Behold. My Empire Of Scraps.

Behold. My empire of scraps.

I can scrape a life together from ashes and crumbs.

We’ve hit Anger, for now

A few years ago, my friend’s city had to be evacuated due to a wildfire. Pictures from the evacuation process look exactly what I (an atheist, and admittedly not a theology expert) picture Hell to look like. It is pure terror.

Once my friend was able to return to her residence she found that it had burned to the ground.  She and her partner had lost everything.

I remember her telling me the frustration she felt  trying to talk about it.  She heard a lot of “but at least you’re ok, it could have been so much worse!” My experience is different than her’s, but I understand her now much more than I did then.

I am Angry.  Yep, Capital A.

When I actually sat down and looked at the numbers, I handed him 6 figures.  I got years of therapy and the prospect of never being right again  nothing.

When I think about how I’m killing myself to pay off debt that I got into to appease him, and scraping pennies together to try to get myself even half way to where I was with him, yeah, I get Angry.  

I am angry for the life he stole from me. 

I’m furious  he’s sitting in MY home, with MY bed and MY furniture, and gifts MY family got us, with MY money lining his bank accounts and MY trinkets and heirlooms that have no real value in this world aside from the memories and connections they have to me lining his shelves and cupboards. 

I have tried to talk about this, and very well meaning people, tell me  “It’s a small price to pay.”   “You’re lucky you got out.”    “It could be so much worse.”

Listen, no one feels my mortality or how “so much worse” it could have been more than me.  You weren’t there when he was threatening me with kitchen knives, putting pillows over my face, smashing my head against walls, pushing me down stairs, or threatening me with tools.

You weren’t there. I was. I know. I get the fucking flashbacks that remind me any time I’m feeling too comfortable.  Do you really think the other stuff is  “a small price to pay?”  You have no idea.  

I know, they mean well, and they’re trying to make me feel better, but they aren’t. They’re trivializing my loss, and making me feel as though I should feel guilty for being angry.

I’m entitled to my rage; I will take it and let it wash over me.

In unrelated news:

Not to be That Person(TM) posting remarks about weather on your dash but there’s been a surge of climate change posts on mine.  And not to trivialize the seriousness of those with my anecdotal shitpost but goddamit it’s October and I live in CANADA:

My response to the event I described in my last post. After this event I sent him a whole bunch of ignored texts like" hey can I help you today?" And " i miss you" and loads of other humiliating stuff. It's not terribly interesting and there's plenty other humiliating things to come so we'll jump forward to his response two days later:

I won’t say that I am ashamed that my heart strings still get pulled when I think of the things he suffered.  So much of what I’ve read makes me think that as a survivor I’m supposed to be as cold toward him as he was to me.

I can’t do that.  I loved this man, and the things that haunted him, haunted me.  And I can mourn for the life he may have had if things had been different.

The difference is, rereading these posts, my heart swells for him, but there is no longer the urge to run over and sweep him into a hug he’d probably reject. I won’t accept the shit he’s endured justifying what he did to me.  

That is progress.

Learned Behaviour

His dad was abusive. Violent. And his father before him.

Once he asked his dad for money for a field trip and his dad threw him into a wall so hard he went through the drywall and ended up in his sister’s closet.

He wasn’t born with these skills.

His mother told him when he was in highschool that regardless of what happened, she would always back her husband over him.

He wasn’t born cold.

I know exactly where he comes from.

I know we’re supposed to avoid harbouring sympathy for our abusers, but goddam it, he didn’t stand a chance.  

Is it any wonder?

TW - self harm

When he was in his early teens, he confessed to his parents that he had urges to hurt himself.  He wanted to take one of his hunting knives and plunge it into his gut.

I’m not a mother, so maybe I don’t know, but if my kid came up to me and told me he was having a hard time not gutting himself, I’m pretty sure we’d be dropping everything and going to the hospital to get some professional help.

They took away his hunting knives.  That’s it.