{Family} Business as Usual

Yes, this is going to be a growl (and we're not Sunday yet).

Sorry about that; you know the drill: feel free to skip the post.

First, I'm sorry to be so silent, but between my jobs, our trying to launch our company, my back playing tricks on me (yes, again), and the bronchitis of the year, I didn't post last month.

Why do I post today? Because I need to vent. Because I always do what needs to be done at work, but I just got lectured by relatives who do fuck all all day, and who feel entitled to lecture me.

Last night, I got home an hour later than usual because traffic was hell and I had to take another route home (incidentally, having to wait for a bus in the cold for twenty-five minutes). Like a good, well-trained idiot, I checked that my relatives were okay, and I mentioned that I was planning to send an update to school about a student who should have been in class but wasn't (I don't even have to do it; it's just me being nice and keeping the admins posted).

I was frozen, knackered, and my back was properly killing me. For once - for once - I went to bed early.

And today, my relatives, who usually forget everyfuckingthing about my life, asked if I sent the e-mail, and I said "no", because it's the truth.

And I heard, 'Ah! I just knew you wouldn't do it!' (clearly implying that it is customary to see me drop the ball).

I barked that I went to bed because I was properly exhausted, and they did hear that I was pissed off.

As usual, they phoned back a few minutes later, to merrily talk about something totally irrelevant, and allegedly fluffy to try and make me forget that they'd just behaved like wankers.

<insert snort here> I know all their manipulative tricks...

Today, Scotland (bless them!) unanimously voted to protect victims of physical and psychological abuse. When can we start doing this with relatives DNA-related nightmares?

That Kind of Day, Eh?

I don't understand why so many bipeds feel the need to be so petty... and it's a festival on Earth these days.

There's a failed con artist with a fake tan, who got a million from his daddy to start a business (and who managed to lose almost a billion (!!!!!) in a year years later) who's trying to make gullible people believe that he could manage a country (when he's never been properly involved in politics before) - and he's just been caught on tape gloating that he's a predator.

There are politicos who help make money, thanks to all the horrors going on in the Middle East, whilst other politicos, in a kind of remake of the 1930s would like to know where the aliens are working in their country.

All that makes my blood boil, and today... the ugliness got personal (as I've lost a friend).

That this person has been forgetting my birthday (we're supposed to be good friends) for a decade... No problem. It's not that important (even though that person didn't forget to wish a "Happy birthday!" to... a sports coach met once a week for a few months).

That I'm always the one who has to keep in touch... I'll make the effort. No problem.

That this person played deaf when I talked about breaking down and thinking about suicide. No problem. It's my burden (and I understand it's not easy to know what to say [though a hug would have been frigging nice]).

That this person acted as if nothing happened when I said that I'd apostatised... Still not a problem.

My health is yo-yo'ing again, so I don't have time for pettiness (I've got fever, headaches, and most of my joints hurt, which is pretty scary - and painful).
As well, I'm drawing the line at pseudo-jokes.
I've never bought the 'I'm telling you something horrible, but I'll pretend it's a joke so you can't be mad at me'. People use 'I'm joking' when they've pushed you over the cliff, but they don't want the witnesses to tell the coppers what really happened.

I don't particularly enjoy having to get rid of knives in my back - and today's incident left me with my lower jaw on the floor, coz I didn't expect to be told something so low about my life - especially not from someone who I thought was a friend, but friends don't disparage you, your beliefs or your life.

I do have good friends who are lovely and kind, Merlin be praised. I won't be able to forget (or forgive) what that person told me, wrapped in a pseudo-joke, and I'm done being the only one making all the efforts. 

I'm nice, but life's too short.

Less pettiness, more empathy.

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.

The Constant Threat of a Relapse

The annoying thing when you're a survivor with PTSD is that you've got to manage the things that could make you jump off a cliff. 

If you're lucky, you've got someone (or many people if you're really lucky) helping you and holding another sword next to yours, and ready to have your back against the Void. I've got a lovely brother who instinctively understands how easily I could snap (he's the only one seeing my seems come loose when I've got an attack, and he's always found the right words to generate some light in my darkness - last December, the Void caught me by surprise, and I collapsed like I hadn't in a decade within a day. He was there as I navigated the Void).

