Yesterday marked sixteen years of the birth of the person who is responsible for me being alive today – my son.
2002 and until late 2003, I was hit with the most traumatic and lowest of low moments of my life. I came face-to-face with a shade of ‘humanity‘ that I never knew existed. I thought Bollywood was all drama & hype and was naive enough to not consider that those Indian dramas could have been inspired by real-life stories in real-life homes with real-life families.
So, yes, I was in for the roller coaster ride – only, no restraints, no seat-belts.
The word is insidious – to me, it was the backdrop of over a decade of living in an abusive relationship – where the abuse itself slowly crept in and wrapped it’s tentacles around me even before I saw it coming. One by one, those venomous tendrils wrapped themselves around my life – restricting movement, interaction, job prospects even, stifling relationship with my family, with myself, denying money, denying books, denying purchases & clothes… and controlling the essence of who I am with the tantalizing taste of 85% bitter sweet chocolate. 70% is the recommended minimum amount of cocoa beans to in healthy dark chocolate in the range of 65-80%, so you see, my threshold to withstand bitterness was slowly being raised (until, perhaps, such a time when I would fail recognize the sweet from the bitter, the healthy from the unhealthy, the safe from the unsafe.)
I had just moved to a new country. Back then, the Internet was limited. I wasn’t working. I was raising at baby and keeping home single handedly with no help. I had no friends and my family wasn’t around. International calls were expensive and I was answerable for any call I made because someone else was paying the bill – and that someone else was ‘not my father‘.
The isolation… phew….
Those months were the worst, most horrible, devastating months of my life – the memory of those months still brings a chill down my spine and I can vividly recall the color of the walls, the feel of the sofa covers, the harsh brightness of the fluorescent lamps because the warm-glow lamps that I would have loved, the ones that made me feel warm & nurtured, were, well, a strict no-no.
I feel my chest constrict as I type this now, I feel my breath shorten and my throat clamp – but this needs saying. I lived in a prison of fear. And living in a prison for fear for years at a stretch is not just sheer agony – it is hell. And guess what? I didn’t even know that I was courting the Devil.
Abusive narcissists have a way of fucking with your head. A head that was sharp & brilliant & fully capable of slaying an army with sheer wit and smarts, is rendered putty and slime all in the garb of a idolized version of what society feeds us in the name of love and family values and traditional concepts of marriage – (in my case Indian Catholic and all that schmaltz)
The shame associated with acknowledging a mistake – that the man you fell in love wasn’t the kind-hearted, nice, fun-loving, accepting, open-minded, genial personality you thought he was – but behind closed doors, transformed into a monster who thrived on passive aggressive humiliation, anger and control issues and carried a vengeful, spiteful, vindictive streak so thick and pulsating that it would cause palpitations at the thought of asking him, “Can we go out to dinner?”
Day by day, a piece of me was hacked away – emotionally, mentally, financially, spiritually, physically….. my sense of self, my identity, my purpose, my value, my significance, my beauty, my presence, my strength – everything was hacked and torn away, little by little (insidiously)… without logical reason (personality disorders can’t be logically explained)
….until I was left numb.
Numb.
That’s the word.
By August 2003, I was suicidal.
And I didn’t know what to do.
I didn’t know who to speak with and I didn’t know how to voice and put the intangible abuse into physical sense so they would believe that I was sinking. I was dying and I truly believed that the only escape was to bring an end to the seeming madness – the incoherent shouting in my head – the disbelief and the prospect of having to live in this lock-up indefinitely was harrowing. My emails to my sister were perhaps the only way I could ease a bit of the pressure within. I can’t remember if I emailed by mother. I was too scared to tell my father, although maybe that would have been the best thing to do.
To this day, my sister remembers those years to be the most painful – she says she would never ever want to read something like those emails from me ever again because they were dripping with pain and reeking of helplessness – both qualities she had never seen in me.
If you’re wondering why I didn’t get out, the answer is that at that time, ‘getting out’ didn’t even seem like an option! It was always there, and perhaps would have been the best and safest exit, but I didn’t even see it as a remote possibility – I wasn’t conditioned to think of life beyond ‘till death do us part‘, perhaps.
Sucks, I know…
So one day, when my head felt so heavy that it felt like a zillion wasps were buzzing in my head and I was trying to remember what it felt like to love and be loved, and randomly had images of my family, my grandmother, my uncles and aunts and friends and cousins …and looked back at 25 years of being cocooned in a family and community that raised me from infancy to adulthood…
And still the buzzing in my head overpowered all those flitting images with the heavy darkness of perpetuated abuse and isolation.
