Not Me Too - Part 1 "You were Mediocre. You're Just Not Assertive"
Over the past few days, I've heard the words "So this is Christmas, what have you done" echo continually in my head. I think John Lennon is haunting me personally, threatening me to do some reflection. While I seldom chronicle in writing, I am a fierce hoarder of photos and screenshots as my dwindling I-Phone storage can tell you. And with that comes a unique fuel for reflection. I look back at old photos, posts, screenshots and think of where I've been regularly. As I look back on this year and on the previous posts here, I find myself so disconnected from the unbridled optimism and sentimentality of my previous passages. My base emotional and psychological state have changed as I've been dealing with what unfortunately is a diagnosis of Complex PTSD and derealization and depersonalization disorder as a result of a traumatic sexual experience and what could be categorized as an emotionally abusive relationship. And while I thought I'd be shielded from being hurt by someone so immensely from having my mental health altered, my conception of myself as strong or pragmatic didn't keep me from falling victim to this. I was played, hurt , fooled, bamboozled, lied to, emotionally abused at times and betrayed , the full Monty. And no matter who I thought I was, it happened to me too. I've never had mental illness and didn't think my mental health could truly be altered in such a way. I can be sad and get over breakups, disappointments, loss etc. Shoot I'm going to an ex's wedding in April, someone I once considered marrying. But this, what's happening now to me, is something foreign. And so as I come to terms with this diagnosis, I reflect on what got me here.
I wrote my former partner, we'll call him Nitehawk, a very long letter asking him to reflect on all of this, to which he responded "seems like for your sake, we shouldn't be in contact for a while. Wish you the best" LOL, empathetic king. But I understand it's not easy to reflect on yourself and come to terms with who you were this year. I know that too. So follow the next few posts for what is a doozy of a year.
PART 1
If I’m being honest, I looked up the definition of emotional abuse or contempt in dating more than once while we were together. That should've been my sign, but each time I thought to bring it up, I was met contradictory behavior and would bury the notion. Abuse was a word used by my therapist, many others after, but it’s a hard one for me to use because I don’t want to see him as abuser and me as a victim. But there’s a lot to consider why that may lightly resonate. I highlight in parenthesis some of the signs of emotional abuse and where each story lines up. This is a tiny snapshot not comprehensive or complete. There are more stories ,good and bad, but we're hyperfocusing on a part if it.
2/3/21 It starts with him telling me “I didn’t know myself”, accusing me of lack of self- awareness or knowledge at a time where he barely knew me and was projecting that onto me. His clumsy diatribe was in response to me being quiet at a happy hour where he, much like he did when I met his family, left me on my own and paid me little mind. I remember him laying across me, not interacting with me, feeling like a piece of furniture below him. I remember telling him I was nervous beforehand, and him responding with nothing. I was quiet and he didn't care, but mentioned something when his friend who was quiet on the happy hour. This night was painful. It was like I didn't even exist to him. I explain this a few days later. I employ this lovely metaphor about feeling like I’m a dancer on a stage who keeps waiting for him to dance with me. "I see you dance with other people in the audience, and they can see that you don’t dance with me. And I just begin to feel awkward in my body, uncomfortable, and alone". I felt that so many times - in Beacon; I felt that in Florida meeting his family. I felt that on his birthday weekend at Pioneers, at Kishi Bashi concert I got us tickets to .
2/20/21 He updates his dating profile to explore new connections while we were separated geographically but romantically still exclusive and had just spent Valentine's day together(humiliation, disregard for feelings). We are still very much exclusive and that hasn't changed, but once he left , he felt no obligation to uphold that or at least have a conversation about it. I would've been fine to break things off. A simple conversation would have avoided the pain of me discovering this while bragging to a friend about him and her reading his profile out loud at dinner. And so, I try to lay it all out then, letting him know how all these things made me feel uncared for, the lack of curiosity/engagement, the low awareness. I tell him he has a pattern of hurting women that comes across when he talks about his past partners– how they felt he wasn’t there for them, didn’t have their backs, had done things I can't talk about but have crossed moral lines. He knew and seemed to understand. And I hoped he'd taken what I said to heart and worked to change, so that he didn’t hurt the next person. Sadly, these things didn’t quite change and I was the next person, feeling all of these things come back up in full force.