The medication I take against the Void is mostly working, but it's not 100% efficient, and negative incidents can push me towards the Void in the wink of an eye.

Over the past week, I discovered that the business plan we had had to be modified because we simply can't afford to start that kind of business as we'd dreamt it. What's petty and sordid is that we're asked to buy a kind of insurance that we've already got from another source, but noooooooooo! We must have that special one (and whether we're successful or not, we must pay - and we'd get absolutely no advantage since we're already protected). After a few hours when we pictured our lovely plan going down the drain, we found our Plan B, which is going to allow us to work, but within a very different frame (and we're not entirely out of the wood registration-wise, but there's still hope - I think).

Then... a manipulator Apparated to my doorstep, and I didn't spot the trap until I'd already done what that person wanted. Oh, it was nothing bad, but when you've been in the claws of an abusive manipulator, such a tiny thing makes a lovely last straw.

I've had a mild panic attack for not spotting the trap, but I've done everything I could to manage keeping the Void at bay, but I'd rather not have to deal with such bipeds.

It started as a joke on Twitter, but there's a plaque on my door, and I'm very seriously considering writing "By appointment only" there.

As well, I swore to myself to no longer answer the door unless all the building's fire-alarms are going off and there's a brigade of firemen begging me to open the door. Even though I know most of my neighbours (and I've known them all my life!), we never visit one another, so only strangers would come bug me, and the threat of meeting another manipulator is just too scary.

I'm probably turning into a misanthrope light, but allowing strangers in my life's too big a danger with no benefit for me. I need my home to be a safe haven, a refuge where I don't risk being hurt.

I guess I'll feel better after a good night of sleep (or two), and with some lovely sunlight around, but I was lucky that my meds work well and that I spotted the sign of the impending panic attack and did the one thing that works against it.

I bet it's tough to imagine how tiny bumps on the road of life can look like the Himalayas to survivors, but that's how they feel... And it sucks.

PTSD & Suicide

Oddly enough (karmically??), I've been watching a few things about PTSD and suicide over the past week.

It's not such a mystery. If you bury people under trauma and you trigger panic attack after panic attack, there comes a time when the idea of stopping the pain/finding eternal sleep starts sounding bloody appealing.

Until you've met the Beast of the Void, you cannot understand how cold is the blade that pierces your heart.

Right now, I know that I'm in the uh-oh zone. If things like the ones I describe in my prior post keep happening, I'm going to start looking at the river and lengths of rope with different eyes.

It's that easy to blow a fuse for good.

I think I'm going to resort to yelling at my plonkers, but one shouldn't have to be "growly" in order to counter the pettiness and ineptitude of a collection of village idiots who don't do what they're supposed to do (and some pretend or think - or whatever - that you're the one who's being nasty because you want them to do what they're supposed to do).

I'm shaking.

I'm furious.

I'm not going to be able to fall asleep at any decent hour because I'm stressed.

But...

I don't want to kick the bucket because of wankers who think someone died and made them kings. It's a pity to have to stop being nice and kind to prevent idiots from taking their toll on my poor health.

Gosh, I hope it's just a glitch, and not the preview for November!!

'She's guilty!!!'

Preliminary note: I considered not posting this one, but the amount of sexism and victim-blaming I've read today is making me see red, so before I blow a fuse, I give you a growly post on a thorny topic...






I'm back home, and I'm angry... because I was silly enough to watch the news (I should stick to newspapers and Twitter; those can already make me growl, but usually, I don't get to put a face on plonkers saying stupid things).

So, there was this section about the death of a baby, killed by his violent and abusive father.

Allow me to yell this in red: WE MUST EDUCATE PEOPLE ABOUT ABUSE AND HOW TO HELP VICTIMS!!!

It was a complete festival of victim-blaming in that section:

- the neighbours: heard the shouts and the wife being beaten, but they did nothing and said nothing.

- the wife's mother and father-in-law: scolded the husband, and stopped going to see their daughter after the husband threatened them with a knife.

- the wife's father: he tried to protect her by telling her to leave, but now he blames her for staying.