I found myself on the red, Persian rug in the living room with my baby playing on the mat in front of me – thinking, “Today I end it all.“
The irony of sitting in the living room contemplating ending my life is not lost on me.
I mentally said my goodbyes to everyone and was all set for my final do svidaniya (Russian for ’till we meet again’), when Ash crawled up into my lap and held my face in his baby hands, looked straight into my eyes and planted a drooly kiss on my numbed out face.
No words exchanged.
Nothing.
That one moment felt like an iron hook had been baited – right at the center of my soul, but it felt like I was hooked at my navel. And I was yanked out of a deep, dark abyss where I was free-falling.
And all I heard was, “You can do this! I need you and you are not all this. This is not you.”
He saved me that day.
He’s the reason I am alive today.
He’s the reason I wake up every morning thankful for adding value to my life and to those around me. He’s the reason I chose to start finding choices. I called my endocrinologist immediately and booked an appointment – he was the only one I knew – and was referred to a doctor who immediately got me on a protocol for depression.
I started looking for a job – my morale was so blast-fried, I remember looking for roles that were entry-level jobs despite my profile at my previous designation. Also, I had no support in the job-hunt, so that made it harder!
My baby came with me to interviews when no one was there to baby sit him. He came with me in his stroller after I had taken the public transport for the first time in my life in Dubai and Sharjah to walk back home because, hey, someone’s mother didn’t think I should work until the baby was 6! And because I was going back to work against everyone’s wishes, no one was going to pay for my transportation to work and no one was going to pay for a nanny.
I was on my own.
A month after that near-miss moment on the Persian rug, I got a job. I started rebuilding myself – my sense of self, confidence, self-esteem, independence, worth and value… one step at a time, one day at a time.
Abuse is fucking real. Suicide is fucking real…. and the crazy carousel that runs non-stop in one’s head without pausing, making life look like there are no options is bloody, fucking real. It is all real to the person going through it. Even if that person has perfected the art of showing everyone that she is one helluva strong woman. And even if it doesn’t ‘seem’ to everyone that it is real, it is!
That is why mental health is such an important topic to be aware of.
Truer still, when that strong woman had the only option of putting on the ‘strong woman’ cloak because no one else around her offered a hand to lift her out of it. Or the people she reached out to, refused to believe that the person they knew – their friend / colleague / son / brother – could do the heinous things she said he was doing. I mean, what does it matter if he doesn’t want her to be associated with her family/ friends anymore? She was married to him now! Right? It should only matter for her to make things work for the two of them…. for HER to make things work….
So people saw the tough and strong woman – the warrior – when in fact, they were only seeing the armor – the thick, strong, metal armor. The armor that they would bounce against when they came charging at her. Her inside, though, was still numb and very vulnerable.
The coping strategy was working, but the healing was still a long way off.
So I faked it till it could make it.
And now that I’m ready to make it, taking off the armor is hard.
But, while I work on that, the bounce back brought me to face a number of questions and fine-tune a number of things that I do – as part of my work. The understanding of the what just happened to me (and this did not happen overnight) and the why has taken years to process – I’m still unraveling the story…. but it’s allowed me to slowly start looking at my story, and try to make sense of it… and while I’m alive, and still making sense of it, helping others make sense of theirs.
So here’s my bottom line.
I’m strong today but I know what it felt like to be weak, broken, shattered, humiliated, alone and isolated once. I know what it feels like to put a mask on to benefit the rest of the world because they would rather see you happy that face the discomfort of having to pull you out of the crap, let alone see you wallowing in it. I know what it feels like to think that ending one’s life may be the best way out (and the ‘let’s deal with karma in the next life’ idea).
I also know that reaching out for help is not always easy – or responded to. But, still, I promise, reach out .. do reach out.. miracles always exist. And for the rest of us on the other side of the fence, please keep your eyes, ears and hearts open. Abuse, suicide & living the trauma behind this is not always a logical ‘if-then’ representation. It doesn’t always make sense, but there is a pattern… It is, insidious.
Believe them, open the doors to safety and help someone see outside the dark box that they are huddled in.
Because, really, there is always a possibility of life beyond the darkness – a life worth living.
Luvena's World 