While I bounce around the timeline a bit, this weekend is so horrific for me, I wanted to talk about it first. It should've woken me up to the fact that I was being abused. It was the clearest indicator as there were no arguments or conflicts that weekend or any back and forth. The blows were always coming from one direction, his.
1/28/22 Nitehawk's Birthday Weekend
I go to the improv class he wants me to go to for his birthday, a situation I avoided previously out of fear of embarrassment. Imagine you’re me - you’re nervous about embarrassing yourself in front of everyone and your partner. After class ends, you’re waxing poetic about how it’s good to just go out there and go for it, knowing you didn’t quite sparkle that day. And unprompted, without constructive criticism, your partner tells you, you were mediocre. That is the conversation (criticism to destroy self-esteem).
Later that night, you take them to the bar. You’re with a few strangers, and low and behold the person closest to you basically treats you like a stranger too. You buy them drinks, have the bar play them a song. But they stop interacting with you. The two people you are with, not even the one in your partner’s class, have any clue you’re even together.
Next night, you plan this great dinner. You’re a little late but you have a reservation and so you’re excited to share this great meal with the other person. You know they’re health-conscious and can feel good about the food here. And then while you’re not paying attention, a group of people cut in front of you and your person snaps at you, hurling the accusation that you’re not assertive once again, while they do nothing to address the situation. You joke about how you’ll fight those people. They shut you down flatly declaring – no you won’t. (belittling, criticism to destroy self-esteem, aggression, humiliation)
You go back home trying not to be deflated from the events and as you’re sleeping, the ceiling begins to leak. You contain the leak with the recycling bin and sit down as the other person continues to fortify the leak. You remain calm as you’re not one to panic in crisis, but once again are jabbed at for remaining seated or not asserting enough dominance against the water flowing from the ceiling. (aggression, belittling) When I write it, it feels very misogynistic, like a man punching down at a woman and accusing her of being weak. Perhaps that is exactly what it was.
And to top it all off, the next day, after a weekend of being kicked in the teeth, your partner after a month and change of being together confesses that what you thought was a perfectly platonic dinner between him and a friend had led to a sudden realization that they were “romantically curious” about the friend. A a poorly timed admission, as I had to leave to take my friend to the hospital following a brain injury. I sat that night in the hospital scrambling to keep her symptoms straight and advocate to her doctor, watching her brain function rapidly decline , not knowing whether my friend would live or die that night, all while having to think about how my boyfriend discovered for feelings for a friend while we were together. ( not emotional abuse just shitty and humiliating, but also emotional cheating as an aside)
This was all in the span of three days.
I think the problem-solver in me sees problems as a thing to be addressed and solved, but it didn't quite click that another solution to this problem, not for us, but for me, would've been to leave. I shouldn't have advocated for better treatment, to be treated with decency and humanity, I should've left.
He took moments that would have brought us closer together and used them to hurt me. When we played ‘The And’ on the train, the question of “What do you know to be true of how I see the world?” comes up. I think to myself, maybe if he cares, sees me, actually liked me, he’d say something like “You lean toward optimism because you’ve had a tough life and you needed optimism to survive. You try to see the best and bring out the best in people because you’re loving and want people to feel loved by you”. But he turns to me, and says “I see the world as I do because I “haven’t been tested”, essentially calling me naïve (humiliation). It’s a shot at who I am at core coming from the person that meant the most to me. I felt smaller than a speck of dirt on his shoe. I don’t think I could ever say that to someone I cared about, not even someone I hated.