- the various shop owners in town: saw the black eyes and bruises on the wife, but they "didn't want to get involved" because it was "none of their business".

When the wife got pregnant and her husband kept beating her, she went to the police.

What happened?

The husband got a few hours of community service. Awwwwwwwwwww!

Now, he's killed their baby.

I've just seen the Prosecutor declare calmly that the mother is somehow guilty as well because she didn't protect her child.

What about going to court six months ago and trying to get protection - and being left alone with a drinking sociopath?

What about being brainwashed into believing that she couldn't do a single thing without her husband (as per several shop owners' testimonies!)?

What about being another victim in this? Just a victim.

People who've never been abused can't imagine what it is. As I've already said before, my own mother is deeply convinced that I could have left my abuser in the wink of an eye, and that I should have been back to "life as it was before" five minutes after leaving him.

*snort* That's a pretty dream.

Abuse victims are in a form of hell on earth, and manipulation is a form of torture.

Yes, some mothers will react and leave when their companions start attacking their children. Some can do that, because that act of violence becomes a freeing trigger that helps them make a change.

Unfortunately, not all can do that, and the Earthlings should be told and taught that until they understand that abuse victims have their souls shackled and restrained.

I'm quite angry because what I saw made it clear that the wife is a victim, too, and the Prosecutor clearly felt contempt for her.

Her parents fled, the whole town turned deaf and blind, the police and the court gave a half-hearted slap on the wrist to her abuser, and now that the murderer she couldn't escape has killed her baby, she's probably going to end up in jail.

If I were the judge... I'd make sure she gets proper help, and I'd add the number of years the Law wants her to spend in jail to the sentence of the real culprit... but that's me, a Survivor who knows how quick and easy it is to fall for a predator.

That Sword of Damocles

My being bullied by someone who's bitter, because I wasn't stupid enough to not see that he tried to cheat after failing to deliver a first assignment on time and because I was honest enough to report the truth, is quite hurtful - all the more since I'm just the link between my bullying liar and my bosses, and I've got no feedback from the Suits.

That has made me think about my life. My life today. My life as a survivor.

This is a kind of testimony to document the damages of abuse and bullying.

Of course, my bullying liar doesn't know a thing about me, my life, my past... He doesn't know a thing about me, and all he cares about is that he's been made to look bad, twice, because he didn't do his job - twice, and after I gave him a second chance, he decided that yelling at the Suits that I'm the one who's bad, and who's targeting him on purpose (because I'm obviously that mean, and everybody's going to back him up on that [that bullying liar must be smoking the bad lawn, as no one is going to lie for him]).

So... I can prove that the bullying liar is a bullying liar, and I can probably get other people to back me up (because I do my job well), and yet... I am in pain.

I know that I'm doing my job well, but that bullying liar has managed to make me doubt that I'm any good. That sent me back to the time when I was in an abusive relationship that nearly killed me (ten years being tortured by a manipulator, who'd deny everything even today - two years on Prozac, trying to rebuild my life and my confidence).

It's really odd, because just before that thing happened - I mean just one bloody day before! - I was thinking that I was happy and that things would be fine.

Now... I'm on the verge of an ulcer, and I don't know how I'm going to recover from what the bullying liar did to me, to my work, and to my good reputation (and I just bet that he'd be delighted to know that he's done that to me).

Today... I find myself wondering if the Void, the Shadows, that worm that could tackle me into deep depression (something so deep that I'd kick the bucket, one way or the other) is ever going to leave my life.

It's probably one of these conditions that one has to monitor forever.

It's somehow a good thing that I was doing so well when I was psychologically stabbed in the back several times, since that prevented me from collapsing too low, but I really wish the Suits were a tad more concerned that they've opened the door to a Snake who could get someone to collapse for good, just because that lazy plonker didn't want to work properly and didn't appreciate being told the naked truth.

Another Encounter with the Void

This is probably going to sound like a bit of a whinge, but if I can’t pour my heart out on my own blog, where could I do it? 

It’s more a statement that I need to get off my chest than anything else, really… Maybe it’s another testimony of my broken heart I want to post, like a message in a bottle. 

