Walk in My Shoes

It's funny how people on Twitter (I'm not on Facebook, but I guess it's the same over there) retweet and like things, but they seldom actually chat. I'm not such a big fan of silence, so I try to talk to people when they send something that touches me one way or the other.

Yesterday, Louise Brealey sent a link to a video about abuse. Even though I'm fine these days (that's a wonder with the amount of stress generated by the launch of our company!), that short video made me cry because it reminded me that my own mother is either in denial about what my abuser did to me or she really believes that I should have been back to normal five minutes after he left.

This is not how it works.

My soul is scratched - but healing.

My heart was broken - but I've found some glue to repair it... though the tiniest pieces are fucking hard to put back where they belong.

When I met my abuser, some people I knew could have warned me against him. They didn't.

It took him six hours to worm his way into my coat of armour and toss me into a tiger trap where I woke up, broken, hurt, lost. Lost... important part of the issue in my case. I couldn't figure out what was going on.

One day, I remember thinking, as it's often the case with victims, 'Why do I allow him to do these things to me?' and then... it hit me. It was the wrong question.

The right question was, 'Why does he think he has the right to treat me like this?'

He had no right to hurt me.

Too bad for me, he was a manipulator, and he'd found all my buttons within hours of meeting me, and he could abuse me all he wanted.

Fast forward a few years, and I'm healing.

Yesterday, someone at @BoxRoomFilms tweeted me with kind words after I mentioned being a survivor. That was quite nice. It was 'Hey! Stay strong, fellow human being!'

And this morning, I got this:

Ah.

So it's my fault if I was stupid enough to pick up a snake. I was bitten, and I'm the only one to blame - because me, myself, and I, we picked up a snake.

That was a lovely punch to the gut.

Miss Valicia thinks victims are the only ones to blame.
Miss Carla felt the need to remind me that I was stupid enough to pick up a snake, so I deserved being bitten.

Thank you so much, sisters.

No wonder my friends in town don't want to hear what I have to say when I feel a bit low because of the long-term consequences of the abuse, and no wonder my own mother wants to forget about the whole thing.

As I told Miss Carla, this is victim-blaming AND my snake looked like a bloody canary when I met him. He was delightful until he morphed into his own version of Mr Hyde. AND, to the rest of the world, he was ALWAYS Mr Charming.

I'm not stupid.

I wasn't stupid back then.

I was targeted by a sick wanker, who, unfortunately, was twisted enough to find a way to control me long enough to do with me as he pleased.

It's frigging easy to say 'Don't pick up a snake if you don't want to be bitten!'. These creatures don't show their fangs until it's too late and the VICTIM cannot escape.

I wish we could eradicate all forms of abuse, but it seems that there's still a lot of education to do if we don't want the Valicias and Carlas of the world to hand out useful advice to not pick up the snake, but it seems that people who haven't been walking in the shoes of a victim of abuse simply cannot understand how devastating and paralysing it can be to find oneself into the clutches/fangs/whatever of a gifted abuser.

We're not stupid.
Our abusers are twisted. They're the ones who must be blamed. To keep working on the snake image, the issue isn't 'Why did the girl pick up the snake in the first place?', but 'Why did that snake think it had the right to bite its rescuer?'.
Victim-blaming isn't nice. There's no need to pile up more negativity on the backs of victims.
I suspect that Miss Carla is in the US. I'll see if she answers when she gets up, but I doubt it...

My first play will be out in June, and I must say I'm 'happy' that it's about abuse and the dire consequences it can generate.