faster, like the abusive relationship I had fallen into was an acid that both numbed and dissolved my flesh, so as it liquidated me, I didn’t notice until it was too late and everything was gone.
When my mom and Bret began to mention their suspicions of Lionheart’s potentially abusive behaviors I made excuses for him.
“You don’t understand the situation”
“You don’t know what he’s been though”
“You don’t know him like I do”
“He’s not usually like that”
These are common phrases people hear from victims of abuse as they are mired in an abusive situation. It is common for victims to defend their abuser and abusive relationships, like cults, the victims rarely, if ever, consciously know they’re in one.
I write the rest of these journals in retrospect but when I think back, I see the images of my past with a thick fuzz around the edges, like the world looks when I take off my glasses.
Trauma, especially abuse, makes us question our memory and if what we think happened really happened. Abusers who gaslight compound this by creating an alternate reality where nothing is wrong. I know that what I remember did happen but perhaps I remember it out of order or get some details wrong. Details are irrelevant when recounting abuse and if you are a survivor reading this - DO NOT doubt yourself. You know how you feel. I know how I felt during all of this and THAT is what matters. I remember the feelings like it was yesterday - the fear, pain, shame, and hurt.
Abuse and gaslighting instills doubt but writing is healing. Reconciling the past through this writing is remembering the fractured pieces of myself and becoming whole again because that’s what remembering is. Abuse dis-members and ruptures us but when we heal, we re-member ourselves and become whole again.
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