Here’s what happened:

When I finally managed to watch the British Academy Television Awards 2012, I was expecting some fine entertainment (and I wasn't disappointed!), but I wasn't expecting to cry when Monica Dolan made her speech.

What caught me by surprise was this:

'Twelve young women and girls, that we know of, were  lost in the Cromwell Street murders, and some of them were taken from  their families and some of them were in and out of care and I think the thing that affected me most working on this was not the  appalling violence actually; it was the fact that some of those women,  some of them, were never reported missing, and it seems that some of  them, no one noticed that they had gone for twenty years, and I would like to live in a world where everyone is missed.’

Of course, I haven’t been abducted and murdered, but I’ve discovered that I can become silent in a few of my Internet spots and, basically, disappear, and no one notices (nearly no one – I got one flare from a far-away friend, who did wonder what was going on [if you’re the one, and you’re reading this, you’re glomped again].).

On most groups, I’m not that active, so it’s not a surprise, but in the group I started, I was posting very, very, very, very, very regularly, and when a nasty bout of depression, a bit of Void caught me, I just couldn’t post.

Void and darkness left bit by bit, but I’m now coming back to a place where I can be MIA for two months, and I could have been decomposing on my linoleum, and I have the feeling that no one noticed.

I really feel as if whether I’m on this planet or not makes no difference, and it’s not the best of feelings. I’ve recently read things that explained the lurker phenomenon, but I really feel like a piece of furniture that’s forgotten against the backdrop – all the more since, in the past, I’d already explained that my health problems tend to take their toll (being half-paralyzed for years will do that to you) and I’d warned that a sudden disappearance might well be a sign that the Void was calling me (if, by any chance, someone is reading this and thinking “Pft! She’s just crying wolf to make herself interesting”, I’ll answer that my mantra in most of April was “I want to die, I want to die”). Yet, in spite of my earlier call for a bit of e-warmth, I got nearly nothing (just one message from the other side of the globe).

I see some good things happening; some people caring and being good.

And so, I end up wondering if there’s something wrong with me and if I’m invisible or something.

I know I’m not the only one having problems, but I can’t imagine that I’m dealing with hundreds and hundreds of lurkers, which is why I do feel like a piece of furniture. Since this is happening to one of my other literary incarnations, I tried a little experiment and took down all my works from the archives (no one noticed, which tells me that I could disappear for good and it’s the smell of decomp that’d inform neighbours of my fate – if they cared enough to mention it to the landlady!). 

I feel as if I’ve been dumped by the site I started. These readers haven’t realized yet that they’ve killed my muse, and I’m not going to write anything else for them (it's not to punish them; it's just that my inspiration for their plots dried up and died. My silver lining is that I’ll focus on my original works from now on).

This is what happened to me in that particular zone of the Internet, but when I met friends in town and basically sent an SOS, I was ignored. I came to the conclusion that it’s fine if I’m around to help them with something, but I’m not worth a quick hug (which is all I need).

The conclusion is that there’s nothing wrong with me, and some of the people I know and e-know are just not on my wave length. There’s no need to ask for a hug or even just a smiley in an e-mail, I’ll never get that. I could make it my sig line (“If I suddenly stop e-mailing for several days in a row, something’s wrong; please, wave, send the cavalry, beam Captain Kirk, or something…”), and the message would still not go through.

In fact, the one who’d send the cavalry is my brother. The handful of friends who’ve got the address of this blog would notice too, but for the rest of the planet, my fall would be quieter than the breaking of a twig in the heart of a huge forest.

I think I’ll try to exorcise a bit of Void with a new Sordid Fairy Tale on the topic.

The Black Hole That's Eating My Soul

It’s astounding how one can resist the pull of the Void (yea, capital v, of course).

In a long list of odd incidents, there are two major slaps that I’ll never forget.

