Loving Myself Every Day



Paper 4

Grace Horner

News and Feature Writing: Paper 4

December 7, 2010

New relationships are supposed to be fun and exciting. Two years ago, those were the feelings I was having about a budding romance. We laughed a lot, had a lot in common, and enjoyed each other’s company. He was smart, funny, charming, and kind. It seemed like things were finally going to go my way when it came to finding love.

My parents didn’t like him. They thought he was too old for me and that he was manipulating me with promises of helping me get into the television broadcasting industry. His family didn’t like me either. Even though they’d never met me, they thought it was appropriate to tell him how wrong I was for him. We started fighting about our families and their lack of support for us – not as a couple, but as individuals. My family eventually decided not to pay for school as long as we stayed together.

That’s when he decided to co-sign for me to get a loan to stay in school. That was not where the control issues had started, but that was definitely where they got worse. It started with something small, not to talk to my ex-boyfriend. If I did, he would be gone. Eventually though, it morphed into not talking to any of my ex-boyfriends, which morphed into not being friends with or talking to any other men, unless he approved of it. I was not allowed to have certain girl friends either. For example, my roommate was a single girl, so he did not want me spending any time at my apartment because there may be other men there. And if I wanted to go out for a girl’s night, I was probably going out to meet men, so that was another “no.”

“Once you are alienated, sort of on an island, they know they’ve got you all to themselves,” says Dr. Raul Sanchez, a doctor I see about my new issues.  “It’s a control tactic so that you think he’s all you’ve got.”

He had turned into such a baby. He cried every time something happened that he did not like. The littlest fight spiraled out of control. No matter how hard I tried to keep us on one issue, he pulled in everything else that was going wrong in his life. The issue didn’t matter, he always found some way to make it my fault. A very common one was that his mom was mad at him because I was taking up all his time and he didn’t have enough time to talk to her.

And he could yell and yell and yell at me. It seemed like he never got tired of it. But the second I yelled back, he told me to stop yelling or he’d call the police. So I’d stop. While I was talking to him though, he’d yell over the top of me, setting me off into yelling back. This cycle would go on until I was finally so exhausted and in tears that I didn’t even bother trying to talk, I just yelled. Then, of course, he called the police. Thank goodness they never saw any reason to take either of us to jail, though some nights I wished they take him so I could sleep in peace. But his job meant they’d never do that. They only threatened to take me in.

I should have gotten out.

I’ll never forget the first time he hit me. I picked him up from work, and he’d had a bad day. He took it out on me by yelling at me about my parents taking away my car when they cut off my money for school. I asked him repeatedly to please stop yelling. When he didn’t, I slammed on the brakes. I had checked all the mirrors, so I knew no one was going to rear-end us. He turned and it seemed like slow motion. He started pummeling my right side – my face, my neck, my arms, my ribs. I was too stunned to react. No one had ever hit me before. The only thing I could do was cry. I had bruises up and down the next day.

The beatings got more and more regular. Even after he moved away, it would be my weekend to visit and it would start as soon as I got there. It always went the same way. He’d pick a fight as soon as he got off work. We’d yell and then say we were making up. We’d go to bed and I’d fall asleep, but he never could. It’d be 4:00 in the morning before he woke me up though, usually by yelling at me to get out. I’d wake up, start crying, and asking what was wrong – begging him to let me stay. Sometimes he’d throw things at me, once it was my cell phone; another time it was a suitcase full of my things. Afterwards, he always slept like a baby. I laid awake wanting to set his hair on fire.

There were so many threats too. He’d say we were breaking up. When I moved in with him, he threatened to have me evicted. It was always so final. So midway through the summer, I moved out.  A week later, I had crawled back – believing that things would change. They never did.

Two months later, it was back to the same things. Our last fight was over something so small: food. We were both broke and he didn’t have any food to eat. Had I had the money, I would have ordered him a pizza, like he’d done for me. But of course, it spiraled into other things, like always. It ended with him saying that if there wasn’t a pizza at his front door before he went to work, he wouldn’t make the trip during his weekend to visit.

 Of course, like a fool, the next morning I sent a pizza. He called saying that it wasn’t enough, that we were breaking up and he wasn’t coming to visit. I said, “Fine,” and hung up. I haven’t spoken to him since. That Sunday, my dad and I went and got my things out of my old car. He started trying to call that night. He called and sent text messages about 100 times over the next three days. He sent flowers as if to say, “look how good things can be.” I donated them to a nursing home. He stopped trying a few days later.

Sometimes I feel incredibly sad. I lost someone that I loved so very much. I miss the good times we had because we did have them. I wish we had stayed the way we were at the beginning. But I also feel incredibly free. Sure, my ego and self-esteem have suffered, and I’m not the same happy-go-lucky girl I was two years ago.

But I’m free.

“Abusive relationships are a cycle,” Sanchez says.  “You are twice as likely to get into an abusive relationship than you were before.  But it’s a good thing you’re out.  Relationships like that usually get more violent, a lot of times it becomes so much so that it’s fatal for one or both of the people involved.”

I can go out with who I want, talk to who I want, and see my family whenever I want.

I may be rebuilding my life, and becoming reacquainted with myself, but I’m alive to do it.