He would get upset at me for wanting to talk in bed at night always shutting down that kind of intimacy. He'd call me lazy, make passive aggressive snides at me for wanting to stay in bed during the weekends and lounge with him. He'd be resistant to dance with me or sing with me and made me feel crazy for wanting these things. He'd stonewall me constantly cut off conversation and get snippy and mean to me for daring to call it out on so many occasions. I had to ask him to talk about movies , a self-proclaimed cinephile. I remember watching Inside by Bo Burnham excited to talk about it discuss the themes, only to hear him say "it was good" and turn away. He'd sell me a story that these don't come naturally to him or he was tired etc or just snap at me. But in reality, I know these aren't an issue for him now. He was just finding covert ways to hurt me and shut me out. After we broke in therapy, he admitted as much . He pushed me away so I wouldn't fall in love with more, ( enter narcissism) . He knew that and still tried to make me seem crazy through this small and subtle gaslight and crazy-making behavior (mind games).
He'd snap at me continuously- when we were cooking potatoes in his kitchen, were at a grocery store in Florida trying to pick out ice cream, at a pool for starting a conversation about family, doing yoga on his floor. It would always be so strangely sharp and unexpected. I'd always wonder why this person would be so quick to talk down or unleash anger at me for nothing. I remember him snapping at me for wanting to move up during the set change of the Kishi Bashi concert. I was so excited for this concert . I'd bought tickets months in advance and was excited to share this surprise with NH. We had gotten there at the end of the opening set and so I'd asked to move up. I remember him snapping at me "I don't want to do that. No that's obnoxious". It was so sharp as to suggest that I was stupid for even considering it. I silently wept in the crowd. I remember hearing Kishi play love songs that night and watching the men in the audience instinctively grab their partners. Nitehawk didn't touch me, as if to not give me the wrong impression. I told him that the next day. He didn't say anything. He was always hiding deceit in silent.
He'd correct me often, always seizing the opportunity to point out every mistake and flaw (hypercriticism/nitpicking part of emotional abuse), almost relishing in making me feel inferior. He'd point out my flaws, not in the hopes of comforting me or making me feel better about them. He just wanted to let me know he'd observed my imperfections. He'd question small things I'd do as a subtle put downs" Do you not wring out the sponge when you're done? Do you not floss?" To put that in to context, I had to ask him to ask me things about myself. He didn't know my middle name or my mother's name but could ask questions to highlight things I did wrong. Much of this is why, my body had started to manifest foreign expressions of anxiety causing me to show an uncharacteristic lack of fluency. I used to mince words around him, get simple expressions wrong sometimes struggle to express myself. He was chipping away at something within me. My body just recognized it first.
In addition, there was this psychological minefield of him switching personalities around me. He would become quiet reclusive and strange, but be talkative vivid and expressive around everyone else. Strangers, friends, etc. I'd watch the flip happen in real time. I'd listen to him with other people and then he'd turn to me and be weird less chatty. Sometimes, like on his birthday night at the bar, he'd almost avoided interacting with me entirely. All of his public dissociating from me, made me feel like a pariah, like an embarrassment.I told him he made me feel like he was ashamed of me(an experience many black women who date men are familiar with). I remember once mentioning how I pushed him into improv during his level 1 grad show , and he just immediately went silent as if I wasn't supposed to tell people that I had impacted him. At my friend's birthday dinner, someone asked us how we met and he immediately checked out of the conversation , one he'd previously been engaged in when the topic was music. I told him he hated me. He'd say "I don't hate you", but never " I like you a lot. I don't want you to feel that way" or even ask me why I felt that way. He knew. These were clear enough signs. He'd never apologize first. Despite all of these things, it wasn't until I reiterated his behavior that he actually would mutter an apology. But he never recognized it in himself, or perhaps more aptly just didn't care. He meant what he said. And while I thought I could take his apologetic demeanor and understanding in the moment of these conversations about his behavior to mean something, it didn't stop it. He understood , but he chose to do it anyways.
Part 1 , would've been enough to leave, but alas MORE in PT 2
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