To make things short, let’s say that the ending of my teen years wasn’t exactly nice, and one day I stole sleeping pills. Unfortunately, I had no clue about the appropriate dosage to not wake up again, and after long hours, I woke up to find a relative surprised to see me in bed in late afternoon. I was hiding the pills’ bottle under the cover, which must have looked somewhat suspicious, and my relative investigated. When she saw the bottle, she only said that I ‘should take some if it can make me nicer and less grumpy’. That was around the time when a neighbour (someone I hardly knew) caught me as I’d planned to run away; she invited me to her home, made me talk and convinced me that leaving wasn’t the answer.

My first missed attempt at silencing the Void still feels bitter because it taught me that my feelings are an embarrassment to the bipeds who are DNA-related to me, and as long as I’m silent, they don’t care if I’m fine or not.

The second slap is more recent, and due to complete strangers. One night, as one of my jobs was turning my life into a living hell, and my life at home was awful, and my health was in really bad shape, and I’d just lost two people who’d lost their fight against the Void, I took to surfing the Internet, looking for either the recipe for cyanide or a reason to go on. Believe it or not, but chemistry recipes are somewhat hard to find, and so I clicked a link to a so-called helpline.

Mind you, it worked but because the first thing on their webpage (I can’t remember which group it was) was basically saying something like “Thinking of suicide? Well, stop and think of the people you’d leave behind”. It was in the middle of the night, but I wanted to yell at the screen that I didn’t give a damn about the “people I’d leave behind” because it was about me. I wanted to stop being invisible, ignored and drowning in the Void.

When you’re thinking about putting an end to the pain, what you’d like to hear is something like “Talk to me, I’m ready to listen to you” (like that kind neighbour who probably saved me the day she stopped me in the street). Back then, I honestly didn’t give a fig about the rest of the world.

I was in so much pain that I wanted it to end. It felt like standing on the edge of a steep cliff with something as heavy as a planet crushing my back.

I live with the Void.

I have ups and downs.

I’ve tried chemical treatment (that makes life dull and worthless).

Therapy doesn’t work for me – at all.

I’m trying plants, and my writing is my therapy.

I know that I can snap and surrender to the Void; that’s somehow a form of sword of Damocles for me (I know it’s there, and I live with it). It’s having your feet already in a quicksand, knowing it, and hoping that the blades of grass that you’re holding in your hands aren’t going to break and make you sink into the cold sand.

By the way, a few recent events have made me realize that, except if I kick the bucket before my mother (and provided that she does bother to send the police over to my place to check on me), it’s probably the smell of decomp that’s going to tell my neighbours that there’s something wrong with me (though I wouldn’t be surprised to end up mummified – no, wait! The owner of the building would react within three months of my failing to pay the rent, that’s not long enough to be mummified).

It’s astounding how lonely one can be on a rock with seven billion people. I’m not even talking about actual human contact; the Internet has become so normal that disappearing from it with no warning generates, in most cases, silence.

In Maurice, E. M. Forster wrote “understanding nothing except that man has been created to feel pain and loneliness without help from heaven”.

I’ll go a step farther. In some cases, one can be dreadfully alone among people and then the toll of that emptiness in the heart and soul can drive anyone to wish to put an end to the pain.

If you know the Void, you know what I’m talking about.

If you’ve never been there, count your blessings.

The Void is like anti-matter for what makes one human. And it hurts so much.

It’s no wonder some people turn the light off

Is It Possible to Leave "Stockholm"?

I’m not talking about the actual city.

It’s not even going to be about actual abduction, or even battered-person syndrome… I want to talk about emotional manipulation and what happens when you’re the prey of a manipulator.

I was planning to write a text that’d be neutral, exposing the mechanism of manipulation, giving examples, and then I’d explain why I was writing about that particular topic, but I think you’ll read more closely if I say from the beginning that I can talk about it because it happened to me.

It’s so incredibly easy to fall into the trap of a manipulator. It’s so devastating, and you’re so incredibly lonely.

Allow me to make another confession: I’ve been planning to write this since I started this blog, in mid-November last year, but what’s making me finally write this is that my own mother, who’s in constant denial about anything that happens to me that doesn’t fit her view of who I should be according to her, has just disparaged people (women) who stay in abusive relationships and called them wimps.

I’m not a wimp, but I was emotionally abused for eight years.

And do you know what’s the cherry on the icing on the cake? He was so cunning that I have no proof and no witness of what he did to me. He always played with me whilst we were just the two of us.

I’m not stupid – though, in my defence, I’ll say that I’d been warned against physical violence, but until I met that bloke, I didn’t even know that you can torture someone psychologically.

Everything happened in the blink of an eye, and I found myself down inside an emotional pit so deep that I no longer could see the light.

I met him at a very critical moment in my life, and I never spotted the trap. Mind you, it took me a bit of time to notice once I was in it.

I guess I just want to say that it can happen to anyone, from any kind of background. It’s like having a knife in your heart – and I’m afraid this is a very apt image, because you know that you could die if you take the knife off your chest, even if there’s a gifted surgeon nearby to help you. When you’re abused, you need to get away from your abuser, but it’s not always as easy as people who’ve never experienced that usually think it is.

I had one friend who told me to run for my life the week I met him, but it was already too late and he’d found a way through all my defences and I was already completely in his power. He found all my buttons, and it didn’t take him a full day to turn me into his pet.

Apparently, Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological state that makes a hostage feel some sort of empathy for a captor.

In fact, some people link this phenomenon to something called “Capture-Bonding”; in pre-historic times, members of other clans (usually females) were abducted, and basically, rebellion meant death for them.

I’m not going to dig deeper into the psychological studies, but there might be something deep down in our brains that, when activated, brings us back to something that’s rooted into our deepest nature. Some kind of pre-historic Pavlovian-like twist that might explain why abusers can get away with torture.

My abuser was very gifted, and he always made sure to not push me too far in order to keep me under control. His usual pattern involved his criticizing me for the smallest, slightest, most insignificant things (I remember a day when he belittled me for not being strong enough to break a nut and asking for help because I didn’t want to crush it and make a mess in the kitchen), and then he’d feed me crumbs of pseudo-affection (it could be anything from being nice and kind in public to giving me a quick hug in private) to make sure I’d stay addicted to him, and under his spell – though curse would be more appropriate.

I learnt to live on emotional crumbs.

For months after he left because he’d found a newer pawn, I kept feeling guilty.

I’m not an idiot.

In spite of what my own mother thinks, I’m not a wimp.

I was unfortunate enough, in a moment of doubt and questioning, to meet someone who was utterly twisted, and who managed to turn me into a “mouse” for his inner sadistic “cat”.

For months, I guiltily wondered why I, and I quote myself, ‘let him do that to me’.

I started truly recovering from the abuse the day I thought: ‘He had no right to do that to me. It wasn’t my fault’.

Do you know what I wanted when he clawed my heart and soul with his pettiness? I was madly (perhaps Bedlamly would work better here) in love with him, and I would have jumped off a cliff if he’d said that that would make him love me back.

Victims of abuse are not wimps.

They’re not asking for it.

They’re all people who, because of their pasts or/and their current histories find themselves face to face with a monster who slithers like a parasite to their very core and threatens their souls.

Bit extreme?

If you think so, I’m going to make the bet that you’ve never been abused, which is very good for you, but if you’re a survivor and you escaped from the hungry clutches of your tormentor, you know that abuse is akin to torture.

My abuser never laid a finger on me, but I still have bruises on my heart. Years later, there are things that I still cannot do, and my level of trust is quite low (then again, when my own mother thinks that I was free to walk out and start a new life two minutes after leaving my abuser, you’ll excuse me for being cautious and still a bit wary with people).

I know that some people are probably going to blame me for being a wimp, an idiot and a silly girl who wasn’t strong enough to walk out, but I know that it can really happen to anyone with a heart and a soul.

Abuse is a question of circumstances. If you meet the one who can plunge an emotional blade into your heart, you won’t be able to escape.

Since it can happen to anyone, blaming the victims is quite despicable. Recently, I started wondering if it meant that the ones doing the blaming were afraid that they wouldn’t survive to such an ordeal – or if they just enjoyed piling up some more abuse on the victims. I’m afraid both are really equally possible and plausible.

To conclude, we may have wi-fi and shiny gadgets, but our brains are sometimes stuck in dark caves… oh, and stop blaming the victims and stand by them if you want to deserve being called “human”. Ta!